In a statement released tonight by her office, Senator Clinton said she was ''disturbed to learn that my brother, Hugh Rodham, received fees in connection with two clemency applications. He did not speak with me about these applications.''

Her aides said Mrs. Clinton learned about her brother's work on the applications only on Monday, as a result of inquiries.

The National Enquirer is reporting in its next issue that Mr. Braswell's company, G.B. Data Systems of Marina del Rey, Calif., wired $200,000 to the account of Mr. Rodham's Florida law firm on Jan. 22, two days after Mr. Clinton issued the pardon.

Messages left at the law firm and at Mr. Rodham's home this evening brought no response.

Fewer details were available on the money returned to Mr. Vignali. His case has also stirred controversy because his father, a wealthy California entrepreneur, has deep ties to political leaders in Los Angeles, some of whom wrote to the White House on his behalf.

The payments to Mr. Rodham are the latest in a string of embarrassments for the former president stemming from his decision to grant 140 pardons and 36 commutations last month in the final hours of his presidency.

The cases affecting at least two dozen felons bypassed the customary review by the Justice Department, which normally takes as long as a year to investigate pardon applications, and were handled directly from the White House.

Besides Mr. Braswell, whose pardon did not go through the customary Justice Department review, another pardon recipient was Marc Rich, the fugitive financier, whose former wife, Denise, donated more than a million dollars to Democratic causes. The Rich pardon is being investigated by federal prosecutors in New York and in Congress.

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A statement issued by Mr. Rodham's lawyer said he returned the money today in deference to the Clintons' request. The statement said Mr. Rodham did not notify the Clintons of his efforts on behalf of the two men, and he believed they did not learn of his activities until this week.

''Hugh Rodham has done absolutely nothing wrong,'' said the statement, issued by his lawyer, Nancy Luque. ''He has returned these fees solely because his family asked that he do so. Their request, presumably made because of the appearance of impropriety, is one he cannot ignore. There was, however, no impropriety in these matters.''

She confirmed that Mr. Rodham received about $400,000 for his work in the cases. In an interview she added: ''Let there be no mistake. He did not speak to either Clinton at any time about either matter.''

Mr. Clinton's pardon of Mr. Braswell had already received special attention because of complaints by federal prosecutors that it interfered with a criminal investigation against the 57-year-old Miami businessman. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have been looking into accusations of money laundering and tax evasion by Mr. Braswell's mail order business selling vitamins and health supplements.

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Earlier this month, Mr. Clinton said he had intended the pardon only to cover Mr. Braswell's 1983 conviction and had not known that he was the subject of a pending investigation. In the earlier case, Mr. Braswell was sentenced to three years in prison for false claims about a treatment for baldness.

A spokeswoman for G.B. Data Systems said the company declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are pushing ahead with their criminal investigation of Mr. Braswell, though they remain concerned that the pardon could hamper their inquiry into possible money laundering and tax evasion involving Mr. Braswell's business.

Mr. Braswell's access to the Clinton White House had been largely a mystery. Over the last two years, he had been a contributor to Republican causes until G.O.P. workers, including those running the campaign of George W. Bush, learned of his felony record and returned his donation of $175,000.

A Clinton spokesman said earlier this month that Mr. Braswell had been represented in his pardon bid by Kendall Coffey, who was on former Vice President Al Gore's legal team in Florida after the election, but the spokesman believed that Mr. Coffey had never spoken with Mr. Clinton directly about the matter. Mr. Coffey has never commented on the matter.

The pardon fees are not the first time the conduct of Mr. Rodham has been criticized. In 1999, Hugh Rodham and his brother, Tony, set off a diplomatic controversy after they traveled to the Ajaria region of the Republic of Georgia to pursue a multimillion-dollar deal to export hazelnuts. The proposed hazelnut deal set off rivalries between political factions in the Georgian republic and White House officials, including former national security adviser Sandy Berger, pressed the Rodham brothers to drop the business venture.

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At least some of Mr. Rodham's contacts with the White House were through Bruce Lindsey, the former deputy White House counsel and Mr. Clinton's closest confidant. A former White House aide said that Mr. Rodham called Mr. Lindsey to propose pardons of several other convicts that Mr. Clinton and his aides rejected.

The small circle of aides now advising Mr. Clinton were dismayed by the revelation of Mr. Rodham's activities and concerned that Mr. Clinton not issue a blanket denial that Mr. Rodham had exerted influence on pardon decisions, one former aide said. Mr. Clinton and Mr. Rodham may have had private discussions that staffers were not privy to, they said.

Representative Dan Burton, the chairman of the House committee conducting an inquiry into the pardons, called the situation ''deeply troubling'' and said he would seek to get a full explanation of the payments from Mr. Rodham.

''We already know that Mr. Braswell's pardon was not reviewed by the Department of Justice,'' Mr. Burton, an Indiana Republican who heads the Committee on Government Reform, said. ''Yet again, this makes it look like there is one system of justice for those with money and influence, and one system of justice for everyone else.''

Mr. Burton's committee also sent a letter last night to Roger Clinton, the former president's half brother, asking what role he might have played in any presidential pardons.

The criticism was bipartisan. Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called on Mr. Rodham to ''fully account for his actions.''

''What he did was absolutely wrong,'' Mr. McAuliffe said.

Mr. Vignali's case was different. Mr. Vignali, a convicted Los Angeles cocaine dealer, was freed from prison on Jan. 20 after serving six years of a 15-year sentence. His request for clemency went through the Justice Department, and then was passed onto the White House with a recommendation that has not been disclosed.

Mr. Clinton commuted the sentence of Mr. Vignali, a 30-year-old first-time offender convicted in 1994 of conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. In a lengthy defense of his clemency decisions, the former president said he acted in part to spare little-known people who had been sentenced under mandatory drug sentencing laws. ''I felt that they had served long enough given the particular circumstances of the individual cases,'' Mr. Clinton wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times on Sunday.

The commutation of Mr. Vignali's sentence nevertheless stirred an outcry from federal prosecutors in Minneapolis, where he was convicted. The prosecutors had vigorously opposed his release.