Investigations of the White House, particularly in the hands of Republican Administrations, are far from uncommon in recent US history. While much of the focus is placed on Ken Starr's two-year long witch-hunt of Clinton and associates, the longest investigation (1986 - 1993), and potentially most devastating, in the number and seniority of potential indictees, was Lawrence Walsh's inquest into the events surround the Iran-Contra scandal, plotted and carried out from the White House during the Reagan Administration.
If one considers the Plame controversy to be "too complicated", the facts surrounding Iran-Contra could make your head explode. Here are the basics, for those too young to remember:
- US hostages were held in Lebanon by Islamic organizations (Hezbollah) with close ties to post-revolution Iran.
- In July 1985, the Israeli government offered to be an intermediary in a secret deal to sell arms to Iran, with the hope Iran in turn would pressure Lebanese Hezbollah to release the hostages. After the original transaction, the first hostage was freed in September, 1985.
- The Reagan Administration, pleased with the result, decided to try again, but with a larger cache of weapons, hoping all remaining hostages would be released. Problem was, such an expenditure required Congressional consent. Reagan's NSA advisor, Robert McFarland, informed Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger's chief military assistant, Major General Colin Powell, to try and procure the missiles anyway. The deal fell through, however, when Iran wasn't thrilled with the initial delivery of Hawk SAMs. Reagan signs a document first terming the policy, "arms-for-hostages".
- In January, 1986, McFarland decided to bypass the Israelis, who he felt had failed to negotiate properly with the Iranians, and put his own man, Michael Ledeen, in charge. After some original miscues, the Reagan Administration finally sold, at a huge markup, thousands of missiles to Iran (to aid them in their ongoing war with Iraq.) The original Lebanon hostages were released, but more were taken. The policy was finally discontinued when it was determined to be promoting hostage taking.
- The sale of the arms produced millions of dollars which could not be merely placed into the US Treasury's bank account. In 1982, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, which prohibited funding Reagan's pet project, the Nicaraguan Contras. McFarland's successor, John Poindexter, turned the task of using proceeds from the Iranian arms sales to fund the Contras over to his senior assistant, Colonel Oliver North.
- A Middle Eastern newspaper exposed the "arms-for-hostages" in November, 1986. Four weeks later, under mounting pressure, Reagan appointed the "Tower Commission", named for it's chair, Senator John Tower of Texas. At this point, Reagan claimed complete ignorance of all relevant matters. The Tower Commission implicated Casey, McFarland, Weinberger, Poindexter, and North, but essentially gave Reagan and Vice President George Bush a pass.
It is at this point, on December 18, 1986, that Attorney General Edwin Meese requested the appointment of an Independent Counsel. Lawrence Walsh, a life-long Republican, semi-retired former US Attorney from Oklahoma City, was selected for the job and took over the FBI's investigation, termed "Operation Front Door", initiated by William Webster in late November 26, 1986.
From the beginning, however, Walsh didn't stand a chance. Congress opened its own hearings in the weeks after Walsh arrived in Washington; the Senate Select Committee on Secret Miliary Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition was formally established by Senate Resolution 23 on January 6, 1987, and the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran was established by House Resolution 12 on January 7, 1987.
The ranking Republican on the House Select Committee was none other than Congressman Richard Cheney of Wyoming.
Cheney successfully blocked Chairman Lee Aspin's attempts to depose Vice President George H.W. Bush on his knowledge of events surrounding Iran-Contra. He also succeeded in making the final report almost entirely partisan, without a single Republican House member and only three moderate Republican Senators signing onto it. The "minority report" completely exonerated Bush and saved his presidential bid the following year.
For his service, George Bush made Dick Cheney Defense Secretary in 1989.
Republicans on the Select Committee also sought, and received, immunity for many of their key witnesses (North, Weinberger, etc.), despite being warned that it could lead to an inability to later convict them for any discovered crimes. Of course, this is precisely what happened when the appellate court overturned all convictions.
Of course, a true watchdog press could have aided by bringing pressure on controlling politicians. However, in a 1993 article, Robert Parry, who, as a reporter for AP and Newsweek broke many of the original Iran-Contra stories, describes a media atmosphere at the time not dissimilar to today's:
As Lawrence Walsh ends his six-year Iran-contra investigation, Washington insiders are busy judging how big a failure the independent prosecutor has been. "The truth is that when Walsh finally goes home, he will leave a perceived loser," concluded Marjorie Williams in a recent Washington Post profile.
"Loser" is only one of the epithets that the D.C. press corps has hurled at Walsh since he indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger a year ago. In journal after influential journal, the eighty-one-year-old ex-federal judge has been likened to Captains Ahab and Queeg, Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and even the Inquisition's Torquemada. The trashing of Lawrence Walsh has become a journalistic cottage industry--and has put the press in the disturbing role of objecting to discovery of the truth.
Washington's overt hostility to the investigation, as evidenced in commentaries by liberals as well as conservatives, has even contributed to the success of the Reagan-Bush administrations' long- running cover-up. The assaults on Walsh have served as a kind of peer-group enforcement mechanism that has limited his investigation's options.
James Brosnahan, the San Francisco trial attorney who moved to Washington last fall to prosecute Weinberger (before Bush pardoned him), came to see the unrelenting attacks against Walsh as part of the obstruction of justice. "It was all so transparent that I was disappointed more people didn't pick up on the fact that all they were really trying to do was obstruct the trial of Weinberger," he says.
The final icing on the cake which sunk the Iran-Contra investigation was Bush's pardoning of Weinberger and six others after Walsh discovered Weinberger's handwritten notes on Iran-Contra in the summer of 1988, referenced by Parry above. The notes purportedly proved that not only was Weinberger much more involved than he'd reported to Congress in 1986, but so were Reagan, Bush and Powell, who, post-Gulf War I had achieved an almost god-like status in the eyes of the electorate.
It's rather ironic that many on both the Left and Right, when analyzing the current investigations by SP Fitzgerald on the outing of Valerie Plame, look to Colin Powell as a possible "straight-shooter" whose personal integrity would trump any loyalty he might feel for Bush. That may still be case, but it appears that Powell owes a fairly significant debt to the Bush family. And of course, we have no clue as to what new transgressions might be exposed should the Plame investigation bear fruit.
The facts are that many of the actors in the current Plame Affair have strong ties to Reagan's inner circle and/or Defense Department, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who served as a Director of Special Projects (1982 - 1985), Donald Rumsfeld, Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East (1983 - 1984) and on Reagan's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control (1982 - 1986), and Stephen Hadley, appointed by Reagan to the very important position of Counsel to the Special Review Board, aka, the "Tower Commission". They cut their obstructionist teeth on Iran-Contra, and learned long ago that the media was a powerful tool in the undermining of a special prosecutor and his pet grand jury.
Fitzgerald is a very competent guy. But so was Walsh, and he was sent packing, disgraced, for investigating a case which easily could have brought down a king, and nearly did. Walsh's targets had at their disposal a malleable Congress and self-serving press corps. But even the House of that Congress was ostensibly controlled by Democrats, and the media had yet to be fully corporatized. Thus, Fitzgerald has far more potential landmines to avoid, with much less support. A few pardons here, or Congressional investigations there, and Rove, Scooter and their bosses are sitting pretty for as long as they like.
Fitzgerald then finds himself inducted into the Loser Special Prosecutor/Independent Investigator Hall of Fame. Right next to Lawrence Walsh and Ken Starr.
[Nota bene: I discovered while researching this piece that former Nixon counsel John Dean expressed similar concerns regarding Congress subverting the Plame investigation vis-a-vis Iran-Contra back in January, 2004.)
(Originally posted on Wampum)