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Subject: Bush Urged To Grant Pardons; Senior Aides Advise Presidential Action On
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 08:40:52 EST
Message-ID: <1.1992Nov7.084053@AmeriCast.com>

Bush Urged To Grant Pardons; Senior Aides Advise Presidential Ac-
tion On Iran-Contra Cases<By Ann Devroy and Walter
Pincus=Washington Post Staff Writers=

Some senior Republicans and White House aides, including the vice
president, are advising a presidential pardon of Iran-contra de-
fendants, starting with former defense secretary Caspar W. Wein-
berger, as President Bush begins clearing his desk of the final
business of 12 years of Republican rule.  According to White
House and GOP sources, no formal recommendation has been made to
Bush, but some of his aides have raised the possibility informal-
ly.  White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater said yesterday
he had heard no discussion of such a move.

Bush is said by close aides to believe the announcement four days
before Tuesday's election of a revised indictment of Weinberger
and the release of Weinberger notes from the Iran-contra era el-
iminated any chance he might have had of catching Democrat Bill
Clinton.  Bush also is said to believe that Weinberger is "an in-
nocent victim of (Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence E.)
Walsh's drive to get (Bush) and that it is a travesty overall,"
according to one of the president's associates.

As Bush rests at Camp David this weekend, before a five-day
Florida fishing trip next week, he plans a radio address today
pledging his help and cooperation to President-elect Clinton and
to rebuilding the Republican Party, split into conservative fac-
tions already battling over who will be the next party chairman.

Charles Black, a senior political adviser in the Bush campaign,
launched a quiet campaign this week to become the new party
chairman. But other candidates are organizing to stop him, sug-
gesting that his roles as a lobbyist, whose extensive consulting
business includes foreign clients, and as what one called "a
stalking horse" for the presidential ambitions of Sen. Phil Gramm
(R-Tex.) would be counterproductive to rebuilding a shattered
party.

At the White House and in Republican circles, thousands of Bush
appointees have begun adjusting to life out of power, with the
first sign being telephones that no longer ring. Fitzwater, who
served as White House press secretary for President Ronald Reagan
and then Bush, was uncharacteristically poetic about his abrupt
change of status.  "Receding power rides a swift horse," Fitzwa-
ter said, adding, "You know, it's kind of nice. No hordes waiting
outside my door. No endless phone list. It is kind of peaceful."

Some Bush aides got a more abrupt welcome to the new world. Mar-
garet Tutwiler, director of communications at the White House and
assistant secretary of state in the State Department under James
A. Baker III, said she arrived home from Houston Wednesday to
find letters from two Washington real estate agents offering to
sell her Northwest house. Yesterday, television crews were film-
ing the house as part of a story on the outgoing team. Tutwiler,
however, plans to remain in Washington and find a job in the
private sector after Clinton's inauguration.

Some senior aides described Bush as bitter about the final-hours
re-indictment of Weinberger. "Many of us will go to our graves
believing there was political motivation in the timing of this by
Walsh and that any dim hope we had of catching Clinton died when
we spent the last two days of the campaign on the defense over
Iran-contra," said one.

Aides to Vice President Quayle said yesterday his conversations
with Bush are private and they did not know whether he directly
suggested to the president that Weinberger and others be pardoned
before Bush leaves office.  One aide said that mid-level Bush
aides discussed the issue on the flight from Houston to Washing-
ton on Wednesday after the election.

Weinberger's trial on five counts of perjury to Congress and
false statements to prosecutors is scheduled to begin Jan. 5.

Both Bush and Quayle publicly expressed anger and frustration
over the re-indictment of Weinberger and release of a 1986 note
written by Weinberger that contradicted Bush's account of his
role in the Iran-contra affair.

The note said that Bush, as vice president, supported the arms-
for-hostages deal during a critical White House meeting in which
several top aides, including Weinberger, opposed it. Bush has
said he did not realize that a direct deal, in which arms were
sold to Iran in exchange for Iranian help in freeing hostages
held in Lebanon, was occurring until many months later, and that
he did not realize the extent of the opposition to it.  Walsh has
heard the pardon rumors but "can't do anything about them," ac-
cording to sources close to the Iran-contra prosecution. Robert
S. Bennett, Weinberger's attorney, said earlier this week that he
was unaware of any such move being in the works.

A presidential pardon would not prevent Walsh from filing a re-
port on the findings of his six-year, $33 million investigation
into the worst scandal of the Reagan administration.

"Bush has never been a target" of Walsh's inquiry, one source
said, and the prosecutor agreed in August to postpone questioning
the president in the final phase of the Iran-contra investigation
until after the election.

If Bush did pardon Weinberger, questions would be raised about
what he should do about other pending cases and about the seven
other Iran-contra figures who have pleaded guilty to Walsh's
charges.

Some Republican sources have connected the use of the Weinberger
note in the new indictment to Walsh's newly named prosecutor in
the Weinberger case, James J. Brosnahan, who took over the case
on Oct. 15.  A California trial lawyer and head of Morrison and
Foerste, a large San Francisco firm, Brosnahan is a registered
Democrat. According to Federal Election Commission records,
Brosnahan contributed $500 to the Clinton for President Committee
last March during the primary season. Other members of his firm
gave an additional $22,000 to the Clinton committee, the records
show.  A spokesman for Walsh said that the independent counsel, a
longtime Republican who was an appointee in the Eisenhower, Nix-
on, Ford and Reagan administrations, never looked into
Brosnahan's political background when he was deciding whether to
hire him.<

The Washington Times reported yesterday that Republicans were al-
leging that the Clinton campaign had advance notice of the Oct.
30 Weinberger indictment, because the campaign's press release on
it was dated Oct. 29. The press statement was not released until
Oct. 30.  Yesterday, George Stephanopoulos, spokesman for the
president-elect, said he was "guilty" of having a wrong date on
the release, but that there had been no contact with the Iran-
contra prosecutors.

"I can say categorically we had no contact with Walsh prior to
the indictment," Stephanopoulos said. He added that "no one on
the (Clinton) staff talked to Walsh's staff as far as I know."
"Nobody from our office talked to anyone outside the office on
this or any indictment," said James Wieghart, a spokesman for
Walsh's office.

According to Stephanopoulos, the first he learned of the indict-
ment was "around 1 o'clock" on Oct. 30, when a Reuters story came
over the news wire. It took the Clinton "rapid response team"
another two hours, Stephanopoulos said, to pull together a press
release that went out under the headline: "New Iran-contra evi-
dence released by prosecutor. . . . "

Sources close to Walsh have said that the Weinberger notes were
included in the indictment to meet defense complaints that the
earlier charge had been too broad and vague. They said the timing
was set by court agreements, not the election.<02:01 11-07C9999-
----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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