Iran Contra: Episode 8 - Pardon Me

Pushkin in a political scandal, the gold standard for evidence has always been tapes. Tapes were decisive in Watergate.

We must not have any question to know on this.

You know, I'm in charge of this thinking, and I am.

Good about everything else.

They were decisive in the Clinton impeachment.

They're bagging.

Put it in a zip rock bag, and you pack.

It in with your treasures.

For though, I don't know, Amonica, it's just this nagging, awful feeling I have in the back of my head.

In Iran Contra, there were no tapes, at least none that the public ever got to hear, 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 fourth, nineteen eighty six. He was still the vice president then, but he was already thinking about

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.

Sixty million dollars.

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 and he ransom payments or any circumvention.

By the spring of nineteen eighty seven, Bush was preparing to compete in the Republican primary. He ran as a heavy favorite against Televangelis Pat Robertson and Kansas Senator Bob Dole.

No, what do you think about eighty eight?

You got your mind made up? Or this is still open?

Now, it's 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.

Phobs News has spent more than a month preparing to Night's report on the Vice President and the Iran contra affair.

On the eve of the Iowa Caucuses in early nineteen eighty eight, CBS Evening News aired a five minute segment highlighting evidence that undermined Bush's statements on Iran contract.

Questions remain about Vice President Bush's role in the Iran arms sale.

Dan rather pointed to paperwork that indicated Bush had sat in on multiple meetings about the Iran weapons initiative.

Mister Bush attended more than fifteen 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 age were never involved in directing, coordinating, or approving military aid to the Contras, but the record is riddled 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 you had known this was an arms for hostages squap, that you would have opposed it. You also said exactly that.

You did not know that.

May I answered that that was a question. It was yes, statement a statement.

Let me ask the question if created this program, As testifiers stated publicly, he did not think it was arms for hostages and later and that's me.

I don't want to be ugumented, mister, the same questions.

A whole career is 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 Right eighty eight. But Iran Contra couldn't stop George Bush. He eventually ran away with the Republican nomination, and that fall he defeated his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis in the 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

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 Saint John's University's 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 Nafok 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 us a stake through its heart. Some top Republicans are urging Bush to retire.

I was in fact interviewed by the FBI.

Well 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 contract is all over.

I think it's the last card in the cover. He's played the final card.

Episode eight, our season finale. Pardon me how George H. W. Bush tried to close the loop on Iran Contra. We'll be right back. Mary Belcher was a reporter covering the White House for the Washington Times when the Iran Contra scandal broke in November of nineteen eighty six.

The Press Corps was covering Reagan on a 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 nineteen eighty six.

As luck would have it, Belcher was actually on Air Force one when reports about Bud McFarlane and Oliver North's secret Tehran trip 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 spokesperson about these reports, and we didn't get much of any 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 Contribute. She covered the congressional hearings, the indictments of Oliver North and John Poindexter, 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 return home to Michigan, and I was invited to join the office. And I think, as a reporter, you're a voyeur 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 Poindexter, Reagan's former national security advisor. In March of nineteen ninety, it was Poindexter's turn to face trial.

He is charged with five felony counts in connection with the Iran Contra scandal. If convicted, he faces a maximum of twenty five years in prison.

Poindexter was accused of lying to Congress about the US government's role in the Contra War. He was also accused of lying to the Senate about the first US 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 poindexter trial. He did not appear in person in the courtroom. Instead, he was

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 that coming.

Up at all.

As 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.

Poindexter 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 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 a lead up to North and Poindexter's trials, he and his prosecutors had to take borderline comical steps to prevent themselves from becoming tainted by coverage of the Iran Contra 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 Poindexter's testimony came on.

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 through John Poindexter's congressional testimony, not just direct quotes, but background information and so 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 Poindexter didn't have to argue that walsh Or's prosecutors had been tainted. They could just say that witnesses in both trials have been influenced by seeing North and Poindexter's testimony in front of Congress. The attorneys took

How do you negate the possibility that hearing some piece of ammunized 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 nineteen ninety.

A federal judge today dismissed all charges against former White House Aid Oliver North in connection with the Iron Contra affair.

This, I think is a very very serious warning that immunity is not to be granted lightly.

The following year, Poindexter did too.

The ruling was nearly identical to one that dismissed charges against former White House Aid Oliver North.

Poindexter had been By.

This point, George H. W. Bush was well into his presidency. It had been an eventful period.

The Iron Curking between East Germany and West Berlin has come tumbling down.

The Berlin Wall had come down. In Central America, the US 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 least, Bush had ordered air strikes on Iraq and deployed half a million ground troops as part of the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.

President Borch says it will not stop until Iraq gives up Kooi.

Throughout all this, the Walsh investigation continued, the prosecutors weren't just interested in the people who had overseen the eurot initiative or had been in on the secret contray supply effort. They were interested in anyone who had lied to investigators

Casper Weinberger was the Secretary of Defense from the start of the Reagan administration into nineteen eighty seven, so for the long run of years that included this activity.

Biberger'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 tipments.

After all, he was strongly opposed to the initiative. If he 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 weapons 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.

It's perfectly conceivable that 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 nineteen ninety, 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. Capp never referred to his notes, so he never had to cough them up. And cap is Casper Weinberger. That's a 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 cash of Weinberger's personal papers had been sent there after he stepped down as Secretary of Defense in nineteen eighty seven. It was amid those personal papers at Walsh's prosecutors discovered something surprising about Casper Weinberger.

And it turned out that Casper Weinberger was a habitual, meticulous note taker. You know, 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 sort of informal transcripts of who said what as a meeting went around the room, and none of that had been produced.

There were more than seventeen hundred 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 bigs strong. President Reagan had passed

The notes were really a transcript of cabinet level knowledge in real time as the initiatives are going forward, and then as the 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 x seven inch

The analogy that mister Weinberger's attorneys used was it was unconscious he took notes like he brushed his teeth. I do remember Judge Walls saying at one point, I often don't remember when I brush 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 nineteen ninety two, a grand jury indicted Weinberger on felony charges.

Former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger was indicted today by a fel federal grand jury on five criminal charges related to the Iran contra scandal.

They aimed.

The charges included withholding his notes and making false statements about them, and claiming falsely that he had been unaware of the first armstreapments to Iran. Weinberger, who by this point was the publisher of Forbes magazine, rejected Walsh's accusations.

Werenberger again portrayed himself as a man who had no knowledge of early arm sales to Iran and called the charges grotesque.

The decision to indict me is a grotesque distortion with a prosecutorial power and the moral and a legal 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 nineteen eighty six 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 was 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. Others 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, and that's.

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.

Spent five years now on somewhere between thirty and fifty million dollars, and he haven't got much to show for. And they keep perpetuating themselves in office, hoping 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 fifty million dollars in this kind of chicanery, 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 nineteen eighty seven phone conversation between Weinberger and then Secretary of State George Schultz.

Iran contrary is the creature that just won't die no matter how many times George Buyce tries to drive a stake 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

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 a 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 vot.

Bush tried to dodge questions about the memo.

I don't know about that. I've told very openly everything I have to say about it. I don't know about that memo.

So I saw a story on it.

To be honest with you, I didn't read it.

Do you know what they're talking about?

Bill Clinton started bringing up the memo on the trail, offering it as a retort questions about his draft deferment, which he called a hill of beans. Compared to Bush's support for a legal 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 sah, 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 thirteenth, nineteen ninety two, Bush was interviewed by Katie Kirk.

Do you have any knowledge of the Iran contra ars for hostages deal?

While you went.

Ars Topay one hundred and fifty times under oath, some of them in our staff thirty five hundred.

Yes.

I said all along that I knew about the arms going and I supported the present. 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 had been saying so all along.

Late today, Whinehouse aide said Bush misunderstood Katie Kurk's question the AIDS say 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 Kantra 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 superseding indictment against Weinberger, essentially an addendum that introduced more specifics to the case against him. One of those specifics came from a note

And there we were faced with the question do we take out the VP favors or do we leave it in.

This is Jim Brosnahan, a prosecutor on Walsh's team. He remembers reading a draft of the superseding 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 a lot of a lot of Washington peoples thought this was wrong. I respect their opinion, but I thought it. I wasn't going to remove it. May may successful the Vice president's cover up. He had been dissembling with the American public. I wasn't going to take it out.

In 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 and 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 the Vice President and all help broke.

Loose new material that directly contradicts President Bush's claim that he was out of the loop in the Iran Contra affair.

George schultzen I posed Bill Casey Etmees, and Vice President Bush favored.

Campaigning 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 nineteen eighty six, 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 Stephanopolis.

Oh no, oh, no, guy ahead.

He has Governor Clinton's campaign manager. This is an open phonet ess and he dialed in directly.

It was lucked in at number.

Go ahead, George, the president you asked us to find out what the smoking gun was, and this memo clearly shows that it wasn't these arms for hostages, five hostages in return for the sale of four thousand total missiles, and that she knew it then, according to mister Weinberger.

Yeah reply now.

Let me let me tell you now, mister Stephanopp, let's very able, young man. It is the Democrats who have been pushing to the tune of some forty million dollars.

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 today politically?

No, I'm asking, isn't it strange? I'm not implying anything. Let the American people. Let the American people be the judge.

Let's the American people.

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.

It's been a humiliating defeat for Republicans.

The landslide was in the electoral votes.

Maybe you 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 superseding indictment of Weinberger had cost Bush the White House. Bob Dole called it a deliberate hit job by the anti Reagan, anti Bush. Independent Council's Office.

Aide say Bush is not angry at Clintonland, 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 receiving indictment in the phrase VP favored had caused Bush to lose.

A Los Angeles Times exit poll found that the recent Iran contrain 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 mister 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, mister 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 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

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 had 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 twenty ninth, 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.

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 three OHO two with my name on it. A three O two 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 Kasper Weinberger, in which they would try to convince a jury that he had illegally withheld his notes from Iran Contra investigators. Then, on December eleventh, nineteen ninety two, the Walsh team received an astonishing piece of information. George H. W. Bush had

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 have seen in fourteen years in Washington.

He should do.

He be crowned with gar respector 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

The things that were kind of in play between the election and the end of nineteen ninety two, or between the election and Christmas, where 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

I was wrong.

We'll be right back.

The Christmas Eve bombshall from President Bush today.

It ended President Bush pardon Casper Weinberger, accused of lying to Congress and five others in the scandal. Bush called it an act of healing the Iran Contra.

Prosecutor 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 McFarlane, who had pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. MacFarlane's colleagues Oliver North and John Poindexter didn't need pardons because their convictions had been overturned.

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. Lawrence 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 pardoners 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 nineteen eighty seven and into 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 contrat 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 contract is all over.

I can't speak to President Bush's thought process or the lawyers who are advising him, Boyden 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 with the defense, he would have been examined or

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 a 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, you know, 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 twelve hundred page report was released in January of nineteen ninety four, 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 nineteen eighty five arms sales to Iran for the purpose of releasing hostages and its funding of the Nicaraguan contras.

Walsh'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,

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 of 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 in. He thought he was serving the country and 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

Here is Tom Brokaw.

Good evening everyone.

It has been an evening of tense expectations.

The forty eight hour doubline 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 head.

I'm Oliver North.

Welcome to War Stories.

This is the deck of the USS New Jersey now permanently.

Now Fox News was sending North to the Middle East.

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's probably panning around towards oli.

Oli, of course, is with the.

On March twelfth, while the Grenada Freedom crewise 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 we've got.

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 focuses 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 Bengazi scandal, which will soon be appearing in this feed. For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used in our research,