By Erin Quinn

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Longtime Waco lawyer and former federal prosecutor Bill Johnston will celebrate Christmas without receiving the gift for which he has hoped for the last seven years: a presidential pardon.

With President George W. Bush’s days in office waning, the Department of Justice released Tuesday a list of 19 people whose felony convictions will be wiped from record. Johnston, 49, was not on that list.

He was not able to be reached by phone Wednesday.

Johnston was placed on unsupervised probation for two years in June 2001 after he admitted in federal court to not handing over the entirety of his personal notes to former U.S. Sen. John Danforth during Danforth’s $17 million special investigation into the 1993 Branch Davidian siege.

Danforth’s investigators said the notes revealed that, at least by 1994, Johnston was aware that the FBI used tear-gas devices capable of sparking a fire on the final day of the government standoff with David Koresh and his apocalyptic followers.

Seventy-six Branch Davidians, including Koresh, died in a tank and tear-gas assault on their compound mounted by the FBI on April 19, 1993. Officials later concluded that the fire which consumed the Elk compound was started by the Davidians themselves.

“I have lived with this thing every day of my life for the last seven years,” Johnston previously told the Tribune-Herald. “I don’t know that I can do that without having this looked at. Then I can say that I’ve done all I could do.”

A Texan was among the 19 pardoned. Bush relieved a Riviera, Texas, man of his 1996 conviction on a charge of conspiracy to harbor and transport illegal aliens.

In most cases, a committee with the Department of Justice conducts a background investigation, the case is reviewed, and a recommendation is forwarded to a deputy attorney general before it is presented to the president.

equinn@wacotrib.com

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