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Bradford Berenson, Toussie’s lawyer, issued a statement saying, “Isaac Toussie is deeply grateful that both the counsel to the president and the president himself found Mr. Toussie’s pardon application to have sufficient merit to be granted.

“Mr. Toussie looks forward to the pardon attorney’s expeditious review of the application and remains confident that the pardon attorney will agree with the president and the White House counsel.”

Under Justice Department guidelines, an application for a presidential pardon will not be considered by the department’s pardon attorney until a convict has been out of prison for five years.

Toussie was sentenced in September 2003 to a five-month prison sentence, as well as three years of supervised release.

Seidman said the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Toussies allege that the quality of construction in homes they bought on Staten Island was inferior to that in the model homes they had been shown to secure their purchase.

They also allege that their applications were coded by race, a violation of civil rights laws, and that they were steered away from racially integrated neighborhoods to segregated neighborhoods, he said.

“I’m baffled that Toussie was selected as a candidate for a pardon in the first place,” Seidman said. “So I don’t know what I would say about the re-examination, other than why in the first place they thought he was worthy.”

The Toussies deny the allegations in the lawsuit.

CNN’s attempts to reach Toussie’s lawyers on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

A Bush administration official noted it is rare for a pardon to be reversed.

Bush’s 191 pardons and nine commutations are far fewer than those granted by Presidents Clinton and Reagan in either of their two-term administrations.

The Presidential pardon lists are being closely monitored in the final weeks of the Bush administration, particularly to see whether former vice presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby will be granted the presidential favor.

Other notables who asked for pardons include former Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham, a Republican from California, who was convicted of receiving bribes; publishing executive Conrad Black, convicted of fraud; former junk bold salesman Michael Milken; former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, convicted of accounting fraud; and Taliban American John Walker Lindh.

Charles Winters, who died almost 25 years ago, was one of the 19 people given a pardon earlier in the week. His son worked towards a presidential pardon for his dad, who had helped smuggle weapons to Jews fighting in what was then Palestine in the late 1940s.

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