Embarrassments Dog Iowa Front-Runner Huckabee

Michael Huckabee once accepted $40,000 in contributions from the tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds to campaign against a national cigarette tax proposed by Hillary Clinton. But later, Mr. Huckabee ignored his sponsors and imposed his own tax on cigarettes.

During his years in the governor's mansion in Little Rock, Mr. Huckabee granted convicted criminals 1,033 pardons and commutations of sentence — including a pardon for a reckless driving charge by the Rolling Stone Keith Richard. The number amounts to about twice as many acts of amnesty as his three predecessors combined, among them President Clinton.

While governor, Mr. Huckabee was also the subject of 16 ethics complaints that forced him to pay $1,000 in fines for failing to report outside income and payments from his campaign fund, and he was investigated for flying Arkansas state airplanes when on personal and political business.

These facts, which have been an embarrassment to Mr. Huckabee — who is now the favorite to win the GOP stakes in Iowa and who in a new national CNN poll yesterday pulled alongside the Republican front-runner, Mayor Giuliani — are the latest to emerge as the former Arkansas governor's rivals crawl through the minutiae of Mr. Huckabee's past in the hopes of turning up damaging stories to stop him in his tracks.

The payment of $40,000 from R.J. Reynolds was made in 1994 when Mr. Huckabee, then lieutenant governor of Arkansas, was short of money following a failed attempt to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

The donation, former Huckabee consultants J.J. Vigneault and Greg Graves told Newsweek, was to fund a speaking tour aimed at Christian evangelicals in which Mr. Huckabee would condemn Mrs. Clinton's health care proposals, which included a cigarette tax. Mr. Huckabee says he had no knowledge of the funds from the tobacco company and that he cannot recall meetings with executives from J.R. Reynolds, though he acknowledged the events may have slipped his memory.

"I don't recall those meetings. I'm not saying they never happened. But I don't have any recollection of them. If they can show me pictures of me there, that might help," he told Newsweek. "I fully complied with every bit of the law. I don't even know who all the donors were. They sure didn't get anything out of me," he said.

Repeated requests from The New York Sun for comment were ignored by Mr. Huckabee's campaign.

Certainly, the Reynolds donations did not inhibit Mr. Huckabee's decision as governor to ban smoking in the workplace and in 2003 to increase taxes on cigarettes and tobacco.

Mr. Huckabee's record of being soft on convicted criminals is harder to avoid. His role as an ordained Southern Baptist minister appears to have guided his actions when it came to forgiving criminals.

"I would not deny that my sense of the reality of redemption is a factor," Mr. Huckabee told KUAR in Little Rock in 2001. "I don't know that I can apologize for that because I would hate to think of the kind of human I would be if I thought people were beyond forgiveness."

On average, Mr. Huckabee granted clemency once every four days.

In a remark quoted by the Associated Press, one prosecutor, Robert Herzfeld, said in 2004 after challenging Mr. Huckabee's decision to let a prisoner loose before his sentence was completed: "It seems to be true at least anecdotally that if a minister is involved, he seems likely to grant clemency."

The most notorious case of Mr. Huckabee's penchant for forgiveness is his decision to release Wayne DuMond, the rapist of a teenage cheerleader who was castrated by a mob before being awarded a life sentence and a further 20 years in prison.

Mr. Huckabee, who questioned DuMond's guilt and was in favor of his early release, denies the suggestion of two parole board officers that he pressured them to free DuMond. After his release on parole, DuMond moved to Kansas City and smothered to death a Missouri woman.

Also among Mr. Huckabee's many contentious acts of absolution is that concerning James Maxwell, the killer of a pastor of the Church of God in Arkansas, who was working at the governor's mansion in Little Rock when his prison sentence was reduced. Mr. Huckabee also pardoned Robert Arnold, who had killed his father-in-law. Arnold's father was a friend of Mr. Huckabee, according to AP. Denver Witham, who beat a man to death with a lead pipe, also had his life sentence commuted by Mr. Huckabee.

According to the Nashua Telegraph, during his first eight years in office, Mr. Huckabee pardoned or commuted the sentences of 669 criminals, including 11 murderers.

Mr. Huckabee thinks his record is irreproachable. "Compared to previous governors, it really wasn't that disproportionate. The truth can't hurt me on this one," he told the Nashua Telegraph. "When I came into the governorship, we had 8,000 inmates in the correctional system; when I left, we had 14,000."