Lawrence Walsh, Grand Inquisitor

...it reinforces his confidence in his own righteousness, thereby entitling the man to circumvent as he sees fit...

...One T day, in conversation with General John Vessey (then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Weinberger was told that there was a story going around to the effect that the Saudis were giving money to the 50f course, Walsh himself could conceivably be investigated by Congress for false statements, for example his declaration of Oklahoma City as his "work station...

...The bags were checked in at curbside at Los Angeles International Airport, but the satchel never arrived at its destination...

...a stern, gaunt, righteous face with a tinge of the Torquemada, the sort of face that matches the title: Special Prosecutor of Iran-Contra...

...The claim that Fernandez had lied to the IG staff at CIA rested on the testimony of a single person, and that person had already told Walsh that he was unable to testifysolely on the basis of his interviews with Fernandez...

...Herter suggests that it might be desirable to pass some new laws to strengthen U.S...

...On occasion, classified material was included in letters, which subsequently had to be retrieved and classified or redacted...

...It is a picture he clearly enjoys, for Judge Lawrence E. Walsh has cultivated the image of a severe, relentlessly painstaking investigator and prosecutor, a judicial Captain Ahab obsessively engaged in a seek-and-destroy mission against the great white whale of Reaganism...

...At the same time, he was circumventing income tax in New York, where he declined to pay taxes on over $200,000 of pension annuities cashed in from his old law firm...

...In hand-to-hand combat with the best defense attorneys in Washington, he was at a disadvantage...

...Such a career not only testifies to the man's talent and energy, and to his secure place in the upper regions of the East Coast nomenklatura...

...The seafaring image is a suitably evocative one, for Lawrence Walsh has sailed through many stormy waters in the pursuit of his target, but he is not Ahab...

...They did neither, and Walsh advanced, the media probing behind enemy lines for weaknesses, and a massive congressional force in readiness in the rear...

...But such general language is always a coveryour-ass maneuver by legislators, who know how to put clear limits on the executive branch when they are serious...

...This outcome would therefore have strengthened the hand of anyone inclined to take action in this case...

...Why go to court with such a case...

...The danger was there 200 years before Lawrence Walsh took the helm, and in seeking to understand what he did and why he did it, we must constantly remind ourselves that the institution itself is an exceedingly dangerous one, and that Congress knowingly designed it that way on the occasion of Iran-contra...

...When he traveled on behalf of well-endowed clients like AT&T, Lawrence Walsh was not content with a single hotel room, but took three or four or even five, surrounding himself with soothingly empty rooms on both sides, and above and below, so that his sleep would not be disturbed (and his enemies would be unable to listen to his ruminations...

...Walsh's hordes had never looked at the stuff...

...And it is altogether understandable, given the man's list of accomplishments: partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, arguably the pinnacle of the New York legal establishment...

...The act had stipulated that the Special Prosecutor should observe official prosecutorial guidelines whenever possible, but Walsh made it clear early on that he would not be troubled by such annoyances...

...During a discussion of a motion to quash a subpoena, the Walsh team identified a covert agent by name...

...It seems as if, convinced that he was in the presence of the wicked, Walsh was determined to use the awful weapons at his disposal—weapons that could ruin a man who chose to defend himself against the Special Prosecutor—as a means of punishment...

...in August 1987, Walsh announced the first of many novel theories when he said he had an obligation to prosecute if he found "probable cause" to believe a crime had been committed...

...The known direct costs aresomewhere between $30 and $40 million, but Terry O'Donnell, one of Oliver North's lawyers, believes the bill may run as high as $100 million: . massive teams were constituted at CIA, NSA, DoD, and State merely to respond to the insatiable appetite for documents of the Independent Counsel...

...Some, confronted with the agonizing alternatives of defending their honor at the cost of financial ruin or pleading guilty to some penny-ante charge, copped a plea...

...history...

...We tend to forget that there were grave misgivings about the creation of Special Prosecutors (or, as they understandably prefer to be called, Independent Counsels), precisely because of 21 take a dim view of polygraphs, but government investigators give them greater weight...

...Highly sensitive documents were delivered to receptionists at defense counsels' offices instead of being placed in special secure facilities...

...attorneys), after a three-year stint as district judge in New York...

...This was a dramatically lower threshold than the Justice Department's, which required that the prosecutor believe that an unbiased jury would convict if the case went to court.4 But this was only the beginning...

...It should not surprise us that, as Special Prosecutor, Walsh created the largest prosecutorial force in the history of the Republic, with more than seventy lawyers, more than fifty agents, and six offices spread across the country...

...Were the power of judging joined . . . to the executive power," he wrote in passionate defense of the separation of powers in the Constitution, "the judge might behave with all the violence of an oppressor...

...This led O'Donnell to ask: "What does that do to the time-honored principle of 'need to know...

...This was denied by a Walsh security officer, who took a polygraph test on the matter and passed it.2 The case is still under investigation at the Justice Department, and Bush's Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger has termed Walsh's behavior a "flagrant violation" of security regulations...

...After three years trying to convince New York State of his righteousness, the Judge once again claimed all possible advantages, first accepting an amnesty that enabled him to pay his debt without penalty, and then going back to court to argue he shouldn't have to pay anything after all...

...In 1980 alone, the chemical firm paid Walsh and his team $3.3 million in fees and expenses...

...M oreover, there was at least one good reason why Walsh, for all his experience and knowledge, and all his righteousness, was poorly suited to the job...

...page21 problem and if the person were innocent of the original allegation—or any other—but were found to have resisted the investigation in some way, he would be prosecuted for that...

...In other words, if the President wanted to do something he was obliged to check first with Congress...

...income taxes, which he paid—along with a fine—only after his circumvention was uncovered by a congressional investigation and reported in the newspapers...

...touching on at least some matters of substance, had on its own obtained "independent counsel" for [the secretary], and was paying substantial sums of money to provide [the secretary] not only with counsel, but also with a comfortable apartment and other financial needs for her and her child . These words prefigure the very Special Prosecutor who reimbursed himself and his associates according to his own notion of equity, who conjured up new applications of criminal law with which to charge the Iran-contra defendants, and who has frequently failed to observe the rules and regulations that bind most mortal men and women engaged in the enforcement of laws...

...Even after so many counts were thrown out on CIPA grounds, and even the handful of convictions were reversed because of the "taint" of immunized testimony by North and Poindexter, he refused to give up the ship, when a normal prosecutor, held to traditional standards of fairness, would probably have decided the fight was in vain...

...Consider, as well, our defense team: $1 million a year to supply a vault in which the defense team could work, $500,000 a year in rent, and $250,000 times 2 for security contracts, armed guards and double-padlocked doors [and] Department of Justice support...

...The original act was bad enough, but with the 1987 amendments, the Office of the Independent Counsel took on the awesome aspects that Madison foresaw if the judicial and executive functions were combined...

...Justice Department officials are properly reluctant to discuss an ongoing investigation, but it is known that the matter came up in a discussion with a Justice official held by Senior Judge George MacKinnon, a member of the panel that appointed Walsh (but which, by statute, plays no role in the activities of Walsh's office...

...Quite aside from the casual disclosure of government secrets in court, regulations require a security escort when transporting classified documents and immediate reporting of any loss...

...Fernandez denied it, and asked to present the jury with information about his activities in the field...

...In his early submissions to the court, Walsh argued that North could be found guilty "even if he technically compl[ied] with all relevant statutes and regulations," because the defendants chose to hide their activities from Congress to ensure that Congress would not have the opportunity to consider whether to close any loophole...

...Once the government refused to declassify the material, Fernandez could not fairly defend himself, and the case was thrown out...

...and he repeatedly failed to abide by the terms of the Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA), which required him to ask the intelligence community to look at the information he planned to introduce, and tell him if they would tolerate such secrets being blown in the courtroom...

...he is instead a sly, quirky, righteously rigid individual who has long been ready to stretch the rules to the limit and has not hesitated to go beyond the boundaries of the law itself in order to achieve his objectives...

...The pattern long predates his anointment as Special Prosecutor...

...During closed court discussions of which classified information would be introduced at North's trial, one of Walsh's full-time press aides was invariably present...

...Everyone who has lived to middle age, and has conducted his affairs outside a monastery, has done something he should not have done, or failed to do something he should have done, so we are all vulnerable to the kind of open-ended, sky's-the-limit investigation that only the Special Prosecutor can unleash...

...A s of last March, some thirty of his employees had run up more than five thousand hours of unjustified excess leave, and Walsh has paid himself some $78,000 above the authorized rate for per diem expenses, which were themselves suspect because he had declared his "work station" to be Oklahoma City rather than D.C...

...Sooner or later he'll find something wrong...

...This maneuver had the additional advantage of permitting him to charge the government for his (unauthorized, first-class) travel between Oklahoma and Washington, and temporarily enabling him to neatly circumvent the annoying D.C...

...Finally, there were signs that the legendary Walshian attention to every jot and tittle was slipping: in the runup to the North trial, he somehow failed to notice that he was in possession of some eighty (80...

...he had read Fernandez's immunized congressional testimony, and had marked up his interview notes with material taken from the testimony...

...chief negotiator at the Paris Peace Talks...

...When he was selected in December 1986, Walsh quickly assembled secretarial and administrative staff without waiting for the FBI to perform its routine name checks on all those employees who would be handling classified documents...

...Listen to a younger Lawrence Walsh, vintage 1960, acting Attorney General of the United States in the waning months of the second Eisenhower Administration, discussing with Christian Herter and Allen Dulles the best way to get a grip on the vast numbers of Americans and Cubans moving back and forth following Castro's seizure of power in Havana...

...To their dismay, the investigators in the FBI's Washington Field Office found that several of the Walsh employees had arrest records, some of a nature (narcotics violations, for example) that would normally preclude granting security clearances...

...that defense counsel had engaged in discussions about a case with a confidential secretary for opposing counsel without her employer's knowledge, had made ex parte contact with the court's law clerk...

...Anything based on such testimony was inadmissible in court, and when the witness insisted that he could not distinguish between the immunized and non-immunized information, Walsh's man got extremely agitated, and, raising his voice and flailing his arms, insisted that the witness testify, using only the non-immunized testimony...

...Nothing has been done to Walsh, or—if you accept his version of the facts—to his security people...

...Fernandez was accused of lying about his activities, both to investigators from the Tower Commission and to a member of the CIA's Inspector General staff...

...This is now, when the 81-year-old version holds his successors to super-rigorous standards, even when national security is at stake...

...One should perhaps not linger too long on such details, save to notice their contribution to the atmosphere of lofty superiority and noblesse oblige that has long accompanied the words and actions of Lawrence Walsh...

...A man worth such a treasure does not hesitate to take every advantage on behalf of his cause, and Federal Appeals Court Judge Patricia Wald would later chastise Walsh and his colleagues in the case for hiring the secretary of the opposing lawyer: There was evidence...

...control over the travelers, but Walsh dismisses such legal niceties: Walsh pointed out that there was some point at which you simply had to circumvent the law and that what was important was that the INS be given a plausible basis for doing so.1 But that was then, when 49-year-old Lawrence Walsh was trying to advance the national security interests of his country...

...Walsh was made of sterner stuff: unable to get convictions for their actions, he attacked the Reagan men for things they had said...

...The two main counts against North conspiracy to defraud the government, and theft of government property (regarding the profits of the "enterprise")—were dismissed on CIPA grounds, as were the main counts against Joseph Fernandez, the CIA station chief in Costa Rica, the first member of the clandestine services to be indicted in U.S...

...When he set up shop in Washington in the early 1980s on behalf of a chemical company he was defending against charges that one of its medicines caused birth defects, he took two floors at the Watergate at $85,000 a month, justifying it in part on security grounds...

...Thus, the intended victims of the Special Prosecutor are scrutinized for the slightest infraction, but whenever Lawrence Walsh is annoyed by official regulations, for example on things like pay and travel, he simply ignores them, since (in the words of his Olympian response to a recent Government Accounting Office inquiry into the operations of his office) "he does not believe that these requirements apply to independent counsels as a matter of law...

...Having completed the interview, Walsh gave his luggage (including the satchel) to his staff, instructing them to check the bags onto his flight back to Washington...

...His other extravagances are, as the GAO has admitted, virtually impossible to calculate...

...Never before had an executive branch official been prosecuted for making unsworn false statements to Congress, but it became Walsh's favorite charge.5 he indictment of Weinberger is paradigmatic...

...president of the American College of Trial Lawyers and of the American Bar Association itself...

...As Queeg subjected his crew to a humiliating investigation to find the real or imagined pilferer of a quart of frozen strawberries, so Walsh tried to break his intended victims through an ordeal by investigation...

...The dramatic disappearance of such sensitive material must have shaken even the Special Prosecutor, but he failed to report the event for several weeks, and when he did, he suggested to the amazed security officers at the Department of Justice that the entire procedure had been approved by his security personnel...

...Anyone circumventing such strictures would, at an absolute minimum, have his security clearances suspended, and might very well be placed on extended leave pending the outcome of the investigation...

...To make such information public would have gravely compromised national security (how could the CIA expect to find cooperative foreign officials after such revelations...

...Some were subsequently removed, others had their access to secret documents restricted, but others remained in place...

...At a Bar Association prayer breakfast (than which few more desperately necessary activities can be conceived...

...If any normal official of the executive branch had behaved in this manner, he would find himself in deep trouble...

...So-called "redacted pleadings" from Walsh contained classified information instead of having it deleted...

...and both the district court and two appeals courts ruled that the information was exculpatory...

...All they had to do was to require completion within a specified period (with provisions for extension where justifiable), and put a ceiling on spending...

...New York State was not persuaded...

...But he soon ran into difficulty with those annoying CIPA requirements...

...His own righteousness thereby confirmed, Walsh sailed on...

...This would show up in a series of remarkable missteps, two of which give a sense of the whole: he brought indictments against CIA officer Joseph Fernandez in the wrong venue, thereby risking the entire case...

...He is Queeg...

...He might not get a conviction, but he'd make them pay nonetheless...

...Last July, when he traveled to California to interview former President Reagan, Walsh carried along a satchel of classified documents...

...branch, and that there was no basis for the claim that there was anything wrong with the President asking other countries to help the contras...

...Just as Queeg told his men that his ship was governed "by the book," but was quick to rewrite the record when his own inattentiveness sent his vessel around in a great circle to cut a towline, Walsh insists on unprecedented standards for others, particularly when they are on the opposite side of the courtroom, but is very broadminded concerning his own behavior...

...alsh backed off, and promised to pursue his victims on the basis of violating specific laws, rules, and "enactments...

...Walsh appealed twice, trying to find a way to "sanitize" the information by substituting numbers and phrases for countries and persons, but the court wouldn't buy it, and the case died...

...his impatience with annoying security regulations T has been one of the leitmotifs of Walsh's activities: • CIA cables, complete with highly sensitive markings (known as "slugs," invaluable for anyone who wishes to forge such documents), were publicly released as "Exhibits" during trials, in violation of security requirements...

...where he spent the bulk of his working hours...

...T hat Walsh has remained immune from punishment, indeed from even the slightest official reprimand, testifies not only to the gravitas of the man himself, but also to the immense power of his office...

...He had extremely limited prosecutorial experience, confined to his two years in Washington as deputy attorney general (where he oversaw the army of U.S...

...There was another reason that a different man mighthave been better suited for the task, but it was purely theoretical: the 1987 amendments had required that the Special Prosecutor be the sort of person who would conduct the enterprise in a "prompt, responsible and cost-effective manner," language that probably reflected congressional concern with the bills Walsh had run up in his first year of operation...

...But even if he had gotten to court, our Queeg was sailing into a gale...

...boxes of files—North's office files, to be precise—that were finally uncovered by a discovery request by the defense...

...This is not a tragic hero who is gradually perverted by his quest and finally sucked into the sea of evil once within reach of his nemesis...

...This preposterous assertion of legislative hegemony enraged the State Department's legal counsel, Abraham Sofaer, and he, along with counsel from the White House and the Pentagon, challenged Walsh's views, pointing out that secrecy was a traditional and legitimate element of foreign policy, that foreign policy was explicitly placed in the hands of the executive 4 "Probable cause," as Judge Laurence Silberman caustically observed in his ruling declaring the Ethics in Government Act unconstitutional (only to be reversed 7-1 by the Supreme Court), "is that low standard of confidence thought sufficient to support the issuance of a search warrant or an arrest warrant...

...Certainly that reflected his own view of such matters, as his insouciance in handling classified material amply demonstrates, but the government couldn't possibly have been expected to agree...

...In case after case, the government was unwilling to permit Walsh's targets to defend themselves by introducing highly classified information, driving Walsh to enraged diatribes against "phony secrets...

...This last may appear of little import, but it is of a piecewith the most spectacular example of Walsh's cavalier treatment of government secrets...

...The information would have revealed the location of all CIA stations in Central America, and also the details of several secret operations—including activities involving officials of foreign governments...