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Christmas Eve Pardons: How Bush Buried the Iran-Contra Reckoning
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On December 24, 1992, George H.W. Bush signed pardons that ended the Iran-Contra prosecution before it could reach the highest levels of the Reagan administration. Lawrence Walsh called it the completion of a six-year cover-up — and the man who signed the pardons was himself a subject of the investigation.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before George Herbert Walker Bush signed those pardons on December twenty-fourth, nineteen ninety-two, the Iran-Contra affair looked like it might finally produce real accountability. Six years of investigation, criminal convictions, mountains of evidence.
To understand what those pardons meant, you have to understand where the legal proceedings stood at the end of nineteen ninety-two. Lawrence Walsh had been investigating Iran-Contra since nineteen eighty-six.
Weinberger had been Reagan's Secretary of Defense. He had opposed the arms sales to Iran from the beginning, a fact he made publicly known.
Weinberger wasn't the only one. Bush's Christmas Eve pardon covered five other figures: McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clair George.
There's a detail that Walsh found significant, and it deserves attention. Bush himself had been a central figure in the Reagan administration throughout Iran-Contra.
To be precise about what the pardons did and didn't do, it's worth understanding how the legal situation had developed. Walsh's investigation had run from November nineteen eighty-six through the early nineties.
Bush's pardon decision needs to be understood as a political act, because that's what it was. He issued the pardons on Christmas Eve, a moment chosen for maximum news-cycle burial.
The pardon power in the American system is essentially unlimited for federal offenses. A president can pardon anyone, for any reason, at any time, with no legal requirement to explain the decision.
When Walsh's investigation finally concluded in nineteen ninety-three, he filed a lengthy final report. It detailed the crimes committed, the obstruction of investigators, the document destruction, the false statements to Congress, and what he believed was a systematic effort by senior officials to insulate the highest levels of the administration from accountability.
Presidential pardons end prosecutions. They don't resolve history.
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