Poindexter’s Lawyers Seek to Curb North

Attorneys for former presidential assistant John M. Poindexter sought Wednesday to head off potentially damaging testimony by former White House aide Oliver L. North, scheduled to be the government’s first witness in Poindexter’s Iran-Contra trial.

Defense lawyers mounted their effort after U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene impaneled seven women and five men to serve as jurors in the trial of former President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, who resigned in 1986 as the Iran-Contra scandal became public.

North, once a top aide to Poindexter, is expected to be asked by prosecutors to tell jurors about seeing Poindexter tear up a key document, a presidential finding that authorized after the fact a shipment of U.S. Hawk missiles to Iran in November, 1985. That shipment began a series of events that led to Reagan’s worst foreign policy debacle.

Poindexter, in nationally televised congressional testimony in 1987, admitted destroying the document at a time when congressional committees were seeking all evidence about the controversial sales of U.S. arms to Iran.

But prosecutors for independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh need to establish the fact independently. Poindexter’s admission before Congress cannot be used against him because he received limited immunity for that testimony.

However, Poindexter’s lawyers told Greene that while North acknowledged that he saw his boss destroy a document, he did not learn that it was a presidential finding until he heard Poindexter’s congressional testimony. Thus, they argued, it would be illegal for testimony based partly on Poindexter’s immunized account to reach the jury indirectly.

Greene took the matter under advisement, saying he would rule by this morning.

Poindexter is charged with five counts of conspiracy, making false statements and obstructing Congress, partly based on his destruction of Reagan’s belated finding.

Greene excused the newly impaneled jurors from the courtroom while lawyers debated ground rules for the testimony of North, who was convicted last May.