''Does this picture make me look guilty?''

[Octafish]

44. That's not what Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh said.

IRAN CONTRA AT 25: REAGAN AND BUSH 'CRIMINAL LIABILITY' EVALUATIONS

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 365

Posted - November 25, 2011

"Memoranda on Criminal Liability of Former President Reagan and of President Bush"

EXCERPT...

On the role of George Herbert Walker Bush, Mixter reported that the Vice President's "knowledge of the Iran Initiative appears generally to have been coterminous with that of President Reagan." Indeed, on the Iran-Contra operations overall, "it is quite clear that Mr. Bush attended most (although not quite all) of the key briefings and meetings in which Mr. Reagan participated, and therefore can be presumed to have known many of the Iran/Contra facts that the former President knew." But since Bush was subordinate to Reagan, his role as a "secondary officer" made it more difficult to hold him criminally liable.
Mixter's detailed report on Bush's involvement does, however, shed considerable light on his role in both the Iran and Contra sides of the scandal. The memorandum on criminal liability noted that Bush had a long involvement in the Contra war, chairing the secret "Special Situation Group" in 1983 which "recommended specific covert operations" including "the mining of Nicaragua's rivers and harbors." Mixter also cited no less than a dozen meetings that Bush attended between 1984 and 1986 in which illicit aid to the Contras was discussed.

Despite the Mixter evaluations, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh continued to consider filing criminal indictments against both Reagan and Bush. In a final effort to determine Reagan's criminal liability and give him "one last chance to tell the truth," Walsh traveled to Los Angeles to depose Reagan in July 1992. "He was cordial and offered everybody licorice jelly beans but he remembered almost nothing," Walsh wrote in his memoir, Firewall, The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up. The former president was "disabled," and already showing clear signs of Althzeimers disease. "By the time the meeting had ended," Walsh remembered, "it was as obvious to the former president's counsel as it was to us that we were not going to prosecute Reagan."

The Special Prosecutor also seriously considered indicting Bush for covering up his relevant diaries, which Walsh had requested in 1987. Only in December 1992, after he had lost the election to Bill Clinton, did Bush turn over the transcribed diaries. During the independent counsel's investigation of why the diaries had not been turned over sooner, Lee Liberman, an Associate Counsel in the White House Counsel's office, was deposed. In the deposition, Liberman stated that one of the reasons the diaries were withheld until after the election was that "it would have been impossible to deal with in the election campaign because of all the political ramifications, especially since the President's polling numbers were low."

In 1993, Walsh advised now former President Bush that the Independent Counsel's office wanted to take his deposition on Iran-Contra. But Bush essentially refused. In one of his last acts as Independent Counsel, Walsh considered taking the cover-up case against Bush to a Grand Jury to obtain a subpoena. On the advice of his staff, however, he decided not to pursue an indictment of Bush.

Among the first entries Bush had recorded in his diary (begun in late 1986) was his reaction to reports from a Lebanese newspaper that a U.S. team had secretly gone to Iran to trade arms for hostages. "On the news at this time is the question of the hostages," he noted on November 5, 1986. "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details. This is one operation that has been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak."

SOURCE w/links: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB365/