Amateurism in the White House

The Iran- contra scandal has exposed the blunders and chicanery that flowed from the Reagan Administration’s efforts to evade public scrutiny by conducting U.S. foreign policy through private parties. Now this week’s testimony before congressional investigating committees by a young White House lawyer named Bretton G. Sciaroni offers further evidence of the slapdash and delusive way the Administration approached fundamental legal questions about what it was up to.

Sciaroni is counsel for the presidentially appointed Intelligence Oversight Board, which is supposed to review the legality of intelligence activities. It was he who wrote the 1985 legal opinion saying that the National Security Council staff was exempt from Congress’ ban on giving U.S. military aid to the Nicaraguan contras. That finding has ever since been the basis for claims, by President Reagan and others, that the NSC’s activities did not violate the law.

It might be thought that an opinion of such basic importance would have been reached only after the most incisive and scrupulous study. It was not. Sciaroni says that he spent no more than five minutes questioning Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the National Security Council staff about possible illicit behavior, and that North misled him. Further, Sciaroni was denied documents directly relevant to his study. Sciaroni had passed the Bar examination, after four earlier failures, little more than a year before he drafted his opinion. A more experienced lawyer would have asked tougher questions and demanded more thorough access. It seems a fair conclusion that this is precisely why Sciaroni was chosen to provide a legal justification to prop up the NSC’s dubious activities.