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“Weinberger’s early and deliberate decision to conceal and withhold extensive contemporaneous notes of the Iran-contra matter radically altered the official investigations and possibly forestalled timely impeachment proceedings against President Reagan and other officials.” The special prosecutor added that the “notes contain evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”
    Weinberger’s trial was set to begin in January 1993. However, on December 24, 1992, the former Pentagon chief, along with five others (four of whom had already been convicted and one of whom was set to stand trial), was pardoned by Bush 41, who was less than a month away from leaving office, having been defeated by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. A December 25, 1992, editorial in the New York Times —one of the very few mainstream institutions to condemn the pardons—noted that the rationale invoked by Bush 41 to justify his actions was a replica of the excuses Ford had relied on to protect Richard Nixon.
    If Mr. Bush had rested his pardon of Mr. Weinberger on the former Defense Secretary’s health alone, he might deserve credit for compassion. But he went on to lecture Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor, against what he called “the criminalization of policy differences.”
That’s a bogus complaint. Mr. Weinberger was not charged with lying to Congress because of policy differences; lying to Congress for any reason is criminal conduct….
When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for Watergate crimes—a precedent Mr. Bush ignored in his pardon message—he said he acted to restore harmony and move on. Mr. Bush invoked the same sentiments. But the Nixon pardon was wrong, too.
     
    And like Ford’s pardon, Bush’s won praise from the overwhelming majority of politicians and journalists. Weinberger, after all, was a member in good standing of the political class generally and the Washington establishment in particular. He had been a close associate of Reagan’s since the 1960s, when Reagan was governor of California, and he had held a number of key posts under Nixon—including director of the Office of Management and Budget, where his merciless cost-cutting measures had earned him the nickname “Cap the Knife.” In a pattern no one considers unusual anymore, “Cap the Knife” had then converted the praise earned as Nixon’s OMB cost cutter into a plum position as vice president and general counsel of the Bechtel Corporation, which must have found his contacts in DC to be very useful indeed.
    In other words, in the eyes of the political and media establishment, Weinberger was not someone who belonged in a prison cell—not even when there was clear evidence that he had committed serious felonies. As Robert Parry detailed in Consortium News , journalists and political operatives from across the political spectrum closed ranks to celebrate the immunity bestowed on Weinberger and his coconspirators.
    The Washington elites rallied to Weinberger’s defense. In the salons of Georgetown, there was palpable relief in December 1992 when President Bush pardoned Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants, effectively ending the Iran-contra investigation.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many insiders. In a column [on December 30, 1992], Cohen described how impressed he was that Weinberger would push his own shopping cart at the Georgetown Safeway, often called the “social Safeway” because so many members of Washington’s establishment shopped there.
“Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense—which is the way much of official Washington saw him,” Cohen wrote in praise of the pardon. “Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me.”
     
    Let us pause for a moment to reflect on how perverse that is. Richard Cohen describes himself as a