Pollard's Wife to Lobby NY Senate

Andy Soltis - The New York Post - September 16, 2000

*SEE Justice4JP Release 09/016/00 JONATHAN POLLARD TO FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN US COURT for Esther Pollard's response to the inaccuracies and distortions which are italicized and marked by asterisks below.

Jonathan Pollard's wife denounced the way his case has become an issue in the New York Senate race - but said she wants to meet with Hillary Clinton or Rick Lazio to press her case for clemency.*

In an interview with Fox News Channel, Esther Pollard also said she* was about to file a new lawsuit seeking to free her husband, a former Navy intelligence analyst serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. "It's become very clear that my husband's case has been exploited to produce a lot of heat, a lot of publicity" for politicians, she said - without criticizing Clinton* or Lazio* by name.

Mrs. Pollard said she and her husband were "very, very upset" by the disclosure that Mrs. Clinton had intervened to block his transfer to a harsher unit in his prison.* Mrs. Pollard said the resulting publicity was "extremely damaging and dangerous" to the behind-the-scenes efforts by other political leaders to help her husband* "It's like disturbing a hornet's nest, when you live In the hornet's nest," Mrs. Pollard said.

But she told Fox News Channel's Eric Shawn that she believed Mrs. Clinton was not responsible for the disclosure and said the first lady was being "protected and insulated from meeting with me."

She said she wanted to meet with Lazio, or his wife, or Mrs. Clinton - or "anyone who will help us" speed up a presidential review of clemency for Pollard.*

A Lazio spokesman, Michael Marr, said, "This is the first the campaign has heard of her request and we are happy to look into her request and try to make it happen."

There was no immediate response from the Clinton campaign.

Mrs. Pollard compared her husband's case to that of Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos scientist who was indicted on 59 counts related to espionage but freed on Wednesday after pleading guilty to a single count.

She called Lee's treatment by federal prosecutors "the best mirror of the Pollard case - they didn't have a case, so they (hid behind a veil of secrecy) and lied, and lied, and lied."