# Lawrence Walsh **Lawrence Edward Walsh** (January 8, 1912 – March 19, 2014) was the independent counsel who investigated the **[[Iran-Contra Affair]]** from 1986 to 1993. He was a lifelong Republican, a former federal judge and a former deputy attorney general, and he is the figure the wiki returns to whenever the question is what happens when a prosecutor reaches the top of an administration and the pardon power reaches back. ## Before Iran-Contra Walsh was born in Port Maitland, Nova Scotia, Canada, and took his A.B. from Columbia in 1932 and his law degree from Columbia Law School in 1935. He began as a prosecutor under New York County district attorney **[[Thomas E. Dewey]]**, serving as deputy assistant district attorney from 1938 to 1941, and then followed Dewey into the governor's office as assistant counsel (1943–1949) and counsel (1950–1951). He was counsel to the New York State Public Service Commission (1951–1953) and general counsel and executive director of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor (1953–1954). President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated him to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on **April 6, 1954**; he was confirmed on April 27 and commissioned April 28. He resigned from the bench on **December 29, 1957** to become **deputy attorney general** of the United States, a post he held until 1960, during which he worked on school desegregation and helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1960. In 1969 he served on the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam with the rank of ambassador. He spent the intervening decades in private practice — a senior partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York, and later of counsel at Crowe & Dunlevy in Oklahoma City — and was president of the New York State Bar Association (1966–1967) and of the American Bar Association (1975–1976). > [!note] A small conflict in the record > The Federal Judicial Center dates the end of his New York practice to 1981; the American Law Institute says he retired from Davis Polk in 1982 and moved to Oklahoma City afterward. The year he left New York is reported both ways. ## Independent counsel, 1986–1993 Walsh was appointed **Independent Counsel** on **December 19, 1986**, at the age of 74, after the arms-for-hostages sales to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras became public. The investigation ran about six years and cost roughly $47 million. His office **charged fourteen people** with criminal offences. Of those, eleven were convicted — though two of the convictions, **[[Oliver North]]**'s and **[[John Poindexter]]**'s, were overturned on appeal because of the immunised congressional testimony that had preceded them. Two defendants were pardoned before trial, and one case was dismissed. The breakdown is set out in his own Summary of Prosecutions. ### The Christmas Eve pardons On **December 24, 1992**, weeks after losing re-election, President **[[George H.W. Bush]]** pardoned six Iran-Contra figures: **[[Caspar Weinberger]]**, Duane R. Clarridge, Clair E. George, **[[Elliott Abrams]]**, Alan D. Fiers Jr. and **[[Robert McFarlane]]**. Bush's own statement described the prosecutions as "the criminalization of policy differences" and argued that "the proper target is the president, not his subordinates." Then–Attorney General **[[William Barr]]** advised him to issue them. Weinberger's pardon arrived, in the words of Walsh's final report, "less than two weeks before trial" — a trial in which, the report notes, defence counsel had indicated they intended to call Bush as a witness. Walsh's report calls these "unprecedented pre-trial pardons by President Bush following his electoral defeat in 1992." Walsh's public response is the passage most often quoted from him, and it is the reason his name recurs on this site: > [!quote] Lawrence Walsh, December 24, 1992 > The pardon "undermines…the principle…that no man is above the law." It "demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences." > [!note] On the wording > Published renderings of this statement differ in small ways — "principle" and "principles," "consequence" and "consequences" — because the statement circulated as a press release and was excerpted differently by different outlets. The substance is consistent across them. The line is from the December 1992 statement reacting to the pardons, **not** from the Final Report, whose conclusions do not contain it. His **Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters** was issued **August 4, 1993**. He published an account of the investigation, *Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up*, in 1997, and an autobiography, *The Gift of Insecurity*. He died in Oklahoma City at 102. ## Why he's on the map Walsh is the control case. He was a Republican appointed under a Republican president to investigate a Republican administration, he had been a federal judge and the second-ranking official at the Justice Department, and he still finished the job unable to try the cabinet officer at the centre of it. That outcome — a prosecution defeated not in court but by clemency — is the template the wiki follows through [[Elite Impunity]] and the [[The Pardon and Clemency Pipeline]], and it is why his 1992 warning gets quoted whenever accountability for a president's subordinates comes back into question. His own framing is the one worth keeping: the danger he named was not that the law would be broken but that breaking it would be shown to carry no cost. See also [[Trump v. United States]], where the Supreme Court addressed the related question of a president's own criminal liability, and [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]]. ## See Also - [[Iran-Contra Affair]] · [[Iran-Contra Timeline]] · [[Independent Counsel]] - [[Caspar Weinberger]] · [[Elliott Abrams]] · [[Oliver North]] · [[John Poindexter]] - [[George H.W. Bush]] · [[William Barr]] · [[Ronald Reagan]] - [[Elite Impunity]] · [[Rule of Law]] · [[Appomattox]]