Insanity or Vanity? The Case Against Lawrence Wlash
Brock, David
INSANITY OR VANITY? THE CASE AGAINST LAWRENCE WALSH BY DAVID BROCK ANGRY, VINDICTIVE, AND FLAT-OUT WRONG, THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL WHO INVESTIGATED IRAN-CONTRA REMAINS THE BEST ARGUMENT FOR...
...Silberman, by contrast, had strong ties to the Reagan foreign-policy team, and to George Shultz in particular...
...He decided to try to implicate Reagan in this conspiracy by making an example of Weinberger...
...Lee Liberman, a founder of the new Federalists and now Assistant Counsel to the President, examines all candidates for federal judgeships for ideological purity...
...Hogan dismissed the obstruction charge again a few weeks after the election...
...Evidently, Mr...
...There ain't no such rail" in Hogan's courtroom, Bennett told me...
...It hurt him rather than helped him...
...Army's non-solution: "This means lighter, less explosive hand grenades" so in future either all grenades will be of this less-explosive type, or the quartermaster will stock both "female" and "male" hand grenades, presumably color coded for identification purposes in pink and powder blue, respectively...
...To my knowledge a "female" base-plate was never developed...
...The senators make clear in the opening sentence that the issue they deemed unimportant was not the fact of Weinberger's knowledge, which the committee knew he had, but rather the timing of that knowledge: "You have asked us, as Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Iran-Contra Committee, whether if Secretary of Defense Weinberger learned of arms shipments to Iran in the fall of 1985 as opposed to a later time that would have been material for the Committee's purposes...
...Silberman says he has no memory of ever having had a shouting match with Judge MacKinnon, who is now deceased...
...The opinion makes clear that Silberman would have overturned the North convictions on several other grounds in addition to the Kastigar issue (for example, he wrote that North should have the right to call Reagan at trial, which hardly endeared him to his presumed masters in the White House...
...Walsh portrays the two senators who headed the Iran-contra investigating panel, Daniel Inouye and Warren Rudman, as pawns in an initiative by Bennett to pressure Walsh into leaving Weinberger alone...
...But, the issue is why you have the intellectual dishonesty to claim to wear Conservative colors and yet publish such gross intellectual dishonesty on a scale never seen in print before...
...DAVID F. CRAIGMILE Lake Forest, Illinois Fighting Like a Man Tom Bethell's excellent article, "Our Meter Maid Military" (TAS, July 1997), contains two examples where the inequality of physical strength between male and female personnel causes serious problems that have not been answered in a forthright manner by the Army...
...All criminal convictions against the two were overturned by the federal courts in 1991, and Walsh is therefore at pains to account for this disastrous turn of events...
...When Weinberger refused to give testimony about Reagan's role that would have been inaccurate, Walsh indicted Weinberger on one count of obstruction, as well as four other counts of perjury and making false statements...
...At issue were several motions to dismiss the five-count indictment that Walsh had brought against former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger...
...I n one of the very few memorable scenes in independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's otherwise languid Firewall, his 531-page memoir of the Iran-contra investigation, Walsh describes a critical hearing in the Washington courtroom of U.S...
...Anyone with Bennett's status in the bar is going to have friends among the city's judges...
...District Judge Gerhard Gesell, who presided at the first North trial, and who eventually threw out the entire case after concluding that witnesses in fact had been contaminated by the immunized North testimony...
...Silberman, for his part, says that, far from "despising" Gesell, he had always "found Gary an engaging fellow" outside the court, and had occasionally socialized with him in Georgetown, where the two judges were neighbors...
...It may be that Walsh picked up something about the Federalist Society and Liberman from news accounts generated by the Roger Minor article...
...According to Boyden Gray, the circumstances were exactly the opposite of what Walsh describes...
...For instance, he claims that William Clark, the former The American Spectator • September 1997 77 (Continued from page 12) ing Roosevelt's actions taken to try and get into World War II without following our Constitution...
...The more conventional interpretation for what went wrong in the North prosecution—that Walsh, convinced he would ultimately prove a grand scheme that would implicate 28 September 1997 • The American Spectator Reagan, blew it when he failed to indict North on destruction of documents before North gave congressional testimony—is glossed over...
...The Federalist Society, however, has never taken a position on any political or even legal issue, unlike the ABA, which Walsh once headed, and from which Silberman resigned precisely because the organization insisted on taking political positions on such questions as abortion...
...We could not prosecute everyone who had hidden his notes...but we could prosecute one of these individuals...
...The appellate court decision in the North case required the prosecution to prove in court that North's immunized congressional testimony had not influenced the witnesses in his trial...
...He is susceptible to political and media pressures to "produce" in a results-oriented process...
...The American Spectator • September 1997 Though he could never prove it, Walsh convinced himself that several of the highest-ranking members of the Reagan Cabinet obstructed justice...
...Emphasis added.] Never have I read a more forthright admission of the true facts, by any devotee of Roosevelt, than this one...
...judge Wald, by contrast, would have upheld the North convictions...
...Why would Bush know anything about Weinberger's notes...
...Not surprisingly, Firewall is being marketed by W.W...
...Although the organization was not openly partisan, its dogma was political," Walsh writes...
...Gray, however, says, "we had absolutely no indication from Bennett that he would subpoena Bush...
...Senate, in which he described "the strategy we had on what to do if we came across an impeachable offense [by Reagan...
...HALL Palm Bay, Florida I am highly offended by the article written by Tom Bethell in the July American Spectator issue in which he states more women 78 September 1997 • The American Spectator...
...More importantly, on his main point, his attribution of the Kastigar portion of the ruling to Silberman with the amiable Sentelle merely signing on, Walsh is in error...
...I found it appalling that the two senior leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Iran-Contra would have allowed themselves to be sucked into signing such a silly letter without at least talking to me first, but Inouye and Rudman had always wanted to stop at North and Poindexter...
...R.E...
...I n treating the Federalist Society, a group of Republican, Democratic, and libertarian lawyers interested in judicial restraint, Walsh rolls out the heavy rhetorical artillery...
...But this is something that Walsh can't bring himself even to consider, for, in the conspiracy theory within a conspiracy theory that Walsh has spun, he needs to sustain the idea of a cover-up as an excuse for not finding any underlying crimes...
...But, if it's the former, please send me my check back...
...If he reports that there is no evidence of illegality, he is deemed to have failed...
...According to the Society, about loo judges of every conceivable stripe have spoken before the group...
...Walsh's contention is that he lost these cases because the judges retained their partisan affiliations, even after they went on the bench, and he accuses the Bush administration of fostering this by insisting on an ideological litmus test for its judicial appointees...
...When I asked Walsh for proof of this claim, he identified the counsel office staffer who had allegedly made the statement about the Federalist Society litmus test as "Lee Livenger...
...The central obstruction charge, however, was thrown out for lack of evidence in September 1992 by D.C...
...does not feel obliged to follow the looser standards of scholarship and factual accuracy required of historians or journalists...
...Moreover, even if the charge about the Bush nominating process was true, Walsh uses it to explain the actions of Silberman and Sentelle, both of whom were appointed by Reagan, not Bush...
...According to Walsh, Silberman's overriding concern in deciding the North case was his own prospects for a Supreme Court nomination from President Bush...
...Terzian feels enough time has passed by that the American liberal can now admit the truthfulness of the conservative position that Roosevelt took America into World War II through stealth, profound dishonesty, and was truly guilty of impeachable offenses...
...After speaking with Silberman about his absence, Robinson suggested to his fellow judges that "they talk about baseball" rather than politics at lunch, but the judges continued talking politics and Silberman stayed away...
...What "monumental" hypocrisy...
...With this mindset, I am sure that Terzian supported the attacks upon Richard Nixon, and probably believes Clinton's behavior is wonderful...
...One obvious answer might be that Walsh had insufficient evidence to prove such crimes...
...Indeed, a prosecutor with unlimited time, unlimited resources, and only one case can be a dangerous thing...
...He wasn't my mouthpiece," Gray says...
...Silberman might well have been nominated but for his role in the North decision...
...that Silberman "despised" the trial judge in the North case, Gerhard Gesell...
...government tried to trade arms to Iran for the release of American hostages and diverted part of the proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras—was a vast criminal conspiracy involving President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, CIA Director William Casey, Attorney General Edwin Meese, Weinberger, and others...
...Rudman was never close to Bush...
...in 1988, in fact, he supported Bob Dole against Bush for the GOP nomination...
...Thus as a contribution to the record of the Iran-contra affair, Firewall proves to be an extremely unreliable document...
...This is true, so far as it goes, but Walsh fails to mention that the reason Silberman was nixed undercuts his whole theory about Silberman's motives...
...Given these facts, Walsh's explanation for why he lost the North and Poindexter cases evaporates like a snowflake on the Potomac...
...District Judge Thomas Hogan...
...Had he been able to pierce the "fire-wall," Walsh suggests that most of the Reagan men would have gone to jail, and Reagan himself would have been impeached...
...Bennett apparently had no difficulty persuading Gray that pardoning Weinberger would solve Bush's problems," Walsh writes...
...Walsh then goes on to impugn the senators' motives...
...To clinch the case that he was up against a stacked appeals court panel, Walsh writes that he was "especially troubled that one of White House counsel Boyden Gray's assistants had openly declared that no one who was not a member of the Federalist Society had received a judicial appointment from President Bush...
...The scandal was an issue in two presidential elections, giving voters ample opportunity to pass judgment on high Republican officials whose truthfulness and public accountability had been seriously called into question...
...Walsh portrays Caspar Weinberger as the big fish that slipped away...
...DAVID BROCK is an investigative writer for TAS...
...As another of Weinberger's lawyers argues a motion, Bennett is described by Walsh as "sprawled at the back corner of his counsel table, his girth protruding through his open coat and both arms extended along the rail that separated the well of the court from the spectators—a possessive posture that reminded me of the nineteenth-century Thomas Nast cartoons of Boss Tweed...
...But it is far easier to retroactively throw around charges of bias than it would have been for Walsh to have supplied proof of it at the time...
...T hough Walsh doesn't intend it, his chilling tale of the indictment brought against Weinberger is a case study in what's wrong with the institution of the independent counsel...
...Walsh wrongly portrays Silberman as the author of the appeals court decision, and he alleges that Silberman might have been biased in adjudicating the matter...
...According to published reports, when President Bush received the list, he crossed Silberman's name out...
...He argues that top Reagan administration officials successfully erected a "firewall" of obstruction and "outright lies in sworn testimony" that thwarted his investigation and hid the truth...
...Walsh believes that Iran-contra—in which, in case you've forgotten, the U.S...
...When I asked Walsh about this, he returned to his mantra of "court sources" and declined to elaborate...
...Maybe, it's good news and bad news...
...Given Walsh's distinguished career in the law—as U.S...
...Ultimately, Walsh's case that the Weinberger pardon was the "last card in the cover-up" rests on his contention that the pardon spared Bush from being called to testify about his own role in the affair, which, as Walsh imagines it, would have exposed Bush's lies...
...His description of why he chose Weinberger suggests that factors other than the law were motivating him...
...In the shifting court majority, Sentelle proved to be the key vote in overturning the conviction because he agreed with Silberman on the immunity issue...
...I checked the Rudman book, and it is convincing on the question of whether he was prepared to go higher than North and Poindexter in pursuing possible criminal wrongdoing...
...Example #2— It was "pointed out that two-women teams are not strong enough to carry a stretcher with a 170 lb...
...Walsh, however, misstates what was in the letter...
...Attorney General Richard] Thornburgh and I met with the President and we all decided, with a collective sigh of regret, that the timing made it too politically hot...
...In an interview, Walsh insisted that the shouting match had occurred, but he refused to tell me how he knew of it or provide any details...
...Walsh's misrepresentation of the letter allows him to make the claim that the Iran-contra committee was complicit in the conspiracy to pin Iran-contra on North and Poindexter while adopting a see-no-evil policy with respect to higher-level officials like Weinberger...
...Rudman, who had a reputation in the Senate for being fiercely independent of his party while serving the public interest, would be a peculiar choice in casting any cover-up...
...It is well known that no federal judicial appointment is made without her imprimatur," Minor wrote...
...Even (Continued on page 77) 29 Brock (Continued from page 29) more peculiar is Walsh's identification of Rudman as "George Bush's ally from New Hampshire...
...THE CASE AGAINST LAWRENCE WALSH BY DAVID BROCK ANGRY, VINDICTIVE, AND FLAT-OUT WRONG, THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL WHO INVESTIGATED IRAN-CONTRA REMAINS THE BEST ARGUMENT FOR GETTING RID OF THE STATUTE THAT SET HIM OFF ON HIS YEARS OF FRUITLESS AND POINTLESS PURSUIT OF RONALD REAGAN AND COMPANY...
...Bennett notes that he regularly plays poker with several Supreme Court justices, but that did him no good in the Paula Jones case...
...During recent Senate committee hearings, a four-star general testified that the Army is "better off" with women in the ranks...
...Sentelle, a protégé in North Carolina of Senator Jesse Helms, was still relatively new in town when the decision was rendered...
...deputy attorney general under President Eisenhower, a partner in the New York law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, president of the American Bar Association, and as a federal judge — it comes as something of a jolt that the burden of his book comes almost entirely to rest on the very serious, but wholly unsubstantiated, charge of "judicial partiality" as the crucial component in sustaining the "firewall...
...These are only two examples of physical strength problems, whereas hundreds could be provided...
...A decade after he was appointed to head a criminal investigation of the Iran-contra affair, a sprawling prosecutorial effort in which he spent seven years, $47 million, and left no stone unturned, but is nonetheless widely viewed as a spectacular failure, Lawrence Walsh is still a man on a mission...
...See...
...Coincidentally, on July 20,199o, the day the North convictions were overturned by the appeals court, William Brennan announced his resignation from the high court...
...Let me quote the entire series of statements by Terzian to avoid any misunderstanding: As president, FDR was one of the few Americans who clearly recognized the menace of Hitler in the years leading up to World War II, and was frustrated by the nation's resolute neutrality, reflected in the laws Congress readily adopted...
...As the highest-ranking member and most arrogant member of the lot, Weinberger was the obvious choice...
...Walsh calls the ruling "unprecedented," ignoring the case law Hogan provides in the opinion...
...In any event, the charge—prominently touted in the Nation's review of Firewall—is certainly false...
...The problem with this claim is that a real cover-up involves real crimes...
...He also notes that, on balance, Pincus's stories wereunhelpful in the effort to win a pardon for Weinberger...
...Nothing came of that effort either...
...It is mind boggling in its honesty...
...Gray says he was not the source of that story and was not in a position to speak authoritatively on Walsh's prosecutorial intentions anyway...
...Gesell is also deceased...
...Leading Weinberger's legal team was the famed super-lawyer Robert Bennett, who not only got the critical obstruction of justice charge against Weinberger dismissed by Hogan, but ultimately checkmated Walsh by winning a presidential pardon for his client...
...He then called back to say the aide was actually "Lee Liberman" and told me that she had been quoted in a newspaper account, which he could not identify...
...The lead book-jacket blurb, by national security reporter Robert Parry of Newsday, proclaims: "If there is any justice, Walsh will be remembered as one man who told the people the truth...
...The bad news is you did publish this trash, but the good news is that you, too, believe that both sides need to be exposed in your magazine...
...If the latter, I feel better about my recent contribution to your foundation, even thoughyour view of this subject of fairness is naive and foolish...
...Walsh's decision to write Firewall is itself questionable...
...or heavier...
...That Walsh appears to believe this raises a doubt about his judgment, and possibly provides a clue to his own political leanings...
...When the political class abdicates and turns over such controversies to special prosecutors, the prosecutors tend to become almost evangelical in pursuit of their calling...
...One of the more egregious errors in the book comes in Walsh's discussion of talks held with Weinberger's lawyers while his office was considering indicting Weinberger for obstructing the congressional inquiry by concealing his notes of high-level discussions about the Iranian initiative...
...The closest I could come to finding anything in the public record about the Federalist Society and the judicial nominating process was a 1992 article by Roger Minor in the American University Law Review...
...This may instill a certain desperation...
...Walsh is compelled to cast Silberman in the leading role because it is Silberman's pedigree, not Sentelle's, that gives his conspiracy theory even the remotest plausibility...
...Acknowledging that he and his team of prosecutors were unable to prove great illegality (indeed, no one was even charged, much less convicted, of breaking the law in relation to either the arms sales to Iran or to the contra diversion), Walsh has set out to explain for the history books why he failed...
...As an adviser in the 1980 Reagan campaign, he had dealt on the periphery of the Iranian hostage issue...
...On the day John Poindexter was deposed by committee counsel, Rudman stayed in his Senate office, chain-smoking, waiting to place the call to Baker if Poindexter implicated Reagan...
...Anyone familiar with the workings of the circuit court knows that Silberman does his own writing and that his opinions (even when issued per curiam) bear his distinctive rhetorical stamp...
...For a prosecutor, whose normal operating principle is to prosecute or shut up, this borders on the unethical...
...Bush, in fact, only created problems for himself by pardoning Weinberger, as Walsh made clear in his press conference following the issuance of the pardon...
...body...
...Maybe he fooled the senators, but he won't fool an unforgiving enemy in the real world...
...Silberman has, as Walsh reports, given speeches as a judge before the Federalist Society, but so has liberal Judge Abner Mikva, whom Walsh praises for his "helpful perspective...
...The description of Bennett's "possessive posture" is meant to evoke for the reader the Tammany Hall–style political corruption that Walsh believes underlies both the unfavorable ruling of Judge Hogan and George Bush's pardon of Weinberger...
...It does, however, illustrate nicely Walsh's insistence throughout the book on blaming everyone but himself for his mistakes...
...These sections of the book are all-important to Walsh's theory of a "firewall," and yet also at variance with the established facts...
...Court sources, court sources, court sources," he said agitatedly...
...Walsh's evidence on this point is limited solely to the fact that Judge Silberman stopped having lunch in the district judges' lunchroom...
...In the New York Times Sunday book review, John Judis gently faulted aspects of Walsh's conduct of the investigation, but nonetheless praised the book as "a useful record of the scandal and its aftermath...
...Worse yet, as the story of the imaginary courtroom rail suggests, Walsh The American Spectator • September 1997 25 WALSH'S DECISION TO WRITE FIREWALL IS ITSELF QUESTIONABLE...
...T hroughout Firewall, Walsh specializes in attributing motives to those he sees as his enemies...
...Walsh also claims that intermediary Clark suggested to Walsh that Weinberger might be willing to plead nob contendere, but sources close to the discussions between Clark and Walsh say that Walsh actually suggested this as a face-saving way to get a weak case settled...
...Walsh rarely provides sources for his assertions in the text of Firewall, and the book contains no source notes...
...Norton & Company as "the definitive account of the most dangerous breach of presidential authority since Watergate...
...One former aide did have a vague recollection that Roger Minor, a Reagan-appointed New York appellate judge who was considered by President Bush for a Supreme Court nomination when William Brennan resigned, may have privately suggested that the influence of the Federalist Society had been the reason why the White House passed him over...
...The book has been received in the same light...
...Boyden Gray told me that the Bush-appointed judges with a Federalist Society connection were a "clear minority...
...You have been flying under false colors...
...Reagan two major "cover-up" prosecutions were against Reagan National Security Adviser John Poindexter, who was convicted on five felony counts of lying and obstructing justice, and Oliver North, the retired Marine lieutenant-colonel at the center of the scandal, who was found guilty on three counts of obstruction, destroying documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity...
...But Liberman (now Lee Otis) assured me she has never been quoted saying that all Bush nominees were Federalist Society members...
...Had he cared to check, this should not have been difficult for Walsh to divine...
...I spoke with several members of the Bush counsel's office, including Gray, and no one had any idea what Walsh could possibly be referring to...
...Army's non-solution: "The task has therefore been redefined as one that requires four people...
...What was wrong in Iran-contra was policy...
...According to court sources, Sentelle, not Silberman, wrote the portion of the per curiam decision dealing with the immunity issue...
...If I may: During WWII I can tell you the poor guys in the 8 imm mortar platoon kept a very accurate record of whose turn it was to carry the artillery base-plate on the next move...
...Change a sentence in the manual and the problem goes away...
...I W alsh's story of how Weinberger got pardoned is replete with misstatements...
...They might as well put a rule in the manual that prohibits getting wounded if you are 140 lbs...
...and that Silberman is a member of the Federalist Society...
...It was issued per curiam, or by the court, which the court sometimes does when it is divided and more than one judge works on a decision...
...The unsigned opinion of the circuit court overturning the North convictions on the crucial immunity or so-called Kastigar issue was joined by Reagan-appointed judges Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle, with Judge Patricia Wald dissenting...
...Evidently this is what happened to Walsh, still brooding a decade later that his accomplishments were not understood or appreciated...
...Scott Armstrong, a legal journalist and well-known critic of government secrecy, went further, flatly endorsing Walsh's central claim in the Washington Post's "Book World": "...the cover-up holds too long and too firmly for Walsh to prosecute its participants...
...UNBURDENED BY THE EVIDENTIARY STANDARDS OF THE LEGAL PROCESS, THE BOOK AFFORDS HIM A PLATFORM FROM WHICH TO HURL ALL MANNER OF UNSUBSTANTIATED ALLEGATIONS AGAINST THOSE HE COULDN'T CONVICT...
...Example #1—"Most women can't throw [a hand grenade] outside its blast radius...
...It turned out that Weinberger had provided access to his notes in a library archive, but Walsh's men overlooked them...
...ACCORDING TO THE SOCIETY, ABOUT 100 JUDGES OF EVERY STRIPE HAVE SPOKEN TO THE GROUP...
...uncomfortable with the discussions about politics that Gesell and other judges liked to carry on...
...There wasn't the remotest indication he would be called as a witness...
...Walsh filed a supplemental indictment on the eve of the November election, a decision which opened Walsh up to charges of partisanship and the timing of which Walsh wrongly attributed to Hogan...
...Walsh could have moved to recuse Hogan if, as he now claims, the relations between Hogan and Bennett had given him cause for concern...
...Walsh is also wrong about Silberman's "antipathy" towards Gesell, which Walsh contends would have been grounds to have had Silberman recused from the case had Walsh only known of it at the time...
...Walsh announced that by sustaining the "cover-up," Bush was now a target of his investigation...
...It is to Roosevelt's great credit that he ultimately defied Congress and misled the American people, by engaging in an "undeclared war" in the North Atlantic, secretly bolstering the British and pro-yoking the Germans—actions which would lead to impeachment nowadays...
...If Rudman was playing politics with the Iran-contra investigation, he might have helped Dole by scarring up Bush rather than protecting him...
...In discussing the Weinberger case, Walsh extends his charge of bias to blacken the reputation of another federal judge, and he then describes in detail the alleged skullduggery surrounding the Weinberger pardon, which he deems the "last card in the cover-up...
...It reminded me of the communist front groups of the 1.94os and 195os, whose members were committed to the communist cause and subject to communist direction but were not card-carrying members of the Communist Party...
...Reagan national security adviser and Weinberger friend, approached him in an effort to get him to dismiss the charges against Weinberger...
...Unburdened by the evidentiary standards of the legal process, the book affords Walsh a platform from which to hurl all manner of unsubstantiated allegations of illegality against high public officials whom he was unable to convict in court...
...In the effort to nail Reagan, Walsh pressured Weinberger to "recollect" things about Reagan's role...
...But his most offensive charge is that Hogan favored Weinberger because the judge is a friend of Bennett's...
...Among the many difficulties with this self-serving scenario is a very basic one...
...Of course it is one thing to attribute power to a White House aide with ties to the Federalist Society, as Minor does, and quite another to embellish this into a wild claim that membership in the Society was a prerequisite for judicial appointment in the Bush administration...
...The case was sent back to U.S...
...According to Walsh, the two senators wrote a letter to Bennett "saying that Weinberger's knowledge of the 1985 shipments through Israel had not been material to the select committee's inquiry...
...According to Aubrey Robinson, then chief judge of the district court, Silberman stopped lunching with the lower court judges because he was 26 September 1997 • The American Spectator SILBERMAN HAS, AS WALSH REPORTS, GIVEN SPEECHES AS A JUDGE BEFORE THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY, BUT SO HAS LIBERAL JUDGE ABNER MIKVA, WHOM WALSH PRAISES FOR HIS "HELPFUL PERSPECTIVE...
...When I asked Senator Rudman about this, he reminded me of a long section in his memoir, Combat: 12 Years in the U.S...
...In explaining Silberman's supposed biases for ruling as he did, Walsh offers three specific pieces of evidence: that Silberman had "gotten into a shouting match with Judge George MacKinnon, the chief of the panel that had appointed me [independent counsel...
...If in fact the evidence showed that Ronald Reagan knew about the diversion itself, we were prepared to stop the hearings, notify Howard Baker [then Reagan's chief of staff] and refer the matter to the House Judiciary Committee...
...An "overly bright and cynical" judge, of course, might have found a way to issue a more politically palatable ruling in positioning himself for a Supreme Court seat...
...And so the reasonable observer may wonder why, given Walsh's palpable zeal, the "firewall" itself didn't yield successful criminal convictions on obstruction of justice or perjury charges at the highest levels...
...District Court Judge Thomas Hogan...
...He's making a mountain out of a molehill," Robinson says of Walsh...
...Walsh accuses Boyden Gray of leaking a story to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus that Walsh was considering indicting former President Reagan as a way of generating political support in Republican circles for the Weinberger pardon...
...In a sarcastic afterword to the section on the North prosecution, Walsh writes: "The next time a seat on the Supreme Court became available, Boyden Gray included Laurence Silberman's name on a short list of four possible nominees for the president to consider in filling the vacancy...
...According to Walsh, Clark argued that mounting legal bills would force Weinberger to sell his summer home...
...Weinberger, however, did not then own a summer home...
...A few lines later, Bennett is seen again, "still lounging against the rail...
Vol. 30 • September 1997 • No. 9
