ASHINGTON, Sept. 10 (AP) — A California businessman who was pardoned by President Bill Clinton for a 1983 fraud conviction refused to testify today at a Senate hearing investigating his dietary supplement business.
The businessman, Almon Glenn Braswell, and the editor of his magazine, Journal of Longevity, Ron Tepper, asserted their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination at a hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.
Scott Mulhauser, spokesman for the committee, said there were no plans to grant limited immunity to Mr. Braswell and Mr. Tepper.
Mr. Mulhauser said the chairman, Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, would rather concentrate on better regulation of diet supplements that failed to produce promised miracle cures.
Committee members had sought to question the two men about the validity of advertising claims that their products improved memory, increased sex drive and slowed aging.
Mr. Breaux has said dietary supplements should be treated more like drugs, which are strictly regulated. In 1994, Congress prohibited most government scrutiny intended to ensure that dietary supplements were safe or that they worked.
Mr. Braswell is the subject of a money-laundering and tax-evasion investigation by federal prosecutors and the Internal Revenue Service, court papers filed by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles indicate.