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Jack Quinn, a high-powered lobbyist and lawyer who served as White House counsel under President Bill Clinton and later represented Marc Rich, the fugitive financier who received a controversial pardon during Clinton’s final hours in office, died May 8 at his home in Washington. He was 74.

The cause was long-term complications from a double-lung transplant in 2019, said his wife, Susanna Quinn. He had previously suffered from hypersensitivity pneumonitis, which led to the transplant.

Mr. Quinn was the consummate Washington insider, sought after by politicians, corporations and other clients for his legal expertise, his political instincts and his ability to navigate the city’s centers of power.

He spent roughly two decades beginning in 1976 at the blue-chip firm of Arnold & Porter, where he made partner and rose to head the lobbying department while emerging as a prominent figure in Democratic campaign circles.

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After working for several unsuccessful candidates for the party’s presidential nomination, Mr. Quinn joined his first winning campaign in 1992 as an aide to U.S. Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), Clinton’s running mate. As vice president, Gore hired Mr. Quinn as his counsel and deputy chief of staff, quickly elevating him to chief of staff.

From his first months in office, Clinton faced scrutiny over issues including the dismissal of seven longtime White House Travel Office employees and his past business dealings in Arkansas, a matter known as the Whitewater affair. The latter inquiry grew to encompass a raft of alleged misconduct involving Clinton and his wife, first lady Hillary Clinton.

Clinton employed three White House counsels — Bernard Nussbaum, Lloyd Cutler and Abner Mikva — before Mr. Quinn assumed the role, once described by Cutler as a “back-breaker of a job,” in November 1995.

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The president turned to Mr. Quinn, the New Republic magazine reported, at least in part because of his forceful testimony before the Senate Whitewater committee regarding the investigation into the death in 1993 of Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel under Nussbaum.

Foster’s death, which was ruled a suicide, fueled conspiracy theories among Clinton’s detractors and contributed to turmoil in the new administration. Reportedly acting on Mr. Quinn’s advice, Nussbaum limited access by law enforcement officers to Foster’s office and its contents in the days after his death. Nussbaum said restricting access was his “ethical duty as a lawyer and as White House counsel,” but it led to complaints that the administration was obstructing the investigation.

In his testimony, Mr. Quinn argued that Nussbaum had cooperated with investigators not too little, but rather too much. His comments were “music to Clinton,” journalist Peter Beinart wrote in the New Republic.

During 15 months as White House counsel, Mr. Quinn advised the administration on standard matters including executive appointments and judicial nominations. He also was called on to help shepherd Clinton through Republican-led congressional hearings on Whitewater and a ballooning Whitewater investigation by independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

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Mr. Quinn defended the president with vigor. During a congressional probe into the travel office firings, Mr. Quinn invoked executive privilege in refusing to hand over internal White House documents, prompting a House committee to undertake criminal contempt proceedings against him. The White House ultimately agreed to submit 2,000 pages of material, averting a contempt-of-Congress vote, which Mr. Quinn denounced as a “desperate political act.”

Mr. Quinn stepped down as White House counsel in February 1997. He returned to Arnold & Porter before forming a bipartisan lobbying firm with Ed Gillespie, a top Republican strategist, in 2000. The firm, which they sold several years later, represented major companies including Verizon, Bank of America, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, DaimlerChrysler and Enron before the energy company’s bankruptcy.

Mr. Quinn’s most famous private client was Marc Rich, a billionaire commodities trader who had done business with Iran, Iraq, Russia and Libya. Rich’s dealings with Iran in the 1970s and 1980s coincided, in part, with U.S. trade sanctions against the country and the hostage crisis in which student protesters in Tehran held dozens of U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.

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In 1983, Rich was indicted in federal court on more than 5o counts stemming from his alleged evasion of $48 million in taxes, the largest-ever such case at the time. Before he could be arrested, he moved to Switzerland, where he took up residence as a fugitive. For years, he appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Mr. Quinn joined Rich’s team of lawyers in 1999. He was widely cited as leading the efforts that persuaded Clinton to include Rich among the 140 people he pardoned on his last day in office.

Rich’s pardon attracted intense controversy after the revelation that his former wife, Denise, had donated more than $1 million to Democratic causes, including $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential library fund. Mr. Quinn said he had been unaware of her largesse and had simply advised her to write to the president on behalf of her ex-husband, whose cause she said she supported because of their children.

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As White House counsel, Mr. Quinn had helped prepare ethics policies barring senior administration appointees from lobbying the White House for five years after they left office. But he was widely characterized in news accounts as using his connections to secure a pardon for Rich directly through the White House, rather than by petitioning for clemency through the Justice Department in accordance with standard procedures.

The Los Angeles Times described him as “working the phones” and assembling a portfolio of letters extolling Rich that was “thicker than a big-city phone book.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, citing Rich’s longtime financial support of Israeli and Jewish causes, was among those who asked Clinton to look favorably upon Rich’s case.

Days before Clinton left office, Mr. Quinn wrote the president a hand-delivered letter and spoke with him by phone, making Rich’s case one final time.

Eric H. Holder Jr., then a deputy attorney general and later attorney general under President Barack Obama, ultimately recommended Rich’s pardon, although he subsequently expressed regret for having done so.

Mr. Quinn denied having lobbied the Clinton administration on Rich’s behalf, saying that his interactions were limited to “communicating with regard to a judicial proceeding.” Ruling in an investigation into Clinton’s pardons, however, a federal judge found that Rich’s lawyers “were acting principally as lobbyists.”

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The judge observed that “although Quinn may be an excellent attorney, he was preceded by a series of excellent attorneys” and that “clearly, he was not hired for his ability to formulate better legal arguments or write better briefs.”

“Rather, Quinn … was hired because he could telephone the White House and engage in a 20-minute conversation with the president,” the judge wrote. “He was hired because he could write the president a ‘personal note’ that said ‘I believe in this cause with all my heart,’ and he would know that the president would read the note and give it weight.”

A spokesman for Mr. Quinn offered another take.

“People can only come out of this with a sense of admiration for how smart he was and how well he represented his client,” Peter Mirijanian said in 2001. “Which is how people get hired in this town.”

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In recent years, Mr. Quinn worked for the firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, leading its federal affairs and public policy practice. He spent years representing family members of victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in ongoing litigation that accuses Saudi Arabia of complicity in the attacks.

A partner in that work, Sean Carter, credited him with playing a key role in lobbying efforts that contributed to the enactment in 2016 of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which effectively allowed the litigation to move forward. When President Barack Obama vetoed the legislation, Congress voted overwhelmingly to override him for the only time in his administration.

John Michael Quinn was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 16, 1949. His father managed a power plant, and his mother was a homemaker.

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Mr. Quinn, the first member of his family to attend college, received a bachelor’s degree in government in 1971 and a law degree in 1975, both from Georgetown University.

He was introduced to politics as a college student, joining the presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy (D-Minn.) — the father of a Georgetown classmate — who challenged the incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination. McCarthy was denied the nomination, but his vigorous opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War played an important part in Johnson’s decision to withdraw as a candidate.

For Mr. Quinn, politics proved more alluring than classes, which he often skipped to travel with McCarthy’s campaign, completing his coursework on the road.

Later, during his undergraduate years and as a law student, he worked as a full-time staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by George S. McGovern (D-S.D.). Mr. Quinn’s college roommate, Rob Liberatore, recalled that Mr. Quinn was so engaged in his work on Capitol Hill that he did not attend classes his sophomore, junior or senior years — yet “he had a higher GPA than I did,” Liberatore said, “and I went to class.”

Following his law school graduation, Mr. Quinn became, at age 26, campaign director for U.S. Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.) in his unsuccessful bid for the 1976 presidential nomination. Mr. Quinn then joined Arnold & Porter and continued working for Democratic presidential aspirants, among them U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) in 1980, U.S. Sen. Gary Hart (Colo.) in 1984 and Gore in 1988. He taught constitutional law for several years at Georgetown before joining the Clinton White House.

Mr. Quinn’s marriages to Burdett Rooney and Diane O’Brien ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife of 17 years, the former Susanna Monroney of the District; two children from his first marriage, Megan Quinn of Tacoma, Wash., and Jonathan Quinn of Steamboat Springs, Colo.; two children from his second marriage, Caitlin Slaviero of Sydney and Brendan Quinn of New York City; two children from his third marriage, Jocelyn Quinn and Storm Quinn, both of the District; two daughters from other relationships, Kathleen Quinn of Garwood, N.J., and Jessica Del Pizzo of Arlington, Va.; a brother; and 12 grandchildren.

Amid the furor surrounding the Rich pardon, some observers spoke critically of Mr. Quinn for having, in their view, tainted the legal profession by mixing lobbying with the law. But others rose to his defense. One of them was Leonard Garment, who served as White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate affair, which ultimately drove Nixon from office.

“After all the rubbing of hands and clucking of tongues and a little of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ … Washington and the clients will only remember that Jack Quinn was rather dogged in [Rich’s] defense,” Garment told the Los Angeles Times in 2001, when Mr. Quinn was called to Capitol Hill to address the case.

“He didn’t wince or whine or moan during a couple of hours of testimony when he was being beleaguered by that air of sanctimony that pervades those congressional hearings,” Garment continued. “And … he got his guy off.”

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