I was surprised. I had heard it was possible, but I couldn’t conceive that President Bush would do it. It’s hard to find an adjective strong enough to characterize a president who has such contempt for honesty-and such a lack of sensitivity to the picture of a president protecting a cabinet officer who lies to Congress. Using the pardon power to help a friend and other associates from the Reagan administration shows a disdainful disregard for the rule of law. It gives the impression that people in high office with strong political connections can get favored treatment. And I think that is a terrible impression for the president of the United States to give.
It looks that way. But it’s a silly assumption that this could be buried. It makes one wonder whether the president understood the magnitude or the gravity or the horror of it. Look at it: the president of the United States pardoning a cabinet associate two weeks before trial.
We were fully confident. This is about as simple a case as one could imagine. It was based on Secretary Weinberger’s own notes.
We’ll look into his failure to supply his diary notes in a timely fashion-and any other matters as to which he may have had knowledge.
The Weinberger trial would have exposed the effort (by senior Reagan administration officials) to protect President Reagan from a confrontation with Congress. We could have showed they concealed his deliberate pursuit of an arms-for-hostages transaction even though he knew the Arms Export Control Act forbade it. The Weinberger trial would have brought out this conspiracy. It can still be discussed in a final report, but the public cannot see the witnesses and evaluate the testimony for itself. They’ll have to take the word of the independent counsel.
The pardons are his constitutional prerogative. But the pardons are relevant to our inquiry because they prevent further exposure of the coverup. The pardons in themselves perfect the cover-up.
We try not to be emotional about these things.
It diverted me from the full commitment to the final report … Responding to the criticism and preparing for Weinberger has taken time.
Most people don’t understand the magnitude of the assignment. To do the job properly, we were drawn into investigations of very secret agencies. We were greeted with 100 percent hostility. Witnesses were unwilling to cooperate. We were dealing with people skilled at deception and at avoiding disclosures. To do it properly had to take a long time. I have questioned myself whether I should have created a bigger staff so we could do this more rapidly, but I thought having separate teams would be wasteful.
That’s a record we can be proud of When you consider the difficulty of the cases and the fact there wasn’t a single friendly witness, that’s quite an achievement. And it will have a deterrent effect on the temptation of high-ranking national-security officials to lie to Congress in the future. This deterrent effect is now sullied by President Bush’s pardons and by his wholly false statement that these are political issues, not criminal. Making false statements to Congress is a crime.
