[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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