Ex-Prosecutor Alleges Dole ‘Hypocrisy’

Former Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh attacked GOP challenger Bob Dole for “hypocrisy” Tuesday for criticizing President Clinton’s refusal to rule out pardons for Whitewater figures.

In excerpts from a forthcoming book and in a public statement, Walsh said Dole was “the foremost advocate” in urging then-President Bush four years ago to grant a Christmas Eve pardon to former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger before his trial on cover-up charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin, in a written response, said that “with all due respect to Judge Walsh, his understanding of the issue appears to have been clouded by the opportunity of a little self-promotion and moneymaking.”

“Judge Walsh failed to note that prior instances did not involve sitting presidents who were active participants in investigations and who stood to personally gain from promised pardons.”

In fact, however, Walsh argues in his book that Bush’s pardon of Weinberger and five others a month before his presidency ended raised questions as to “whether the president had granted pardons to protect himself.” Walsh apparently refers to speculation that Weinberger’s trial might have revealed an active Bush role in the scandal, which Bush repeatedly denied.

Walsh’s comments revisit a feud with Dole that began during the Bush administration. In Walsh’s last two years as independent counsel, he was sharply criticized by Dole, then the Senate minority leader, for the length of his investigation and its soaring costs, which ultimately ran to more than $37 million.

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Walsh, describing himself as a lifelong Republican, said in a written statement that Dole’s criticism of Clinton on the pardon issue “gives the voters a remarkable view of Dole’s hypocrisy.”

Dole has criticized Clinton for failing to rule out pardons for convicted Whitewater defendants James B. and Susan McDougal, his former business partners in the ill-fated Whitewater Development Corp. In a television interview last month, Clinton was asked if he would grant such pardons. He replied that he would let normal criminal justice processes take their course.

Drawing a distinction between Whitewater and the Iran arms scandal that he investigated for seven years, Walsh’s statement said that Dole “attempts to exploit President Clinton’s connection with long-ago business transactions that had ended before he became president, while Dole himself had urged pardons for crimes of constitutional dimension committed in office by a Reagan Cabinet officer.”

At the time of his pardon, Weinberger was a month away from a trial on perjury charges as the highest-ranking former official to be charged in the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved the secret sale of arms to Iran to help fund U.S.-backed anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua.

In the short excerpts from his forthcoming book, “Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up,” Walsh declares: “I did not think that George Bush, who seemed to pride himself on his character, would be the first president to use his pardon powers in a cover-up.”

Walsh says in his book that he lost all respect for Dole in the 1992 pardons.