[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 25, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: January 25, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                        IRAN-CONTRA FINAL REPORT

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, with the public release of the Iran-Contra 
final report, the Lawrence Walsh witch-hunt is officially over. But it 
will never be over for the innocent people whose reputations were 
nonetheless recklessly, and irreparably, damaged by Mr. Walsh in his 
final report.
  Apparently, Mr. Walsh spared no one, trashing Cabinet Secretaries and 
personal secretaries alike. As an article appearing in yesterday's Wall 
Street Journal explained: ``Dozens of examples from the  *  *  *  final 
report show Mr. Walsh stomping on his victim's rights. Publishing the 
report itself is profoundly unfair  *  *  *  the final report contains 
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of  *  *  *  unproven allegations, even 
including excerpts of grand jury testimony.''
  And, Mr. President, that is the point: When the ``Not Guilty'' 
verdict is read or indictments are not brought, a prosecutor normally 
picks up his briefcase and moves on to the next case. Unlike Mr. Walsh, 
he does not spend 8 months, at taxpayer expense, memorializing his own 
efforts and smearing the very people he failed to convict or even 
indict.
  Last year, during the Senate debate over the Reauthorization of the 
Independent Counsel Act, I offered an amendment restricting the scope 
of final reports issued by future independent counsels. This amendment, 
which was designed to ensure that future independent counsels will not 
resort to Walsh-style smear tactics in their final reports, was adopted 
by the Senate on a bipartisan basis. It is my hope that the House of 
Representatives will adopt a similar amendment when it considers the 
reauthorization measure, perhaps as early as next month.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Wall Street Journal 
article be inserted in the Record immediately after my remarks.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 24, 1994]

                      Damning News in Walsh Report

                          (By Michael Ledeen)

       Most of the working press, hoping as they had for seven 
     years that Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh 
     would somehow pull a fluffy crime out of his empty hat, 
     treated Mr. Walsh's final report as old news, and in one 
     sense they were right.
       After Mr. Walsh's election-eve indictment of Caspar 
     Weinberger (the statute of limitations having quite clearly 
     expired), after his tendentious ``interim reports'' that 
     slandered his targets without enabling them to reply, after 
     his utterly unethical public statements about the ``guilt'' 
     of one or another target, the special prosecutor expired with 
     a long sigh. There was no evidence to justify any further 
     prosecutions. He even had some kind words for Ronald Reagan: 
     He meant well; he thought he was advancing the national 
     interest.
       Yet there is news in the final report. For starters, there 
     is a drastically revised portrait of Secretary of State 
     George Shultz, previously enthroned as the lone teller of 
     truth of the Reagan cabinet.


                            A Hero Dethroned

       It appears that Mr. Shultz systematically misled Mr. Walsh 
     and Congress about the extent of his knowledge throughout 
     Iran-Contra. The final report contains dozens of excerpts 
     from notes and memorandums prepared by Mr. Shultz's two top 
     assistants that show that many State Department officials 
     were very well informed, indeed, about matters that Mr. 
     Shultz had sworn the department in general and he in 
     particular had been kept in the dark about. ``Shultz . . . 
     ultimately acknowledged that his testimony had been 
     incorrect,'' the report says, but Mr. Walsh decided not to 
     prosecute the former secretary of state because he couldn't 
     prove ``beyond a reasonable doubt that his testimony was 
     willfully false.''
       Yet he did prosecute Mr. Weinberger for allegedly doing 
     precisely what Mr. Shultz had done, and the evidence 
     presented against Mr. Shultz is, if anything, more copious 
     than that against Mr. Weinberger. The choice was probably 
     dictated by personal rapport and political calculation: Mr. 
     Shultz was the darling of Capitol Hill, while Mr. Weinberger 
     was a pricklier personality; Mr. Shultz was cooperative with 
     Mr. Walsh and admitted false testimony, while Mr. Weinberger 
     defiantly held his ground.
       A second bit of news is a return to one of Mr. Walsh's 
     original theories about Iran-Contra: that among Mr. Shultz, 
     Mr. Weinberger, Donald Regan, John Poindexter, William Casey, 
     Ed Meese and Robert McFarlane there was a great conspiracy to 
     prevent the special prosecutor and the American people from 
     learning what had really happened. It is a hilarious notion, 
     evidently written by Mr. Walsh's left hand, for the right 
     hand has given us copious evidence that the would-be 
     conspirators--at the very moment Mr. Walsh says they were 
     plotting--were actually making feverish efforts to get each 
     other fired. It requires a hyperactive imagination to believe 
     that such antagonisms could be sublimated in the creation of 
     an Iran-Contra coverup, and then sustained for seven years.
       The third headline concerns George Bush, or rather Mr. 
     Walsh's newfound obsession with him. After years of shadowing 
     Mr. Reagan, and hinting darkly that he'd eventually be 
     harpooned, Mr. Walsh suddenly gave up the chase and shifted 
     targets. Whatever the explanation, the shift bespeaks a 
     certain capriciousness in Mr. Walsh's decision-making 
     process, rather than the relentless investigatory rigor he 
     would have us believe he employed.
       But most of the news is about Mr. Walsh and his team. 
     Appended to Mr. Walsh's account are more than 1,000 pages of 
     responses from persons named in the report (or, given the 
     nature of Washington, from their lawyers)--a victim's guide 
     to how we subverted our own legal system.
       Much of this is brand-new, for it comes from the Indians, 
     not from the chiefs: from secretaries and assistants and 
     other midlevel civil servants. No one is too small to become 
     a target of Mr. Walsh's cruelty; he accuses them all of crime 
     or sin. While stressing he does not have enough to warrant 
     indictment or ensure conviction, he puts his black spot on 
     them.
       Their responses constitute a bloodcurdling catalog of Mr. 
     Walsh's viciousness, unethical behavior and astounding 
     incompetence. For example, both of Mr. Weinberger's 
     secretaries, Pentagon professionals for more than 20 years, 
     were accused of lying. Both denied it. One of them, Thelma 
     Stubbs Smith, was hauled in front of a grand jury, where one 
     of Mr. Walsh's men accused her of lying. Shocked, she denied 
     it, and her lawyer demanded a correction. None was made. 
     Later, Mr. Walsh's lawyer asked to interview her without her 
     lawyer being present; the request was categorically denied. 
     Three days later, Mr. Walsh's lawyer showed up at her door at 
     8 asking to talk to her. Her husband sent the rogue away.
       Meanwhile, the other secretary, Kay Leisz, was informed 
     that she was now a ``subject'' of Mr. Walsh's investigation. 
     The report accuses her of false testimony; her lawyer's 
     response shows the opposite an says: ``It appears that the 
     only rationale that [Mr. Walsh's office] might have . . . is 
     that she may not have said what they wanted to hear.''
       The same kinds of vengeful actions were taken against 
     Samuel Watson, one of Mr. Bush's assistants. Mr. Watson was 
     accused of pronouncing the magic words ``Contra resupply'' as 
     a possible subject for discussion at a meeting in the vice 
     president's office. He didn't remember it, and denied any 
     knowledge of the supply of military equipment to the Contras. 
     Mr. Walsh, somehow convinced that Mr. Watson was covering up 
     for Mr. Bush, proclaims him a liar.
       Mr. Watson's lawyer, former special prosecutor Jacob Stein, 
     observed that ``it was not for illegal acts themselves that 
     the [special prosecutor] sought Mr. Watson but rather . . . 
     [for] his inability years later to remember events as the 
     [special prosecutor] wished him to,'' Mr. Stein delicately 
     observes that such behavior ``violates the fairness of our 
     American sense of right and wrong.''
       The entire case against CIA station chief Joe Fernandez was 
     a joke. Mr. Walsh bungled the handling of classified 
     information so badly that not even an appeal from the Justice 
     Department to the court could save him. Typically, Mr. Walsh 
     thanked Justice by blaming them for the screwup. His key 
     witness to the charge of false testimony against Mr. 
     Fernandez had already told the Office of the Independent 
     Counsel that his own memory was ``tainted'' by the public 
     testimony of others, thereby making him a useless source. Mr. 
     Walsh's lawyers attempted to browbeat him into testifying 
     that there was no ``taint.'' And lawyers' replies show that 
     several of the statements Mr. Walsh characterized as false 
     were in fact true.
       Strikingly, given Mr. Walsh's propensity for accusing folks 
     of withholding information from him, there are several cases 
     where Mr. Walsh was chastised by federal judges for failing 
     to provide the defense with exculpatory material. In the 
     Weinberger and Fernandez cases, defense attorneys had to use 
     pretty rough language to get Mr. Walsh's team to comply, 
     and--in one of those odd moments that make Iran-Contra such 
     an unlikely tale--it was only when Oliver North's lawyers 
     insisted on it that Mr. Walsh realized he had dozens of 
     cartons of Mr. North's files in his possession.
       Such testimony--and there are dozens of examples--shows Mr. 
     Walsh stomping on his victims' basic rights. Indeed, 
     publishing the report is itself profoundly unfair if not 
     illegal. From time immemorial it has been considered 
     unethical for prosecutors to make allegations against persons 
     they do not indict, yet the final report contains hundreds, 
     perhaps thousands, of such unproven allegations, even 
     including excerpts of grand-jury testimony.
       Grand-jury proceedings have always been secret, in part to 
     protect people the grand jury decides not to indict. Mr. 
     Walsh bizarrely proclaimed that such requirements do not 
     apply to special prosecutors and stuck the testimony in his 
     report. The special court that theoretically oversees the 
     work of special prosecutors rejected his theory but permitted 
     the report to appear anyway, on the feeble grounds that very 
     little of the material was really secret anyway and a lot of 
     people--especially journalists--would be angry if the court 
     didn't publish it.


                             Cowardly Court

       It was a cowardly thing for the court to do, and the three 
     judges obviously knew it, for they took pains to indicate 
     their sympathy for those unindicted people besmirched by the 
     report. Had they been made of sterner stuff, the judges would 
     have instructed Mr. Walsh to delete all accusations against 
     unindicted people, and to remove all references to grand-jury 
     testimony. Such a document would have fulfilled Mr. Walsh's 
     obligation to submit a final report and also maintained the 
     quaint notion that Americans are held innocent unless proved 
     guilty. We learned some years ago that Mr. Walsh was 
     contemptuous of such archaic legal notions; it was bad news 
     that the special court wouldn't defend them either.

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