May 26, 2025 • 50 mins
How George H.W. Bush ended Iran-Contra.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin in a political scandal, the gold standard for evidence
has always been tapes. Tapes were decisive in Watergate.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
We must not have any question to know on this.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
You know, I'm in charge of this thinking, and I am.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Good about everything else.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
They were decisive in the Clinton impeachment.
Speaker 5 (00:45):
They're bagging.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Put it in a zip rock bag, and you pack.
Speaker 6 (00:48):
It in with your treasures.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
For though, I don't know, Amonica, it's just this nagging,
awful feeling I have in the back of my head.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
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
(01:18):
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
the future. In his first entry, Bush wrote, this is
the beginning of what I hope will be in accurate diary.
(01:39):
He vowed to spend between five and fifteen minutes a
day recording observations about his run for the presidency in
nineteen eighty eight. 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 Chirau.
Speaker 7 (01:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Sixty million dollars.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Through all of this, there has been considerable speculation about
the role of Vice President Bush. Where was he on
the Iran affair.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:13):
No, what do you think about eighty eight?
Speaker 7 (03:14):
You got your mind made up? Or this is still open?
Speaker 8 (03:17):
Now, it's still open.
Speaker 9 (03:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
A major issue emerging in the Republican presidential campaign is
how much Vice President George Bush knew about the Iran
contra affair.
Speaker 7 (03:39):
Phobs News has spent more than a month preparing to
Night's report on the Vice President and the Iran contra affair.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
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.
Speaker 7 (03:55):
Questions remain about Vice President Bush's role in the Iran
arms sale.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Dan rather pointed to paperwork that indicated Bush had sat
in on multiple meetings about the Iran weapons initiative.
Speaker 7 (04:05):
Mister Bush attended more than fifteen meetings in the Oval
office at which the arms sales were discussed.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
He also quoted from notes and memos that suggested Bush
knew about the Contra resupply operation.
Speaker 7 (04:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
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.
Speaker 7 (04:44):
You said these you had known this was an arms
for hostages squap, that you would have opposed it. You
also said exactly that.
Speaker 10 (04:50):
You did not know that.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
May I answered that that was a question. It was yes,
statement a statement.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
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.
Speaker 7 (05:05):
I don't want to be ugumented, mister, the same questions.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
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?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
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
(05:41):
general election.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
The state of Michigan has just put George Bush over the.
Speaker 9 (05:46):
Top and the number of electoral votes needed to take
the White House.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
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
(06:15):
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
(06:35):
prosecutors had 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.
Speaker 11 (06:51):
All the document requests sought contemporaneous documents and were very
carefully written and encompassed notes and jottings and dictations and diaries.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
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.
Speaker 11 (07:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
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
(07:43):
United States. In the end, it wasn't Reagan who would
define the legacy of Iran Contra.
Speaker 12 (07:49):
It was Bush.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. This
is fiasco Iran Contra.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
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.
Speaker 12 (08:10):
I was in fact interviewed by the FBI.
Speaker 13 (08:13):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
I think it's the last card in the cover. He's
played the final card.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
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
(08:48):
White House for the Washington Times when the Iran Contra
scandal broke in November of nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 12 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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.
Speaker 12 (09:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
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.
Speaker 12 (10:04):
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
(10:26):
I took the job.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
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.
Speaker 13 (10:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
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
(11:11):
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 eighty eight times.
Speaker 14 (11:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Up at all.
Speaker 14 (11:36):
As matter of fact, to this day, I don't know
who finished the delivery of the missiles.
Speaker 12 (11:42):
Really, the overriding message of this is not what did
the president know and when did he know it?
Speaker 1 (11:46):
But what did he not know and when did he
not know it?
Speaker 10 (11:49):
I mean the list of things that he didn't know.
Speaker 12 (11:51):
You heard.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
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.
Speaker 12 (12:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
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.
(12:43):
When Mary Belcher joined Walsh's office, part of her job
was to make sure the prosecutors on staff did not
get tainted.
Speaker 12 (12:50):
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
(13:10):
would circulate to the non tainted prosecutorial team press clips
that were entirely almost entirely blacked out.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
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
a broad definition of influenced. Even if a witness had
only subconsciously shaped their understanding of events by watching the
(13:43):
congressional testimony, that was a violation of North and Poindexter's
Fifth Amendment rights. Here's John Q. Barrett again.
Speaker 11 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
North successfully challenged his convictions on appeal in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 10 (14:19):
A federal judge today dismissed all charges against former White
House Aid Oliver North in connection with the Iron Contra affair.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
This, I think is a very very serious warning that
immunity is not to be granted lightly.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
The following year, Poindexter did too.
Speaker 9 (14:37):
The ruling was nearly identical to one that dismissed charges
against former White House Aid Oliver North.
Speaker 12 (14:43):
Poindexter had been By.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
This point, George H. W. Bush was well into his presidency.
It had been an eventful period.
Speaker 13 (14:51):
The Iron Curking between East Germany and West Berlin has
come tumbling down.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
The Berlin Wall had come down. In Central America, the
US had invaded Panama and arrested its leader Manuel Noriega
on drug trafficking charges.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
American military forces a nighttime invasion of Panama and sporadic
fighting continuing this evening.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
President Borch says it will not stop until Iraq gives
up Kooi.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
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
about either scheme after the fact. In other words, they
were interested in the possibility of a cover up, the
(15:43):
very thing that some of Reagan's advisors had hoped to
avoid after the Iran weapons sales became public and in
November of nineteen ninety one, that led Walsh and his
team to focus on a very senior member of Reagan's cabinet,
former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger.
Speaker 11 (15:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
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.
Speaker 11 (16:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
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.
Speaker 11 (17:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:19):
I do not recall that particular subject coming up, had
it come up.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
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.
Speaker 11 (17:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
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.
Speaker 11 (18:20):
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,
(18:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
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
up a chance to free hostages. Another note indicated that
(19:15):
members of the National Security Council staff intended to present
the arm sales as a means of quote helping a
group that wants to overthrow the government in Iran.
Speaker 11 (19:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
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
(20:02):
later write in his memoir, Weinberger often stood at a
reading desk and wrote on a five x seven inch
government notepad 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.
Speaker 11 (20:20):
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?
(20:41):
But do you take notes?
Speaker 15 (20:43):
You know?
Speaker 11 (20:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
In June of nineteen ninety two, a grand jury indicted
Weinberger on felony charges.
Speaker 9 (21:05):
Former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger was indicted today by a
fel federal grand jury on five criminal charges related to
the Iran contra scandal.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
They aimed.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
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.
Speaker 13 (21:30):
Werenberger again portrayed himself as a man who had no
knowledge of early arm sales to Iran and called the
charges grotesque.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
The decision to indict me is a grotesque distortion with
a prosecutorial power and the moral and a legal outrage.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
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.
Speaker 9 (21:56):
Weinberger is the highest ranking member of the Reagan administration
to be charged.
Speaker 7 (22:01):
It appears that the Independent Council believes that there's been
an ongoing cover up starting in November.
Speaker 16 (22:06):
Of nineteen eighty six that goes on through today.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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.
Speaker 17 (22:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
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.
Speaker 16 (23:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
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.
(24:15):
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.
Speaker 18 (24:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Bush tried to dodge questions about the memo.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
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.
Speaker 10 (24:57):
So I saw a story on it.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
To be honest with you, I didn't read it.
Speaker 6 (25:00):
Do you know what they're talking about?
Speaker 1 (25:04):
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.
Speaker 6 (25:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
On October thirteenth, nineteen ninety two, Bush was interviewed by
Katie Kirk.
Speaker 9 (25:45):
Do you have any knowledge of the Iran contra ars
for hostages deal?
Speaker 5 (25:50):
While you went.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Ars Topay one hundred and fifty times under oath, some
of them in our staff thirty five hundred.
Speaker 19 (25:56):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I said all along that I knew about the arms
going and I supported the present. I gave speeches about it.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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
(26:49):
discovered in Weinberger's files. Weinberger's note said the President had
decided to go with the Israeli Iranian offer to release
our five hostages in return for the sale of four
thousand TOE missiles. George Schultz and I opposed VP favored
VP favored. Here was something better than a huffy phone
(27:11):
call between two cabinet members. It was a contemporaneous record
of Bush's support for the arms for hostages scheme.
Speaker 8 (27:18):
And there we were faced with the question do we
take out the VP favors or do we leave it in.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
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
(27:47):
the polls. Was VP favored too explosive to release so
close to election day?
Speaker 8 (27:53):
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.
(28:17):
I wasn't going to take it out.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
In the press room at the Federal Courthouse in Washington,
reporters combed through the indictment for new information.
Speaker 8 (28:25):
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
(28:53):
channels ran the story of the Vice President and all
help broke.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Loose new material that directly contradicts President Bush's claim that
he was out of the loop in the Iran Contra affair.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
George schultzen I posed Bill Casey Etmees, and Vice President
Bush favored.
Speaker 8 (29:13):
Campaigning in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 9 (29:15):
Clinton quickly interrupted his schedule to pounce on the revelations
in the Weinberger indictment.
Speaker 7 (29:19):
Secretary Weinberger's notes clearly show that President Bush has not
been telling the truth when he says he was out
of the loop.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
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
(29:48):
that he had never been inconsistent and denying that Weinberger's
notes on the meeting were in any way revelatory.
Speaker 8 (29:54):
We have a call from Little Rock.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
During an appearance on Larry King Live, Bush was confronted
on the air by one of Clinton's top aides.
Speaker 8 (30:03):
From George Stephanopolis.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Oh no, oh, no, guy ahead.
Speaker 16 (30:07):
He has Governor Clinton's campaign manager. This is an open
phonet ess and he dialed in directly.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
It was lucked in at number.
Speaker 19 (30:13):
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.
Speaker 8 (30:30):
Yeah reply now.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
These hearings, Bush suggested that Walsh had included VP favored
in his indictment in order to help the Clinton campaign.
Speaker 8 (30:46):
Are you implying or saying that Walsh did that today politically?
Speaker 4 (30:50):
No, I'm asking, isn't it strange? I'm not implying anything.
Let the American people. Let the American people be the judge.
Speaker 10 (30:58):
Let's the American people.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Four days later, Bush lost the election.
Speaker 14 (31:01):
The American people have voted to make a new beginning.
Speaker 17 (31:06):
A landslide victory ushers in the Clinton era Today Wednesday, November.
Speaker 6 (31:11):
It's been a humiliating defeat for Republicans.
Speaker 10 (31:13):
The landslide was in the electoral votes.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Maybe you didn't read the election returns.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
It didn't work out quite the way we wanted it.
Speaker 6 (31:20):
He told his supporters He's going to finish the job
with style.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
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
(31:44):
anti Reagan, anti Bush. Independent Council's Office.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Here's John Q. Barrett again.
Speaker 11 (32:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
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
(32:37):
in the tank for Clinton.
Speaker 16 (32:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
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.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
The old one.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
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
(33:31):
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 Muller.
In the end, Barr decided Muhller had it right. Instead
of appointing a new Independent Council, he referred the Walsh
(33:52):
matter to the Criminal Division. Around the same time, the
Independent Council's 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 advance warning that
the superseding indictment of Casper Weinberger was coming.
Speaker 12 (34:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
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.
(34:44):
In a Virginia FBI field office. Agents asked Mary Belcher
if she was personally acquainted with Clinton's communications director George Stephanopolis.
How did it come to be that FBI agents were
asking about this?
Speaker 12 (34:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
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.
Speaker 12 (35:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
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
(36:08):
kept a diary. A few months earlier. One of Bush's
administrative assistants had found the 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
(36:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Some top Republicans are urging Bush to retaliate by pardoning
former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and other Iran Contra defendants.
Speaker 17 (37:02):
I think what happened to Cap Weinberger is one of
the most disgusting things I have seen in fourteen years
in Washington.
Speaker 8 (37:09):
He should do.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
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
(37:34):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:51):
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
(38:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
I was wrong.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 10 (38:39):
The Christmas Eve bombshall from President Bush today.
Speaker 13 (38:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
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.
(39:14):
That left Casper Weinberger, who was still awaiting trial. Bush's
sixth pardon went to him.
Speaker 13 (39:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
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
(39:54):
he held nothing back.
Speaker 10 (39:55):
Prosecutor Walsh responded today, saying the pardons undermined the principle
that no man is above the law.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
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.
Speaker 5 (40:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
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.
Speaker 13 (40:41):
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.
Speaker 11 (40:50):
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
(41:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
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.
Speaker 10 (41:36):
Is it remotely conceivable there could be a prosecution of
President Bush?
Speaker 5 (41:41):
I could not comment on that. He's a subject now
of our investigation.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
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.
Speaker 11 (42:05):
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
(42:27):
inconceivable that one would be charged with a federal crime.
Almost inconceivable.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
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.
Speaker 10 (42:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
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
(43:30):
called himself one of the few people who knew the details,
most of what followed was pretty anodyne. In a press conference,
Walsh emphasized that Iran Contra had not been the work
of a few rogue operators, that it had come from
the top. Even if Reagan himself wasn't fully engaged in
the details of what was happening.
Speaker 5 (43:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Walsh reserved his harshest criticism from Bush's decision to issue pardons.
Speaker 5 (44:13):
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
(44:35):
certain laws and statutes in the course of it was
not because of any possibly self centered purpose.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
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
(45:10):
leader of the Sandinistas, Don yell Or Tega, had been
voted out as president of Nicaragua and succeeded by the
US back candidate Violetta 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
(45:32):
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 first, two thousand and three, just
(45:53):
over ten years after Bush issued as Christmas Eve Pardons,
Oliver North was scheduled to set sail for the Caribbean.
North was hosting a week long celebration billed as the
Freedom Cruise to mark the twentieth anniversary of the US
invasion of Grenada. As you heard in our first episode,
Grenada was taken over by hardline communists during a coup
(46:14):
in nineteen eighty three. 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
(46:35):
of the Freedom Cruise. Other special guests would include Ronald
Reagan's Attorney General, Ed Meese, but at the last minute
Oliver North had to cancel his trip target Iraq.
Speaker 17 (46:47):
Here is Tom Brokaw.
Speaker 9 (46:49):
Good evening everyone.
Speaker 8 (46:50):
It has been an evening of tense expectations.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
The forty eight hour doubline for Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
President George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq.
Speaker 14 (46:59):
Saddam Hussein will be stopped.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
For the past two years, North had been hosting a
show on Fox News called War Stories, about extraordinary events
in military head.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
I'm Oliver North.
Speaker 7 (47:11):
Welcome to War Stories.
Speaker 11 (47:13):
This is the deck of the USS New Jersey now permanently.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Now Fox News was sending North to the Middle East.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Now Oli.
Speaker 12 (47:20):
North joins us on the phone.
Speaker 11 (47:21):
He is on the east bank of the Tigris River
looking into the city.
Speaker 15 (47:24):
In fact, the camera's probably panning around towards oli.
Speaker 12 (47:27):
Oli, of course, is with the.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
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.
Speaker 15 (47:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
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.
(48:19):
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,
follow the link in the show notes. Fiasco is a
production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries.
(48:40):
The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline kaplan, Ula Kulpa,
and me Leon Mayvock. Our editor was Camilla Hammer. Our
researcher was Francis Carr. Additional archival research from Caitlin Nicholas.
Our music is by Nick Silvester. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at
Chips and y Audio, mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayphiel
(49:04):
and Johnny Vince Evans. Copyright council provided by Peter Yassi
at Yassi Butler PLOC. Thanks to Brian Bonnell, Carrie Baker,
Melissa Kaplan, TC Winter, Alice Gregory, Marcella Nadel, Caitlin Phillips,
ed Winsteed, Ryan Swikert, Mark Feeney, Shane Harris, Malcolm Burne,
Joe Weisberg, Jacob Weisberg, Stephen Fisher, Ed Claris, Alexia Badott,
(49:29):
Jessica Hanson, Evan Bell, Lisa de Leone, 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 Sachs, Jamie Lynes, Becky ver
Haey and everyone at Luminary. Thanks also to Sam Graham, Felsen,
(49:50):
Kotzikam Kova, Sirea Shockley, and Sam Lee Special thanks to
Alexandra Garretton, Sarah Bruguer and the whole team at Pushkin Industries,
and thank you for listening,
Pushkin in a political scandal, the gold standard for evidence
has always been tapes. Tapes were decisive in Watergate.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
We must not have any question to know on this.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
You know, I'm in charge of this thinking, and I am.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Good about everything else.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
They were decisive in the Clinton impeachment.
Speaker 5 (00:45):
They're bagging.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Put it in a zip rock bag, and you pack.
Speaker 6 (00:48):
It in with your treasures.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
For though, I don't know, Amonica, it's just this nagging,
awful feeling I have in the back of my head.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
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
(01:18):
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
the future. In his first entry, Bush wrote, this is
the beginning of what I hope will be in accurate diary.
(01:39):
He vowed to spend between five and fifteen minutes a
day recording observations about his run for the presidency in
nineteen eighty eight. 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 Chirau.
Speaker 7 (01:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Sixty million dollars.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Through all of this, there has been considerable speculation about
the role of Vice President Bush. Where was he on
the Iran affair.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:13):
No, what do you think about eighty eight?
Speaker 7 (03:14):
You got your mind made up? Or this is still open?
Speaker 8 (03:17):
Now, it's still open.
Speaker 9 (03:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
A major issue emerging in the Republican presidential campaign is
how much Vice President George Bush knew about the Iran
contra affair.
Speaker 7 (03:39):
Phobs News has spent more than a month preparing to
Night's report on the Vice President and the Iran contra affair.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
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.
Speaker 7 (03:55):
Questions remain about Vice President Bush's role in the Iran
arms sale.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Dan rather pointed to paperwork that indicated Bush had sat
in on multiple meetings about the Iran weapons initiative.
Speaker 7 (04:05):
Mister Bush attended more than fifteen meetings in the Oval
office at which the arms sales were discussed.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
He also quoted from notes and memos that suggested Bush
knew about the Contra resupply operation.
Speaker 7 (04:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
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.
Speaker 7 (04:44):
You said these you had known this was an arms
for hostages squap, that you would have opposed it. You
also said exactly that.
Speaker 10 (04:50):
You did not know that.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
May I answered that that was a question. It was yes,
statement a statement.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
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.
Speaker 7 (05:05):
I don't want to be ugumented, mister, the same questions.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
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?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
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
(05:41):
general election.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
The state of Michigan has just put George Bush over the.
Speaker 9 (05:46):
Top and the number of electoral votes needed to take
the White House.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
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
(06:15):
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
(06:35):
prosecutors had 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.
Speaker 11 (06:51):
All the document requests sought contemporaneous documents and were very
carefully written and encompassed notes and jottings and dictations and diaries.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
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.
Speaker 11 (07:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
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
(07:43):
United States. In the end, it wasn't Reagan who would
define the legacy of Iran Contra.
Speaker 12 (07:49):
It was Bush.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. This
is fiasco Iran Contra.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
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.
Speaker 12 (08:10):
I was in fact interviewed by the FBI.
Speaker 13 (08:13):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
I think it's the last card in the cover. He's
played the final card.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
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
(08:48):
White House for the Washington Times when the Iran Contra
scandal broke in November of nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 12 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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.
Speaker 12 (09:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
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.
Speaker 12 (10:04):
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
(10:26):
I took the job.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
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.
Speaker 13 (10:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
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
(11:11):
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 eighty eight times.
Speaker 14 (11:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Up at all.
Speaker 14 (11:36):
As matter of fact, to this day, I don't know
who finished the delivery of the missiles.
Speaker 12 (11:42):
Really, the overriding message of this is not what did
the president know and when did he know it?
Speaker 1 (11:46):
But what did he not know and when did he
not know it?
Speaker 10 (11:49):
I mean the list of things that he didn't know.
Speaker 12 (11:51):
You heard.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
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.
Speaker 12 (12:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
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.
(12:43):
When Mary Belcher joined Walsh's office, part of her job
was to make sure the prosecutors on staff did not
get tainted.
Speaker 12 (12:50):
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
(13:10):
would circulate to the non tainted prosecutorial team press clips
that were entirely almost entirely blacked out.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
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
a broad definition of influenced. Even if a witness had
only subconsciously shaped their understanding of events by watching the
(13:43):
congressional testimony, that was a violation of North and Poindexter's
Fifth Amendment rights. Here's John Q. Barrett again.
Speaker 11 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
North successfully challenged his convictions on appeal in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 10 (14:19):
A federal judge today dismissed all charges against former White
House Aid Oliver North in connection with the Iron Contra affair.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
This, I think is a very very serious warning that
immunity is not to be granted lightly.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
The following year, Poindexter did too.
Speaker 9 (14:37):
The ruling was nearly identical to one that dismissed charges
against former White House Aid Oliver North.
Speaker 12 (14:43):
Poindexter had been By.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
This point, George H. W. Bush was well into his presidency.
It had been an eventful period.
Speaker 13 (14:51):
The Iron Curking between East Germany and West Berlin has
come tumbling down.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
The Berlin Wall had come down. In Central America, the
US had invaded Panama and arrested its leader Manuel Noriega
on drug trafficking charges.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
American military forces a nighttime invasion of Panama and sporadic
fighting continuing this evening.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
President Borch says it will not stop until Iraq gives
up Kooi.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
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
about either scheme after the fact. In other words, they
were interested in the possibility of a cover up, the
(15:43):
very thing that some of Reagan's advisors had hoped to
avoid after the Iran weapons sales became public and in
November of nineteen ninety one, that led Walsh and his
team to focus on a very senior member of Reagan's cabinet,
former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger.
Speaker 11 (15:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
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.
Speaker 11 (16:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
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.
Speaker 11 (17:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:19):
I do not recall that particular subject coming up, had
it come up.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
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.
Speaker 11 (17:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
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.
Speaker 11 (18:20):
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,
(18:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
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
up a chance to free hostages. Another note indicated that
(19:15):
members of the National Security Council staff intended to present
the arm sales as a means of quote helping a
group that wants to overthrow the government in Iran.
Speaker 11 (19:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
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
(20:02):
later write in his memoir, Weinberger often stood at a
reading desk and wrote on a five x seven inch
government notepad 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.
Speaker 11 (20:20):
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?
(20:41):
But do you take notes?
Speaker 15 (20:43):
You know?
Speaker 11 (20:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
In June of nineteen ninety two, a grand jury indicted
Weinberger on felony charges.
Speaker 9 (21:05):
Former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger was indicted today by a
fel federal grand jury on five criminal charges related to
the Iran contra scandal.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
They aimed.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
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.
Speaker 13 (21:30):
Werenberger again portrayed himself as a man who had no
knowledge of early arm sales to Iran and called the
charges grotesque.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
The decision to indict me is a grotesque distortion with
a prosecutorial power and the moral and a legal outrage.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
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.
Speaker 9 (21:56):
Weinberger is the highest ranking member of the Reagan administration
to be charged.
Speaker 7 (22:01):
It appears that the Independent Council believes that there's been
an ongoing cover up starting in November.
Speaker 16 (22:06):
Of nineteen eighty six that goes on through today.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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.
Speaker 17 (22:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
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.
Speaker 16 (23:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
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.
(24:15):
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.
Speaker 18 (24:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Bush tried to dodge questions about the memo.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
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.
Speaker 10 (24:57):
So I saw a story on it.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
To be honest with you, I didn't read it.
Speaker 6 (25:00):
Do you know what they're talking about?
Speaker 1 (25:04):
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.
Speaker 6 (25:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
On October thirteenth, nineteen ninety two, Bush was interviewed by
Katie Kirk.
Speaker 9 (25:45):
Do you have any knowledge of the Iran contra ars
for hostages deal?
Speaker 5 (25:50):
While you went.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Ars Topay one hundred and fifty times under oath, some
of them in our staff thirty five hundred.
Speaker 19 (25:56):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I said all along that I knew about the arms
going and I supported the present. I gave speeches about it.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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
(26:49):
discovered in Weinberger's files. Weinberger's note said the President had
decided to go with the Israeli Iranian offer to release
our five hostages in return for the sale of four
thousand TOE missiles. George Schultz and I opposed VP favored
VP favored. Here was something better than a huffy phone
(27:11):
call between two cabinet members. It was a contemporaneous record
of Bush's support for the arms for hostages scheme.
Speaker 8 (27:18):
And there we were faced with the question do we
take out the VP favors or do we leave it in.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
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
(27:47):
the polls. Was VP favored too explosive to release so
close to election day?
Speaker 8 (27:53):
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.
(28:17):
I wasn't going to take it out.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
In the press room at the Federal Courthouse in Washington,
reporters combed through the indictment for new information.
Speaker 8 (28:25):
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
(28:53):
channels ran the story of the Vice President and all
help broke.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Loose new material that directly contradicts President Bush's claim that
he was out of the loop in the Iran Contra affair.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
George schultzen I posed Bill Casey Etmees, and Vice President
Bush favored.
Speaker 8 (29:13):
Campaigning in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 9 (29:15):
Clinton quickly interrupted his schedule to pounce on the revelations
in the Weinberger indictment.
Speaker 7 (29:19):
Secretary Weinberger's notes clearly show that President Bush has not
been telling the truth when he says he was out
of the loop.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
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
(29:48):
that he had never been inconsistent and denying that Weinberger's
notes on the meeting were in any way revelatory.
Speaker 8 (29:54):
We have a call from Little Rock.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
During an appearance on Larry King Live, Bush was confronted
on the air by one of Clinton's top aides.
Speaker 8 (30:03):
From George Stephanopolis.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Oh no, oh, no, guy ahead.
Speaker 16 (30:07):
He has Governor Clinton's campaign manager. This is an open
phonet ess and he dialed in directly.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
It was lucked in at number.
Speaker 19 (30:13):
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.
Speaker 8 (30:30):
Yeah reply now.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
These hearings, Bush suggested that Walsh had included VP favored
in his indictment in order to help the Clinton campaign.
Speaker 8 (30:46):
Are you implying or saying that Walsh did that today politically?
Speaker 4 (30:50):
No, I'm asking, isn't it strange? I'm not implying anything.
Let the American people. Let the American people be the judge.
Speaker 10 (30:58):
Let's the American people.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Four days later, Bush lost the election.
Speaker 14 (31:01):
The American people have voted to make a new beginning.
Speaker 17 (31:06):
A landslide victory ushers in the Clinton era Today Wednesday, November.
Speaker 6 (31:11):
It's been a humiliating defeat for Republicans.
Speaker 10 (31:13):
The landslide was in the electoral votes.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Maybe you didn't read the election returns.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
It didn't work out quite the way we wanted it.
Speaker 6 (31:20):
He told his supporters He's going to finish the job
with style.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
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
(31:44):
anti Reagan, anti Bush. Independent Council's Office.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Here's John Q. Barrett again.
Speaker 11 (32:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
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
(32:37):
in the tank for Clinton.
Speaker 16 (32:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
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.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
The old one.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
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
(33:31):
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 Muller.
In the end, Barr decided Muhller had it right. Instead
of appointing a new Independent Council, he referred the Walsh
(33:52):
matter to the Criminal Division. Around the same time, the
Independent Council's 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 advance warning that
the superseding indictment of Casper Weinberger was coming.
Speaker 12 (34:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
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.
(34:44):
In a Virginia FBI field office. Agents asked Mary Belcher
if she was personally acquainted with Clinton's communications director George Stephanopolis.
How did it come to be that FBI agents were
asking about this?
Speaker 12 (34:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
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.
Speaker 12 (35:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
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
(36:08):
kept a diary. A few months earlier. One of Bush's
administrative assistants had found the 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
(36:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Some top Republicans are urging Bush to retaliate by pardoning
former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and other Iran Contra defendants.
Speaker 17 (37:02):
I think what happened to Cap Weinberger is one of
the most disgusting things I have seen in fourteen years
in Washington.
Speaker 8 (37:09):
He should do.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
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
(37:34):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:51):
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
(38:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
I was wrong.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 10 (38:39):
The Christmas Eve bombshall from President Bush today.
Speaker 13 (38:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
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.
(39:14):
That left Casper Weinberger, who was still awaiting trial. Bush's
sixth pardon went to him.
Speaker 13 (39:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
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
(39:54):
he held nothing back.
Speaker 10 (39:55):
Prosecutor Walsh responded today, saying the pardons undermined the principle
that no man is above the law.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
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.
Speaker 5 (40:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
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.
Speaker 13 (40:41):
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.
Speaker 11 (40:50):
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
(41:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
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.
Speaker 10 (41:36):
Is it remotely conceivable there could be a prosecution of
President Bush?
Speaker 5 (41:41):
I could not comment on that. He's a subject now
of our investigation.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
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.
Speaker 11 (42:05):
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
(42:27):
inconceivable that one would be charged with a federal crime.
Almost inconceivable.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
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.
Speaker 10 (42:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
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
(43:30):
called himself one of the few people who knew the details,
most of what followed was pretty anodyne. In a press conference,
Walsh emphasized that Iran Contra had not been the work
of a few rogue operators, that it had come from
the top. Even if Reagan himself wasn't fully engaged in
the details of what was happening.
Speaker 5 (43:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Walsh reserved his harshest criticism from Bush's decision to issue pardons.
Speaker 5 (44:13):
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
(44:35):
certain laws and statutes in the course of it was
not because of any possibly self centered purpose.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
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
(45:10):
leader of the Sandinistas, Don yell Or Tega, had been
voted out as president of Nicaragua and succeeded by the
US back candidate Violetta 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
(45:32):
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 first, two thousand and three, just
(45:53):
over ten years after Bush issued as Christmas Eve Pardons,
Oliver North was scheduled to set sail for the Caribbean.
North was hosting a week long celebration billed as the
Freedom Cruise to mark the twentieth anniversary of the US
invasion of Grenada. As you heard in our first episode,
Grenada was taken over by hardline communists during a coup
(46:14):
in nineteen eighty three. 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
(46:35):
of the Freedom Cruise. Other special guests would include Ronald
Reagan's Attorney General, Ed Meese, but at the last minute
Oliver North had to cancel his trip target Iraq.
Speaker 17 (46:47):
Here is Tom Brokaw.
Speaker 9 (46:49):
Good evening everyone.
Speaker 8 (46:50):
It has been an evening of tense expectations.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
The forty eight hour doubline for Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
President George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq.
Speaker 14 (46:59):
Saddam Hussein will be stopped.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
For the past two years, North had been hosting a
show on Fox News called War Stories, about extraordinary events
in military head.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
I'm Oliver North.
Speaker 7 (47:11):
Welcome to War Stories.
Speaker 11 (47:13):
This is the deck of the USS New Jersey now permanently.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Now Fox News was sending North to the Middle East.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Now Oli.
Speaker 12 (47:20):
North joins us on the phone.
Speaker 11 (47:21):
He is on the east bank of the Tigris River
looking into the city.
Speaker 15 (47:24):
In fact, the camera's probably panning around towards oli.
Speaker 12 (47:27):
Oli, of course, is with the.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
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.
Speaker 15 (47:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
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.
(48:19):
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,
follow the link in the show notes. Fiasco is a
production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries.
(48:40):
The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline kaplan, Ula Kulpa,
and me Leon Mayvock. Our editor was Camilla Hammer. Our
researcher was Francis Carr. Additional archival research from Caitlin Nicholas.
Our music is by Nick Silvester. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at
Chips and y Audio, mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayphiel
(49:04):
and Johnny Vince Evans. Copyright council provided by Peter Yassi
at Yassi Butler PLOC. Thanks to Brian Bonnell, Carrie Baker,
Melissa Kaplan, TC Winter, Alice Gregory, Marcella Nadel, Caitlin Phillips,
ed Winsteed, Ryan Swikert, Mark Feeney, Shane Harris, Malcolm Burne,
Joe Weisberg, Jacob Weisberg, Stephen Fisher, Ed Claris, Alexia Badott,
(49:29):
Jessica Hanson, Evan Bell, Lisa de Leone, 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 Sachs, Jamie Lynes, Becky ver
Haey and everyone at Luminary. Thanks also to Sam Graham, Felsen,
(49:50):
Kotzikam Kova, Sirea Shockley, and Sam Lee Special thanks to
Alexandra Garretton, Sarah Bruguer and the whole team at Pushkin Industries,
and thank you for listening,
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