Iran Contra: Episode 8 - Pardon Me

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey there, my name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day, it feels pretty rocky? Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. Pushkin. In a political scandal, the gold standard for evidence has always been tapes. Tapes were decisive in watergate. They were decisive in the Clinton impeachment. In Iran contra, there were no tapes. At least none of the public ever got to here. But there was something almost as good. Notes. Specifically, contemporaneous notes. Memos, minutes, calendars, diaries, things that people wrote down while events were unfolding, before they had a chance to contort or revise their accounts of what happened. George H. W. Bush started keeping a diary on November 4, 1986. He was still the vice president then, but he was already thinking about the future. In his first entry, Bush wrote, this is the beginning of what I hope will be in accurate diary. He vowed to spend between five and fifteen minutes a day recording observations about his run for the presidency in 1988. In his second diary entry, Bush addressed a news story that had just found its way into the American media. After first appearing in the Lebanese magazine called Al-Sharau. Despite repeated rhetoric from the White House that this country would not deal with terrorists or terrorist states, that seems to be precisely what happened with $60 million. In his diary, Bush referred to the question of the hostages. He described himself as, quote, one of the few people that know fully the details. There's a lot of flak and misinformation out there, Bush noted. It is not a subject we can talk about. Through all of this, there has been considerable speculation about the role of vice president Bush. Where was he on the Iran affair? Bush's public stance in the immediate aftermath of Iran Contra was that he had been out of the loop. He didn't know that the Iran weapons sales were part of a straight armed for hostages deal. He didn't know what the secret program to aid the Contras. And he definitely didn't know about the diversion of profits from one operation to the other. I was aware of our Iran initiative and I support the president's decision. And I was not aware of and I oppose any diversion of funds, any ransom payments, or any circumvention. By the spring of 1987, Bush was preparing to compete in the Republican primary. He ran as a heavy favorite against televangelist Pat Robertson and Kansas Senator Bob Dole. What do you think about 88? You got your mind made up or is it still open? It is those open minds and even some minds that are already made up that the six Republican presidential candidates all hope to influence over the next three months. A major issue emerging in the Republican presidential campaign is how much vice president George Bush knew about the Iran Contra affair. CBS News has spent more than a month preparing tonight's report on the vice president and the Iran Contra affair. On the eve of the Iowa caucuses in early 1988, CBS evening news aired a five minute segment highlighting evidence that undermined Bush's statements on Iran Contra. Questions remain about vice president Bush's role in the Iran armed sale. Dan Rather pointed to paperwork that indicated Bush had sat in on multiple meetings about the Iran weapons initiative. Mr. Bush attended more than 15 meetings in the Oval Office at which the arms sales were discussed. He also quoted from notes and memos that suggested Bush knew about the Contra resupply operation. The vice president's office says he and his aides were never involved in directing, coordinating or approving military aid to the Contras. But the record is whittled with inconsistencies. Bush had agreed ahead of time to sit for a live interview directly after the segment aired. What followed was a heated exchange with Bush claiming that CBS News had set him up by telling him the segment would be a political profile and rather trying to pin the vice president down on what exactly he had known about Iran Contra. You said these few had known this was an arms for hostage swap that you would have opposed it. You also said that you did not know that may I answer that? That wasn't a question. Yes, it was a statement. Let me ask the question if I may first. Created this program as testifiers stated publicly he did not think it was arms for hostages and that's probably later and that's made. I don't want to be argumented, Mr. Vice President. These questions are not a whole career. It's not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judge your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? As Dan Rather noted in his report, a CBS News New York Times poll had found that almost a third of all Republicans believed Bush was hiding something. CNN election might 88. Iran Contra couldn't stop George Bush. He eventually ran away with a Republican nomination and that fall he defeated his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis in a general election. The state of Michigan has just put George Bush over the top and the number of electoral votes needed to take the White House. After two terms as VP, Bush would succeed Ronald Reagan as President. All the while Bush maintained his diary. I say maintained because he didn't actually write his entries out by hand. He dictated them into a tape recorder. His assistant would then deliver the cassettes to the Vice President's office in Houston, Texas. There, Bush's Houston-based secretary would transcribe them and file them away. Besides those two intermediaries, plus the head of Bush's Houston office, no one knew that Bush was keeping a diary. Not Ronald Reagan, not the Attorney General, and not Lawrence Walsh. The Independent Council who was investigating Iran Contra. Walsh and his team of prosecutors started working on the case about a month after Bush dictated his first entry. And a few months after that, the Office of the Independent Council had submitted a document request to the White House asking for any notes, diaries, or audio tapes that might be relevant to their investigation. All the document requests sought contemporaneous documents and were very carefully written and encompassed notes and jottings and dictations and diaries. This is John Q. Barrett, who worked on the Independent Council's investigation under Lawrence Walsh. Barrett is now a professor at St. John's University School of Law. Contemporaneous documents do speak for themselves, the notes that people are taken when they're not trying to shade their story. It gives you a roadmap that was highly valuable evidence. Highly valuable evidence that Bush did not hand over to the Independent Council's office. Whether Bush made that decision personally, or whether someone else in his orbit made it for him, the move would have lasting consequences. Bush's diary and his failure to disclose it would become part of a showdown between the Independent Council's office and the President of the United States. In the end, it wasn't Reagan who would define the legacy of Iran-Contra. It was Bush. I'm Leon Nehfak. From prologue projects and pushkin industries, this is Fiasco, Iran-Contra. Iran-Contra is the creature that just won't die. No matter how many times, George Bush tries to drive a stake through its heart. Some top Republicans are urging Bush to retaliate. I was, in fact, interviewed by the FBI. The President acted as he faces a demand for notes that could still be embarrassing. Now, he may try to resist on the grounds that Iran-Contra is all over. I think it's the last card in the cover. He's played the final card. Episode 8, our season finale. Pardon me. How George H.W. Bush tried to close the loop on Iran-Contra. We'll be right back. Hey there. My name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day, it feels pretty rocky. Well, I think history can help. This more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. Mary Belcher was a reporter covering the White House for the Washington Times when the Iran-Contra scandal broke in November of 1986. The press corps was covering Reagan on, I believe it was a cross-country trip that ended in California and he was sort of giving a farewell even though he had still two years left in office in 1986. As luck would have it, Belcher was actually on Air Force One when reports about Budmick Farlin and Oliver North secret Tehran trips started trickling out. Belcher and a colleague from Time Magazine had accompanied the president to California. They ended up filing the pool report that day on behalf of all the journalists in the White House press corps. We asked the president's spokesperson about these reports and we didn't get much of an answer. One thing he did say to us was be careful about repeating these sorts of reports because you could be wrong. Soon, Belcher stopped thinking of herself as a White House reporter. She was now on the Iran Contrabeat. She covered the congressional hearings, the indictments of Oliver North and John Point Dexter as well as North Trial. Then, Belcher was presented with an opportunity to change careers and get a very different perspective on the story. And at that point, the spokesperson for Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh was leaving to the return home to Michigan and I was invited to join the office. And I think as a reporter, you're a lawyer and you want to know what goes on inside an investigation you've been covering and I took the job. When Belcher became the spokesperson for the Independent Council's office, the Walsh team was focused on John Point Dexter, Reagan's former national security adviser. In March of 1990, it was Point Dexter's turn to face trial. He has charged with five felony counts in connection with the Iran Contra scandal. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 25 years in prison. Point Dexter was accused of lying to Congress about the U.S. government's role in the Contra War. He was also accused of lying to the Senate but the first U.S. sanctioned arms shipments to Iran. And of deleting electronic messages, he had sent over an internal White House computer network. Ronald Reagan, now out of office, testified at Point Dexter's trial. He did not appear in person in the courtroom. Instead he was beamed in by way of a videotaped deposition. Over approximately eight hours of testimony, the former president used variations on the phrase, I don't recall at least 88 times. I can't say that I specifically recall. I don't have a clear recollection of what might have been discussed. I don't recall ever mentioning anyone else. I don't recall that coming up at all as a matter of fact to this day. I don't know who finished the delivery of the missiles. Really, the overriding message of this is not what did the president know and when did he know it, but what did he not know and when did he not know it? I mean, the list of things that he didn't know, you heard. Point Dexter was convicted on all counts. But like Oliver North, he immediately appealed the verdict, arguing that the evidence against him was tainted because it was based in part on his testimony before Congress. Here's Mary Belcher again. The word taint refers to the fact that both Oliver North and John Point Dexter received immunity from Congress to give their testimony. Nothing that they said in those congressional hearings could be used against them in any prosecution. This was a huge problem for Lawrence Walsh. And in the lead up to North and Point Dexter's trials, he and his prosecutors had to take border line comical steps to prevent themselves from becoming tainted by coverage of the Iran Congress scandal. They couldn't talk about the hearings with their families and literally had to turn off the TV or change the channel when any mention of North or Point Dexter's testimony came on. When Mary Belcher joined Walsh's office, part of her job was to make sure the prosecutors on staff did not get tainted. Every day we would get all the press reports and gather them in the press office and mark out any statements or any information that could arguably be derived from either Oliver North or John Point Dexter's congressional testimony. Not just direct quotes, but background information. And so sometimes I would circulate to the non-tainted, prosecutorial team, press clips that were entirely, almost entirely blacked out. But it wasn't enough. As it turned out, defense attorneys for North and Point Dexter didn't have to argue that Walsh or his prosecutors had been tainted. They could just say that witnesses in both trials had been influenced by seeing North and Point Dexter's testimony in front of Congress. The attorneys took a broad definition of influence. Even if a witness had only subconsciously shaped their understanding of events by watching the congressional testimony, that was a violation of North and Point Dexter's Fifth Amendment rights. Here's John Q. Barrett again. How do you negate the possibility that hearing some piece of immunized testimony didn't stimulate you to recall something that stimulated you to recall something else, that stimulated something else, that motivated you to sort of have a certain inflection or confidence or tone as you recounted what you believed was from your authentic memory without drawing an immunized testimony. North successfully challenged his convictions on appeal in 1990. A federal judge today dismissed all charges against former White House aid all over North in connection with the around-contra affair. This I think is a very, very serious warning that immunity is not to be granted lightly. The following year, Point Dexter did too. The ruling was nearly identical to one that dismissed charges against former White House aid all over North. By this point, George H. W. Bush was well into his presidency. It had been an eventful period. The iron curtain between East Germany and West Berlin has come tumbling down. The Berlin wall had come down. In Central America, the U.S. had invaded Panama and arrested its leader Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges. American military forces, a nighttime invasion of Panama and sporadic fighting continuing this evening. In the Middle East, Bush had ordered airstrikes on Iraq and deployed half a million ground troops as part of the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. The President of Bush says it will not stop until Iraq gives up Kuwait. Throughout all this, the Walsh investigation continued. The prosecutors weren't just interested in the people who had overseen the Iran initiative, or had been in on the secret contra-resupply effort. They were interested in anyone who had lied to investigators about either scheme after the fact. In other words, they were interested in the possibility of a cover-up. The very thing that some of Reagan's advisors had hoped to avoid after the Iran weapon sales became public. And in November of 1991, that led Walsh and his team to focus on a very senior member of Reagan's cabinet. Former Defense Secretary, Caspur Weinberger. Caspur Weinberger was the Secretary of Defense from the start of the Reagan administration in 1987, so for the long run of years that included this activity. Weinberger's personal hero was Winston Churchill. And like Churchill, he could be confrontational and stubborn. Weinberger had strongly opposed the Iran weapons program, and he had tried to convince the President it was a bad idea. Later, when testifying before Congress, Weinberger said he believed he had been successful, only to find out that Reagan had gone ahead with the arms shipments after all. He was strongly opposed to the initiative, if you will, the idea that we should make arms deals with Iranians. The question was, did he know it was going forward or not despite his opposition? Walsh's team had asked Weinberger to provide them with any contemporaneous notes he had taken about the Iran weapon sales. But Weinberger said he hadn't taken systematic notes on meetings during the years in question. He may have jotted things down on an informal basis, but he was too busy to produce a comprehensive record of events as they unfolded. And his general story was that he didn't have personal records, that he wasn't a diary keeper, that he didn't have notes. Perfectly conceivable. It may have reflected something at the meeting, which I didn't make notes on. I don't take short-end. And I do not recall that particular subject coming up, had it come up. But then, in 1990, Walsh's office obtained a document in which former Secretary of State George Schultz expressed frustration at having to share his personal notes with the independent council, while his colleague, Casper Weinberger, had managed to keep his to himself. And then he says, and the note-taker writes it down, cap never referred to his notes, so he never had to cough them up. And cap is Casper Weinberger. That's an incredibly direct statement and a tantalizing lead, and we pursued that. When pressed on the issue, Weinberger's lawyer told prosecutors that anything his client had written down had either been turned over already, or was in the library of Congress. It turned out that a cache of Weinberger's personal papers had been sent there after he stepped down as Secretary of Defense in 1987. It was amid those personal papers that Walsh's prosecutors discovered something surprising about Casper Weinberger. When it turned out that Casper Weinberger was a habitual, meticulous note-taker, lived each day with a white pad at his side and logged his activities, and sometimes added detail of what he learned in a meeting, what he heard from a caller. In addition, in every meeting, he took his white pad and he kept meeting notes. And those also were really informal transcripts of who said what his meeting went around the room. And none of that had been produced. There were more than 1700 pages of Iran contra notes in Weinberger's Library of Congress archive. They offered a window onto the internal debates that took place while the Iran Arms Initiative was revving up. One note quoted Reagan saying that he could answer charges of illegality, but he couldn't answer charges that big, strong President Reagan had passed up a chance to free hostages. Another note indicated that members of the National Security Council staff intended to present the arms sales as a means of, quote, helping a group that wants to overthrow the government in Iran. The notes were really a transcript of cabinet-level knowledge in real time as the initiatives are going forward and then as investigations are occurring. So there was a lot of information in Weinberger's notes. But even if you put that aside, and even if you put aside the question of whether Weinberger hid the notes in the Library of Congress on purpose, the mere existence of the notes suggested that he had been lying when he said he didn't have them. The truth was that Weinberger took notes obsessively and systematically. As Walsh would later write in his memoir, Weinberger often stood at a reading desk and wrote on a five by seven-inch government note pad or a legal pad. He always kept both on his desk. And when a pad was full, he would put it into a desk drawer. When the desk drawer was full, he would move the pads into the bedroom that was attached to his office. The analogy that Mr. Weinberger's attorneys used was it was unconscious. He took notes like he brushed his teeth. I do remember Judge Walsh saying at one point, I often don't remember when I brushed my teeth, but I know I do brush my teeth. And what Weinberger was asked was not, you know, when did you last take notes, but do you take notes? You know, obviously to deny that given the physical evidence and so forth was false. It couldn't be anything other than false. And I think he had a, I'm a good guy, and it's none of your damn business attitude that really was his motivation to lie to those investigators. In June of 1992, a grand jury indicted Weinberger on felony charges. Former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger was indicted today by a federal grand jury on five criminal charges related to the Iran Contra scandal. They included the charges included withholding his notes and making false statements about them, and claiming falsely that he had been unaware of the first arms statements to Iran. Weinberger, who by this point was the publisher of Forbes magazine, rejected Walsh's accusations. Weinberger again portrayed himself as a man who had no knowledge of early arms sales to Iran and called the charges grotesque. The decision to indict me is a grotesque distortion with a prosecutorial power and a moral and illegal outrage. The indictment of Casper Weinberger signaled that more than five years after Walsh's appointment, the Independent Council was still actively pursuing new targets, and that he was aiming at the upper echelons of the Reagan administration. Weinberger is the highest ranking member of the Reagan administration to be charged. It appears that the Independent Council believes that there's been an ongoing cover-up starting in November of 1986 that goes on through today. Weinberger's indictment catapulted Iran Contra into the middle of yet another presidential election. This one pitting George H.W. Bush, who's running for a second term against the Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton. Republicans were outraged by the indictment. Some called on Walsh to voluntarily close his office and stop wasting taxpayer money. Sanders called on President Bush to fire him. You've got a tired special prosecutor and some aggressive on the federal payroll and scalp hunters who are out to get Ronald Reagan, I think that's clear, and the means they've chosen to do it is to try to intimidate the Cap Weinberger. The most vocal critic of the Weinberger indictment was Bush's one-time rival for the Republican nomination. Bob Dole was now serving as Senate Minority Leader. He described Walsh and his staff as a squad of highly paid assassins and accused them of trying to pressure Weinberger into testifying against Reagan. It's been five years now and somewhere between $30 and $50 million and haven't got much to show for and they keep perpetuating themselves in office. Hopefully they might sooner or later be able to get something on Ronald Reagan. They should have been closed up two or three years ago. If Congress spent $50 million in this kind of chicaneery, the liberal media around this town would be investigating. But Walsh's office did not shut down. Instead, two months later, the prosecutors dropped a second bomb when they filed a brief that contained an intriguing footnote. It quoted from a previously undisclosed memo about a 1987 phone conversation between Weinberger and then Secretary of State, George Schultz. A ran-conquer is the creature that just won't die no matter how many times George's bush tries to drive us staked through its heart. The memo dated to when Bush was still Reagan's VP. In an interview with The Washington Post, Bush claimed not to have realized that both Weinberger and Schultz had been against the Iran arm sales. The memo indicated Weinberger had seen Bush's comments and called Schultz to complain. Why did he say that, Weinberger asked? He was on the other side. The phone call suggested that Bush had actively supported the Iran weapons program. When the memo came out, Democratic lawmakers were quick to pounce on it. Well, it turns out that the president's recollection of affairs of state a mere six years ago when he was vice president of the United States are contradicted by Secretary Weinberger and Secretary Schultz. Well on the floor of the House, I can't say that the president of the United States lied, but the case is clear from the Washington Post. Bush tried to dodge questions about the memo. Bill Clinton started bringing up the memo on the trail, offering it as a retort to questions about his draft deferment, which he called a hill of beans compared to Bush's support for illegal conduct. Clinton's running mate, Al Gore, got it on the action too. Well the new evidence came out in the form of notes and they asked him about it and he just, oh I didn't read that story and just brushed it off. Well I would like for him to concentrate on that and see whether he can remember what he said and what he did. On October 13th, 1992, Bush was interviewed by Katie Kirk. Do you have any knowledge of the Iran Contra, Arsfer Hostages deal while you were in Augustus' Vice President? 450 times under oath some of them in our staff, 3500, yes I said all along that I knew about the arms going and I supported the president. I gave speeches about it. Remember up to this point, Bush had insisted that he did not know the weapons sales were part of an armed for hostages trade. Now he seemed to be admitting that he did and pretending that he'd been saying so all along. Late today White House aide said Bush misunderstood Katie Kirk's question. The aide said when the arms deal was cooked up, he did not fully understand it because he was not in the loop. While Bush and Clinton battled over Iran Contra in the media, defense lawyers for Casper Weinberger battled Walsh and his prosecutors in court. By the end of October, the Independent Council's office was preparing to file a super-seeding indictment against Weinberger, essentially an adendum that introduced more specifics to the case against him. One of those specifics came from a note discovered in Weinberger's files. Weinberger's notes said the president had decided to go with the Israeli-Iranian offer to release our five hostages in return for the sale of 4,000 tomisels. George Schultz and I opposed. VP favored. VP favored. Here was something better than a huffy phone call between two cabinet members. It was a contemporaneous record of Bush's support for the arms for hostages scheme. And there we were faced with the question, do we take out the VP favors or do we leave it in? This is Jim Brosnan, a prosecutor on Walsh's team. Do you remember reading a draft of the super-seeding indictment before it was filed and talking to Walsh about whether VP favored should be taken out? Under normal circumstances, they might not have even considered it. But this was the last week of October. Just days before Americans would be going to the polls. Was VP favored too explosive to release so close to Election Day? And my decision was, and I take responsibility for it, a lot of Washington people thought this was wrong, I respect their opinion, but I thought it wasn't going to remove and make successful the Vice President's cover-up he had been dissembling with the American public. I wasn't going to take it out. The press room at the Federal Courthouse in Washington, reporters combed through the indictment for new information. And everybody in the press room was going about their business and doing other things. And over in the corner is a reporter he's typing furiously. All the other reporters went over to see what he was madly typing about. And so they all looked at it and they saw VP favors. And that Friday night, the three leading television channels ran the story of Vice President and all hell broke loose. New material that directly contradicts President Bush's claim that he was out of the loop in the Iran-Contra affair. George Schultz and I opposed. Bill Casey, Ed Mies and Vice President Bush favored. Painting in Pittsburgh, Clinton quickly interrupted his schedule to pounce on the revelations in the Weinberger indictment. Secretary Weinberger's notes clearly show that President Bush has not been telling the truth when he says he was out of the loop. As Bush and Clinton were making their closing arguments in the campaign, Bush's claims about Iran-Contra were under scrutiny. Had he lied about his involvement? And if so, was he lying to protect Reagan or himself? Bush responded to the news the same way he had been responding to questions about Iran-Contra since 1986, by insisting that he had never been inconsistent and denying that Weinberger's notes on the meeting were in any way revelatory. We have a call from Little Rock during an appearance on Larry King Live. Bush was confronted on the air by one of Clinton's top aides. From George Stephanopoulos. Oh no. Oh no. The guy ahead is. He is Governor Clinton's campaign manager. This is an open pounce session. He dialed in directly. It's like a secret number. Go ahead, George. Mr. President, you asked us to find out what the smoking gun was. And this memo clearly shows that it was indeed arms for hostages, five hostages in return for the sale of 4,000-tone missiles, and that you knew it then, according to Mr. Weinberger. May I, sir. Now, let me tell you, Mr. Stephanopoulos, very able young man. It is the Democrats who have been pushing to the tune of some $40 million these hearings. Bush suggested that Walsh had included VP favored in his indictment in order to help the Clinton campaign. Are you implying or saying that Walsh did that to the political party? No, I'm asking. Isn't it strange? I'm not implying anything. Let the American people be the judge. Let the American people be the judge. Four days later, Bush lost the election. The American people have voted to make a new beginning. A landslide victory ushers in the Clinton era today, Wednesday, November the 4th. It's been humiliating defeat for Republicans. A landslide was in the electoral votes. Maybe it didn't read the election returns. It didn't work out quite the way we wanted it. He told his supporters he's going to finish the job with style. Bush had been voted out of office as a one-term president, but he still had more than two months left in the White House. Speculation began almost immediately that Walsh's super-seating indictment of Weinberger had cost Bush the White House. Bob Dole called it a deliberate hit job by the anti-Ragan, anti-Bush independent counsel's office. Aides say Bush is not angry at Clinton, but there is anger at a ran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh for what the White House claims is a witch hunt that hurt Bush in the election. Here's John Q. Barrett again. You know, whether it was sincerely believed or just was a convenient punching bag, a lot of people said that the Walsh super-seating indictment and the phrase VP favored had caused Bush to lose. A Los Angeles Times exit poll found that the recent Iran contra-news had not swayed many voters. The truth was, Bush had been trailing Clinton since the summer, but he had been gaining momentum in recent weeks, and it did fade away after Walsh's big reveal. At a meeting of Republican party leaders, Bob Dole accused Walsh of being in the tank for Clinton. I'd say to Mr. Walsh, why don't you have a little in-house investigation? Why don't you take a look? See if you can find one Republican on your staff, Mr. Walsh. In fact, Walsh himself was a lifelong Republican. He was appointed to serve as a federal judge by President Eisenhower, and later served as his deputy attorney general. Nevertheless, four Senate Republicans made a formal request to the Department of Justice appoint a new independent council to investigate the old one. It was an ironic move. Republicans had recently killed the independent council law put in place after Watergate. The law was set to expire in a few weeks, which meant there was just enough time to get one more independent council investigation started. Bob Dole prepared a list of criminal statutes he thought Walsh may have violated, and he sent it to Bush's Attorney General Bill Barr. In a memo, Barr was advised against appointing another independent council. The author of the memo was the head of DOJ's Criminal Division, Robert Mueller. In the end, Barr decided Mueller had it right. Instead of appointing a new independent council, he referred the Walsh matter to the Criminal Division. Around the same time, the independent council spokesperson, Mary Belcher, was asked to come in for an interview with the FBI. They wanted to know if she had given the Clinton campaign an advance warning that the superseding indictment of Casper Weinberger was coming. And I don't know if anybody knows this, but I was, in fact, interviewed by the FBI to ask me whether or not I had leaked information to the Clinton campaign. Republicans have been raising the possibility of a leak in the media. They were suspicious because a statement issued by the Clinton campaign about the VP-favored memo had been dated October 29th, one day before the indictment of Casper Weinberger was filed. The explanation from the Clinton camp was that someone had simply entered the wrong date by mistake. In a Virginia FBI field office, agents asked Mary Belcher if she was personally acquainted with Clinton's communications director, George Stephanopoulos. How did it come to be that FBI agents were asking about this? I don't know. I assume somebody high up thought that there was a story there. There was something worth investigating, some criminal activity that Judge Walsh's office was somehow working in concert with presidential hopeful Bill Clinton. I asked Belcher if she thought her questioning had been part of an FBI investigation into Walsh's office. She said it had never really occurred to her to wonder, and that she had never discussed it with any of her colleagues. You know, I guess I could request the FBI 302 with my name on it. A 302 is a record of an investigation. It's generally a one or two sheet thing. It would be kind of funny to see it, but it was serious business. I don't want to make light of it, but I really don't know anything more about it. With the integrity of their office under attack, Walsh and his prosecutors continued to prepare for the trial of Casper Weinberger, in which they would try to convince a jury that he had illegally withheld his notes from Iran contra investigators. Then, on December 11, 1992, the Walsh team received an astonishing piece of information. George H.W. Bush had kept a diary. A few months earlier, one of Bush's administrative assistants had found a diary while taking inventory in the White House. She thought it looked relevant to the Independent Council's investigation, so she shared it with Bush's White House Council. He kept a diary to himself until after the election. When Walsh found out about the diary, he didn't say anything about the matter publicly, and it was unclear what, if anything, he was going to do about it. Meanwhile, George H.W. Bush was now a lame duck president. But he was still in charge. And as conservative commentators reminded him over and over again in the weeks after his defeat, that meant he had the power to issue pardons. Some top Republicans are urging Bush to retaliate by pardoning former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and other Iran-Contra defendants. I think what happened to Cap Weinberger is one of the most disgusting things I've seen in 14 years in Washington. He should be crowned with garlic. The specter of pardons for the Iran-Contra defendants had been hanging over Walsh's investigation from the very beginning. Some had expected Ronald Reagan to issue pardons before leaving office. But Reagan didn't do it. And the idea that Bush should started gaining purchase among Republicans after his loss. Attorney General Bill Barr gave an interview in which he said the Iran-Contra defendants had been treated very unfairly. Barr declined to say at the time whether he was advising the president to issue pardons. But years later, he would confirm that he was strongly in favor. John Barrett says he didn't think pardons were likely. The things that were kind of in play between the election and the end of 1992, or between the election and Christmas, were that George Bush had withheld responsive documents, that the White House counsel's office had been part of wittingly or unwittingly withholding those documents. And that George Bush was on notice that he was likely to be called as a witness in the Weinberger trial. All of that added up to a situation where I thought it would be unlikely because of the self-interest that is palpable, that President Bush would exercise his pardon power. I was wrong. We'll be right back. The Christmas Eve bombshell from President Bush. Today it ended. President Bush pardoned Casper Weinberger accused of lying to Congress and five others in the scandal. Bush called it an act of healing. The Iran-Contra prosecute. The pardons were announced on Christmas Eve. There were six in all. Three of them going to people associated with the CIA and one to former State Department official Elliott Abrams. Another went to Bud McFarland who had pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. McFarland's colleagues all over North and John Pointexter didn't need pardons because their convictions had been overturned. That left Casper Weinberger who was still awaiting trial. Bush's sixth pardon went to him. By barring a Weinberger trial and pardoning others who he said had acted out of patriotic motives, Bush tried to put the Iran-Contra prosecutors out of business. In announcing the pardons, Bush called Casper Weinberger a true American patriot. Some may argue that this will prevent full disclosure of some new key facts to the American people Bush said. That is not true. The matter has been investigated exhaustively. Once Walsh wasted no time in reacting and he held nothing back. Prosecutor Walsh responded today saying the pardons undermined the principle that no man is above the law. Walsh called the pardons the last card in the cover-up. He also disclosed for the first time the existence of Bush's diaries and the fact that they had been withheld from prosecutors until after the election. He is pardoning a person who committed the same type of misconduct that he did. President Bush withheld notes that should have been made available to Congress in the spring of 1987 and in to my office at the same time. To some, it looked an awful lot like Bush had pardoned Casper Weinberger in order to avoid further scrutiny of his own role in Iran-Contra and his newly discovered diaries. The president acted as he faces a demand for notes that could still be embarrassing. Now, he may try to resist on the grounds that Iran-Contra is all over. I can't speak to President Bush's thought process or the lawyers who were advising him, Boyd and Gray and Bill Barr. But it's a sure thing that if Bush had testified in the Weinberger trial and his diary had been produced, I mean, we would have gotten and produced it and shared it with the defense, he would have been examined or cross-examined or refreshed based on those diary entries. And a pardon made it a sure thing that there would be no trial and thus that he would never have to testify and thus that those diary entries would never be used in trial evidence. Walsh was asked if he might bring criminal charges against Bush after he left the White House. Walsh indicated that he had not ruled it out. Is it remotely conceivable? There could be a prosecution of President Bush? I could not comment on that. He's the subject now of our investigation. Bush, meanwhile, was devastated by his loss in the election. In his diary, he noted that he had slept well, except for waking up in the middle of the night, thrashing around about the prosecutor. But after some consideration, the prosecutor and his team decided not to charge Bush with a crime. We had extensive discussions. We all, of course, reassembled right after Christmas or right after the first of the year. And the consensus of the office was that, you know, really this was the conclusion. A former president of the United States is a very special category of subject. It's almost inconceivable that one would be charged with a federal crime, almost inconceivable. For the prosecutors in Walsh's office, the only thing left to do was assemble their findings and present them to Congress. Their 1200-page report was released in January of 1994, seven years after Walsh was first appointed. After a seven-year investigation, Independent Council Lawrence Walsh concluded that there was a cover-up by the Reagan administration of its 1985 arms sales to Iran for the purpose of releasing hostages and its funding of the Nicaraguan Contras. Bush's conclusion was that President Reagan had not committed any crime, but that he had, quote, set the stage for the illegal activities of others by encouraging and in general terms ordering support of the Contras. Bush hadn't committed any crimes either, Walsh said, and it turned out his diaries didn't contain much new information. Despite that first entry in which Bush called himself one of the few people who knew the details, most of what followed was pretty anodine. In a press conference, Walsh emphasized that Iran Contra had not been the work of a few rogue operators. That had had come from the top, even if Reagan himself wasn't fully engaged in the details of what was happening. They didn't run off by themselves to violate the law. They thought they were carrying out his wishes. They had the backing of very high government officials in the agencies in the State Department, the Defense Department and the CIA. So it is in no sense a rogue operation. Walsh reserved his harshest criticism from Bush's decision to issue pardons. I think President Bush will always have to answer for his pardons. I think that was the most unjustifiable act. There was no public purpose served by that. President Reagan, on the other hand, was carrying out policies that he strongly believed. He thought he was serving the country in what he did. And the fact that he disregarded certain laws and statutes in the course of it was not because of any possibly self-centered purpose. By the time Walsh's report was published, George H. W. Bush was living as a retiree in Houston, and Ronald Reagan was suffering privately from the early stages of Alzheimer's. Bill Clinton was dealing with the fallout from a magazine article in which a group of Arkansas state troopers alleged that he had had a sexual encounter in a hotel room with a woman named Paula. Meanwhile, in Central America, the leader of the Sandinistas, Don Yeller Tega, had been voted out as President of Nicaragua and succeeded by the U.S.-backed candidate, Violeta Chamorro. As for the American hostages in Lebanon, most of them had been released. Two who never came home, including CIA station chief William Buckley, had died in captivity, and their bones had been found on the side of the road in Beirut. Iran Contra was over. Any remaining questions about why it happened and who deserved the blame would have to be examined through a rear-view mirror. On March 1, 2003, just over ten years after Bush issued his Christmas Eve pardons, Oliver North was scheduled to set sail for the Caribbean. North was hosting a week-long celebration, Bill does the Freedom Cruise, to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada. As you heard in our first episode, Grenada was taken over by hard-line communists during a coup in 1983. A group of American medical students studying on the island were believed to be in danger. The Reagan administration saw an opportunity to intervene and strike a blow against communism in the Western Hemisphere. Oliver North had helped plan the operation. Twenty years later, North was set to lead a private tour of Grenada as part of the Freedom Cruise. Other special guests would include Ronald Reagan's Attorney General, Ed Mies. But at the last minute, Oliver North had to cancel his trip. Target Iraq. Here is Tom Brokeau. Good evening everyone. It has been an evening of tense expectations that 48-hour deadline for Saddam Hussein President George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein will be stopped. For the past two years, North had been hosting a show on Fox News called War Stories, about extraordinary events in military history. I'm Oliver North. Welcome to War Stories. This is the deck of the USS New Jersey. Now permanently burned. Now, Fox News was sending North to the Middle East. Right now, Oli North joins us on the phone. He is on the east bank of the Tigris River looking into the city. In fact, the camera is probably panning around towards Oli. Oli, of course, is with the movie. On March 12th, while the Grenada Freedom Cruise went on without him, North appeared on the Fox News show Hannity and Colmes to talk about the mood on the ground. These Marines have been out here for almost two months, and they're ready, North said. We're kind of like divers at the end of the board, poised and ready to plunge, and waiting for somebody to give us the signal to jump off the board. In North said, one of the nice things about being with the troops was that everyone was blissfully unaware of anti-war protesters and the machinations of politicians in Washington. Out here, the focus is on the mission, North said. And what they really want to do is simply get on with it. And that is it for this season of Fiasco. Keep an eye out for our season on the Benghazi scandal, which will soon be appearing in this feed. For a list of books, articles and documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in the show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline Kaplan, Ula Culpa, and me, Leon Nefak. Our editor was Camilla Hammer. Our researcher was Frances Carr, the additional archival research from Caitlin Nicholas. Our music is by Nick Slevester. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY. Audio mix by Rob Byers, Michael Rayfield, and John Evans Evans. Copyright counsel provided by Peter Yassi at Yassi Butler, PLLC. Thanks to Brian Bennell, Carrie Baker, Melissa Kaplan, TC Winter, Alice Gregory, Marcelo Nadelle, Kaitlyn Phillips, Ed Winstead, Ryan Swykert, Mark Fini, Shane Harris, Malcolm Bern, Joe Weisberg, Jacob Weisberg, Stephen Fisher, Ed Clarice, Alexia Bedotte, Jessica Hanson, Evan Bell, Lise de Leon, Jennifer Valdez, Adam Davidson, Laura Mayer, Michael Wright, and Jill Burkhart, Richard Plepler, Ken Druckerman, and everyone at left right, Jill Abramson, John Davidson, and Interface Media Group. Matt Sacks, Jamie Lines, Becky Verhe, and everyone at Luminary. Thanks also to Sam Graham Felsen, Katzikum Kovah, Saraya Shockley, and Sam Lee. Special thanks to Alexandra Garriton, Sarah Brugare, and the whole team at Pushkin Industries. And thank you for listening. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.