Word.ws English Dictionary

Pardongate

Pardongate proper noun: the 2001 controversy around Bill Clinton's pardons of 140 people, including Patty Hearst, on his last day in office as President of the United States.

Proper noun

Pardongate

  1. (informal) The 2001 controversy around Bill Clinton's pardons of 140 people, including Patty Hearst, on his last day in office as President of the United States.
    • Newly elected Senator Hillary Clinton suddenly found herself caught up in Pardongate's swirl, as prosecutors began reviewing her husband's grant of clemency for four upstate New York rabbis whose village voted for her […]2004, Carl Limbacher, Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House
    • […] hearings on Pardongate, Clinton's eleventh-hour clemency spree, were still under way.2006, Lynn Vincent, Robert Stacy McCain, Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party

Origin of Pardongate

From pardon + -gate.

Questions about Pardongate

What does Pardongate mean?
Pardongate means the 2001 controversy around Bill Clinton's pardons of 140 people, including Patty Hearst, on his last day in office as President of the United States.
What part of speech is Pardongate?
Pardongate is a proper noun.

Words near Pardongate in the dictionary

  1. pardonees
  2. pardoner
  3. pardoners
  4. pardonest
  5. pardoneth
  6. Pardongate
  7. pardoning
  8. pardoning my French
  9. pardonings
  10. pardonless
  11. pardonmonger

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Pardongate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Pardongate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pardongate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.