As the scandal unfolded a year later, Reagan and his top aides gathered in the White House Situation Room the day before the November 25 press conference to work out a way to protect the president from impeachment proceedings. "Visiting hours are on Thursdays," Weinberger stated. In a dramatic meeting on December 7, 1985, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger told the President that "washing transaction thru Israel wouldn't make it legal." When Reagan responded that "he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages," Weinberger suggested they might all end up in jail. missiles were transferred to Iran from Israel during the first phase of the operation in 1985-because Attorney General Meese had told the president the 1947 National Security Act could be invoked to supersede the AECA.Īs the Iran operations went forward, some of Reagan's own top officials certainly believed that the violation of the AECA as well as the failure to notify Congress of these covert operations were illegal-and prosecutable. He found that it would be difficult to prosecute Reagan for violating the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) which mandates advising Congress about arms transfers through a third country-the U.S. The criminality of the arms sales to Iran "involves a number of close legal calls," Mixter wrote. On Reagan, Mixter reported that the President was "briefed in advance" on each of the illicit sales of missiles to Iran. Mixter (now a partner in the Washington law firm of Morgan Lewis), and represented preliminary conclusions on whether to prosecute both Reagan and Bush for various crimes ranging from conspiracy to perjury. The criminal liability studies were drafted in March 1991 by a lawyer on Walsh's staff, Christian J. Source credit: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library Ronald Reagan with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Regan discussing the President's remarks on the Iran-Contra affair, Oval Office. "This particular detail was so dramatic, so sexy, that it might actually-well divert public attention from other, even more important aspects of the story," North wrote, "such as what the President and his top advisors had known about and approved." The focus on the diversion, as Oliver North, the NSC staffer who supervised the two operations wrote in his memoirs, was itself a diversion. The posting comes on the anniversary of the November 25, 1986, press conference during which Ronald Reagan and his attorney general, Edwin Meese, informed the American public that they had discovered a "diversion" of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the contra war, thus tying together the two strands of the scandal which until that point had been separate in the public eye. The documents were obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the National Security Archive for the files compiled during Walsh's six-year investigation from 1987-1993. Twenty-Five years after the advent of the "Iran-Contra affair," the two comprehensive "Memoranda on Criminal Liability of Former President Reagan and of President Bush" provide a roadmap of historical, though not legal, culpability of the nation's two top elected officials during the scandal from the perspective of a senior attorney in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. Bush chaired a committee that recommended the mining of the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983, according to previously secret Independent Counsel assessments of "criminal liability" on the part of the two former leaders posted today by the National Security Archive. Washington D.C., Novem– President Ronald Reagan was briefed in advance about every weapons shipment in the Iran arms-for-hostages deals in 1985-86, and Vice President George H. The Iran-Contra Scandal, 1991 Confirmation Hearings, and Excerpts from new book Safe for Democracy The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contrasīy Scott Armstrong, Malcolm Byrne, Tom Blanton, and the National Security Archive (New York: Warner Books, 678 pp.)ĭocuments Spotlight Role of Reagan, Top Aides The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified Historyīy Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne (New York: The New Press, 314 pp.)
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