From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: George Bush pardons criminals
Date: Thu,  7 Jan 93 03:53:01 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world
  <1993Jan4.160441.28047@eff.org> <markp.726164495@dragonfly.wri.com>
  <1993Jan7.003223.11309@eff.org>

I found this article in the LA Times a few days ago and thought I'd share 
it with those who missed it.  Teddy Kaldis and other Defenders of the Reagan
Faith should rejoice in this obviously "un-biased" account. :-)

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	Copied without permission from:       
	The Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1992

	WALSH'S CRIME: PROSECUTION BY DEFAMATION

	By Elliott Abrams
	Special to the Los Angeles Times

(Abrams was assistant secretary of state during the Reagan administration
and now is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington.)

	   The president's constitutional power to issue pardons was
employed to defeat a vicious, partisan special prosecutor. The wonder is
that so many "civil libertarians" willfully blind themselves to
independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's own abuses, as if they believed - to
paraphrase Barry Goldwater - that extremism in the prosecution of
Republicans is no vice.
	   Consider the recent behavior of Walsh's office. This past fall,
he hired a bitterly partisan new prosecutor, James Brosnahan of California,
who brought a new indictment of Caspar Weinberger almost on election eve.
That new count was thrown out by the first court that reviewed it, so we
know it was bad lawyering. But much worse, from the thousands of pages of
Weinberger notes, the new indictment quoted a few phrases about President
Bush. Is there anyone who really believes this was done without partisan
motives?
	   When the pardons were issued on Christmas Eve, Walsh was home in
Oklahoma while his staff was running the show in Washington. Now he has
stepped into the act again, engaging in wholesale slander. While he has
never brought a single charge against Bush, Walsh now goes on television to
talk of Bush's "misconduct" and "cover-up." Though Weinberger has never
been convicted of any crime, Walsh says Weinberger "lies as well in press
conferences as he does when he testifies before Congress."
	   While Robert McFarlane, Alan Fiers and I were forced to plead
guilty to the misdemeanor "withholding information from Congress," Walsh
now says we were guilty of the felony "lying to Congress." He never even
charged - much less convicted - any of us of that very different crime.
Every first-year law student knows a prosecutor must work in the courtroom,
not through defamation. Professionalism, if not personal honor, should keep
Walsh from hurling irresponsible accusations.
	   Nor is this Walsh's first brush with illegal behavior. He and
his chief aide, Craig Gillen, avoided District of Columbia income taxes for
years and were hit with back tax bills and penalties by the D.C. government
in 1992. Walsh and Gillen declared their home towns to be their "work
stations" so that they could get extra pay for each day on the job in
Washington and flights home on the weekends at government expense. Those
actions are of a piece with Walsh's attitude: Laws are made to trap
Republican officials, not to restrain the prosecutors attacking them.
	   In my case, as I explain in "Undue Process" (Free Press),
Walsh threatened to prosecute me for statements I made on the Evans and
Novak TV show (so much for the First Amendment) and, citing potential
conflicts, refused to deal with the lawyers I hired, forcing me to use
others (and so much for the Sixth Amendment). The Walsh abuses are a civil
libertarian's nightmare, but the silence of most civil liberties groups is
deafening.
	   One can only hope that the three-judge panel that appointed
Walsh will do its duty and rein him in or fire him.
	   What of Walsh's excuses for his conduct? He now insists that the
entire case would have changed, and might have led to the impeachment of
President Reagan, if he had only had Weinberger's notes. But in 1987, Walsh
received Secretary of State George P. Shultz's notes, and these told the
story of the arms-for-hostages debate within the Reagan administration. As
Shultz recorded, he and Weinberger opposed what they saw as a direct trade
of arms for hostages, while Vice President Bush did not. Nothing in the
"new" Weinberger notes adds to or contradicts these facts, which Walsh
has known for five years. What's more, he had access to Weinberger's notes
for a year and half before he even looked at them.
	   The truth is that Walsh did not pursue real crimes, nor did he
"follow the money," as the Watergate prosecutors did. Instead, he
followed an incredible conspiracy theory designed to pull in every
high-ranking Reagan-era official and impeach Reagan - and to secure Walsh's
place in the history books. He will be in there now, all right, for the
longest, costliest and least fruitful special prosecution ever.
	   Next year, Congress will consider whether to resurrect the
special prosecutor law. Our country does not need such an invitation to
prosecutorial abuses. We managed to handle both Watergate and the Spiro
Agnew case without such dangerous mechanisms. At bottom, Iran-Contra was a
fight between the executive and legislative branches over foreign policy
power, in which leaders of both branches committed abuses. The use of the
criminal justice system to attack one side in that political struggle is an
abuse of the criminal process. The special prosecutor system should end
with Walsh's own intemperate, unprofessional outbursts.

(End of Article)

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NOTE: 	Elliot Abrams pleaded guilty on October 7, 1991, to misdeameanor
	counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagan
	administration's efforts to aid the Contras.  He was sentenced to
	two year's probation and 100 hours of community service.
	Mr. Abrams is one of the group of men pardoned by George Bush in
	the latest indictments concerning the Iran-Contra affair.

--Louis
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc