Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of call it like I see it, we're gonna take a look back at the Iran Contra scandal, which, despite it not seemingly having the same level of notoriety as, like, a watergate or the sizzle, so to speak, of Clinton. And Clinton Lewinsky was a pretty major scandal in the 1980s, and one that really illustrated some of the ways the operation of our government can be co opted by a group of individuals without regard for the law or the rules, like in the constitutional system.
Joining me today is a man who knows how to keep it going nonstop. Tunde Ogun, Lana Tunde. Are you ready to flip the switch here today?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: It's already flipped, man.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Already flipped, man. It stays on. You don't have to get ready if you stay ready.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: All right. All right. Now we're recording this on September 3, 2023, and briefly, the Iran Contra affair. And I'll give this brief kind of rundown, because it's been almost 40 years. It essentially involved a group of people in the american government operating to sell us weapons to Iran. I, who was a state sponsor of certain terrorist groups in exchange for not just the money, you know, you're selling stuff, but also to try to get hostages held by some of those terrorist groups released over in the Middle east. And then also, you know, that's. That was part one. And then part two was this group in the american government. We used the profits from these arms sales to fund the contras, who were an insurgent group in Nicaragua. Their fight against the Cuba backed Sandinistas who were in control in Nicaragua. And funding the Contras was something that Congress had said is illegal, you know, or I should say the government. It was on the law, on the books that that was not something that the government said was authorized or legal. So it was to get the money to get around the fact that the government couldn't formally provide that money.
So to get us started. Tundez, looking back almost 40 years later, what about the Iran Contra affairs? Stands out to you? You know, what do you really, when you look back at it, what do you think is something that we should really take note of, or again, stands out?
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say that the, initially, I would say just the lack of knowledge that I think the general public has today on it being probably one of the major scandals in us government history and definitely a major, one of our lifetimes, you know, of the last 50 years or so. So I just, I just, it's, it you know, revisiting this and preparing for today's show was like, wow, this was actually a really big deal. And the amount of indictments that followed the investigation and also in preparing for the day and getting more in the weeds of it, because this was interesting for me because I remember watching these hearings as a kid in my living room with my mom because she would have the evening news on when she came home from work, and this stuff was on the tv. So revisiting it now as an adult, it's like, okay, now, now I see what this. What was going on here a bit clearer, clearly, but I realized that this was in the backdrop of a lot of the cultural things geopolitically, that not only were going on at the time, but that are still going on now. I mean, seeing names like Hezbollah being influenced by Iran and Lebanon and the iranian republican guardhouse funding terrorism and some of these activities. And, you know, it's just interesting that. That a lot of this stuff is still here today and still influences the geopolitical situation around the world.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You know, that's a very excellent point as far as how a lot of this stuff is. This was coming on the tail end of the Middle east really changing. You know, in the late seventies. You have Lebanon changing as a nation, Iran, all these countries becoming much more hardline, conservative, religious countries than they were previous. And so that kind of transition and the trajectory that, that put a lot of these states in the Middle east on is what is the current state that we're living under right now. So, like you said, we're seeing a lot of the groups that we still hear about now. They became prominent at this time. But actually, I would say, looking internally, what stands out to me about this really, is how our constitutional system anticipates a lot of the ways people in power would want to use it or abuse it, because the illegality with the Iran Contra in large part dealt with the fact that the people who wanted to do something did not have the power to make what they wanted to do illegal. And they weren't just a king and say, well, if I do it, it's legal. You know, and so it. That it's literally kind of the separation of powers at work, you know, because Congress said, hey, we don't agree that this is important or this is necessary. And so therefore, we're gonna say, you can't do it. And the executive branch of government, where the biggest problem came, is they said, well, we don't care that Congress just made this illegal or in fact, there were laws that were signed onto the books that were passed and Congress assigned onto the books by Reagan. And then it was like, look, we don't care that this was made illegal by, and, you know, us, the executive branch conceded to that. We're just going to do it anyway. And therefore, that's where the illegality and scandal, a large part of it comes from. There's also the whole idea of selling arms to someone who's whole, who is affiliated with people that are holding your people hostage, trying to get those hostages out. That's pretty scandalous in itself. But, you know, again, that was, that's geopolitical. But the internal friction with our system, again, it just, it's like, yeah, this is what, this is the kind of thing, and they knew this back in the 1780s. This is the kind of thing that when people have executive power, they would want to do over and above the system. And so, therefore, let's, let's make it explicitly so that we can stop them from doing that unless everybody, unless the people, so to speak, represented by Congress in that sense, sign on, you know, and they, the executive branch can't just go and do what they want to do.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. I think this is why the Iran Contra affair, actually, in studying it, is a lesson in United States civics, because that's where I was going to, that the Congress represents the people of the United States, the voters. And it's a very unique thing we have in this country, the separation of powers, where the executive branch has its power checked by the legislative branch, which is the people. And so I think most Americans don't appreciate that as much as they believe in freedom and believe in limited government and thing, or at least many Americans say they do, that the real power of this system, that it was created so that the Congress does represent the people. And exactly what you're saying the scandal was the executive branch going around the will of the people as expressed through Congress, saying, we don't want to go in this excursion anymore. And I think that's where, to me, that the culture of it was very interesting. So there's a couple things you said that I want to break down. One is just to take it to. What you mentioned is the hypocrisy that the United States was engaged in, which embarrassed us on the world stage when this came out, because I learned in preparing that in the spring of 1983, we, the United States, launched, launched something called Operation Staunch, which was a wide ranging diplomatic effort to persuade other nations worldwide not to sell arms or spare parts of weapons to Iran. And so this goes back to the revolution of 79. And this history is important just to understand all this stuff. So I'll do a quick 10 seconds of it. That the Shah of Iran was our ally. We sold weapons to him and, you know, f 14 tomcats when they were the new hot stuff and all that. Right.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: I.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: But after the islamic revolution of 1979, the overthrow of the shah and the taking of american hostages, clearly our public stance with Iran changed, and they were no longer an ally. They were an adversary. And so by 1983, a few years later, Iran, airplanes and tanks and all that need service and repair, these parts fall apart over time. So Iran was out there trying to buy parts for their military, especially the fact they started, you know, not, I won't say them, but a war was started between them and Iraq, which is.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: A big part of this. In 1980, Saddam Hussein and Iraq and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, we started going at it. And that went on during a large part of the eighties. So they were in an absolutely hot war against their neighbor. Those are neighboring countries.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So we're telling the rest of the world and going around the world saying, don't no one sell arms to Iran. No one sell arms to Iran. They're our enemy. You know, let's let them, you know, just get their butt kicked by Iraq. And Iraq and Saddam Hussein were our ally at the time. And so that's why this is, this was embarrassing for the United States when it came out in 85, 86 that this whole time we've been selling weapons to the Islamic State of Iran.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Well, that plus, you know, the reagan administration said, you know, their stated policy, we don't negotiate with terrorists, you know, so, I mean, like that, it's a lot of egg on the face, you know.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Well, and that's why also I feel like how we've had talked in various discussions about the need to own the narrative of history. And I feel like this is one of those narratives that's been swept under the rug. Because if you look at the american culture today, I mean, I think a lot of Americans would be beside themselves to find out that an islamic state that was, that came about by overthrowing our ally, basically, and taking Americans hostage.
Within just a few years after that, we're sitting there selling them weapons secretly when they could have been toppled by our allies. Saddam Hussein at the time. You know what I mean?
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Like, why not just that, but they're also supporting groups that actively have terror hostages, American Beirut, you know, like so.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: And the Islamic Republican Guard of Iran. So, yeah, I agree. And that's why to me this was very interesting and just this reminder of all of this and on the backdrop of the 1970s and Vietnam and all that, that they didn't want to say, let's go do this publicly.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, and that's, they couldn't say that let's do this because it's contra to so many things that they had said they stood for. I want to just clarify one point. You know, like Congress is considered to be more directly closer to the people because in general, particularly the House of Representatives, we elect our members of the House by district. Your district may have 10,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 people in it, versus we elect a Senate even is for a whole state, you know, and then we are with the, the president. It's the whole nation. So you're closest in terms of, in the federal government, your closest where you have the, the most direct input, so to speak, relative to how many other people vote on it, is going to necessarily be your rep in the House of Representatives. So kind, that's, and that's where spending bills are supposed to originate, you know, for that reason, you know, is because it's okay, this is the group that's closest to the people. So they're going to be the ones that dictate how money is spent, you know, and so that's, you know, but that's a big part of, because they know, again, the foresight if people in the executive position like to just get on and say, hey, here's what we're going to do. Here's the move, you know, now one of the things that played a role in this, though, so you have what's going on in the Middle east, you know, which is like, again, like the first half or the, the portion that you just went in on, the other piece about this has happened is because it's the diversion of that money from those arms sales to the contras in Nicaragua and Central America. And so what that is based on in large part is that Reagan in the administration still, they were still looking at what was called domino theory, which is where once communism comes into an area, then all the other nations in that area are going to topple sort of like a domino and become communists as well. This is what got us into Vietnam, the idea that that was going to happen in Southeast Asia. Now a lot of people weren't believing that anymore and, or just didn't want to go down the road of Vietnam. They didn't consider Vietnam worth it. All the money spent, lives lost there, and they still ended up going into communism. And so what? There was this effort in Central America to prevent what would seem to either be communist regimes or regimes that would be not hostile to, sufficiently hostile to communism from taking power. And so when the Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua, the contras were fighting against them. And that is essentially, the contras were right wing, so to speak. They were. They were very against communism, whereas the Sandinistas were seen to be supported by the more supportive of the idea of communism, or at minimum, not letting american corporations dominate the economy and extract resources out as much as they want, which is a concept we went into, actually, when we did the confessions of an economic hitman. You know, it wasn't as simple as communism versus free market. It was also our companies having vested interests in these places, and they're not wanting governments to come in and say, hey, you big companies can't take that stuff out anymore. But I wanted to ask you, you know, after giving all that background, this domino theory thing, you know, which is something like, you know, Ronald Reagan, one of the big players in the Iran Contra affair was. Was Oliver north, who was Marine, but then also worked with the National Security Agency and did a lot of the kind of groundwork as far as getting arm sales done and getting the money over to the contras.
But the domino theory is kind of what is a fear they had in terms of how communism would spread. So what do you make of that now? Again, looking back in time in terms of how it was something that they feared and used it for their act to justify their actions.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, look, this is why it's just interesting to see this arc of history, the modern history of the last, let's say, post World War two era, because it's similar to what we saw in, let's say, in this recent generation of post 911, where there was this fear that some of this more aggressive jihadism style of Islam, if I can call it that, might spread further. And I think that the ultimate fear was the last decade when ISIS started actually taking over swastika of land and people worrying that they could have really penetrated other parts of the Middle east. So I think the domino theory in general has probably been around forever in human history. Just this fear that if you have an opponent and you let them get this piece of territory, then eventually they're going to start influencing the inhabitants in that piece and then again start falling.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: But it's a little different, though, because what we're talking about here is economics and or ideology. And so it's not like a. If an opponent takes this land area, then they're closer to then launch an offensive against you. This is just like, are these ideas going to be to spread and become more palatable?
[00:15:19] Speaker B: It's kind of the same in the sense of. Yeah. Whether it's physical or kind of psychological, that's what I'm saying, is that once we finished with World War two and we had now the two superpowers of the kind of the United States and the western world, like the UK and Western Europe versus the Soviet Union, that that's where we started seeing this. This kind of current era or the modern era of this domino fear, which is the United States and the Soviet Union playing this game of chess around the world. And each piece, whenever it moved, it scared the other. And so the korean war was the first, obviously, example. But then to the point we're talking here, Vietnam was extremely, just an inflection point in american culture. So I think by 19 or the early eighties, you're so close. Remember, Vietnam ended pretty much 1973 to 75. So you're not that far away from that memory. We had 58,000 american soldiers die, a million Vietnamese, and Vietnam ended up going communist anyway. And by the early eighties, you know, people could look at Vietnam and say, okay, they want communism, they want communists. We wasted so many lives and resources and what was it worth? Because it's not like that part of the world is not like Australia is now communist or other allies of ours.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: The dominoes didn't all fall like predicted. Yeah.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: So I think that's what gave people that weren't either what we could call paranoid or super hawkish in the government, a little bit of strength by the early eighties to say, look, you know, we got to stop all these excursions. Kind of the stuff we would hear after, let's say, the first decade of the Iraq Afghanistan conflicts, where a lot of Americans were saying, we can't, we can't keep spending money on this stuff and trying to convince everybody to be like us. Some people don't want to be and leave them alone. And, you know, like, as long as we have our military and our defense apparatus in a certain posture, they probably won't, you know, these domino, these breadcrumbs won't lead them back to our place, in a sense. So I find that interesting, that it's kind of like the lack of success of the Vietnam War and the public's that's why they had to hide it from Congress, or Congress, I should say, first cited not to fund this because Congress was responding to the american people who just didn't want to be in these international excursions to fight this boogeyman called communism, but that by the eighties, already looked like it was starting to get kind of weak, you know, like, or minimum.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: It's not going to automatically spread. Like, again, the people who use the idea that it would automatically spread once it hit certain places, that was, was proven to not necessarily be the case. So, like you said, it strengthened the people saying, hold on, hold on, hold on. We're going here for what now?
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: So think about it.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: But let me just say something. Sylvester Stallone, between Rocky and Rambo, you know, he started proven to us that we're losing their stuff.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Well, no, I mean, he did a lot of work in the eighties on that.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, he helped us out.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: But see, now here's the thing that really, I think, gets you into danger with this, because what this is basically domino theory is the ultimate ends justify the means thinking. Like, there is this concern that we have communism, you know, this more ideological or abstract thing that's going to come and do things that we don't like. And so because of that, whatever we decide to do is justified. And that's honestly, that's what essentially happened inside the Reagan administration. Now with the Iran Contra affair, I will say there's disputing accounts on how much Reagan knew, how much was. He just didn't keep his staff under, you know, on a leash or whether he was out there directing all this stuff to actually have the discussion here. I don't think we really need to get into that. We'll have some stuff in the show notes, you know, that you can review, and it'll go more into that kind of stuff. But ultimately, the thing, it's always a concern when you get into ends justify the means thing. We see this in modern times. You know, it's like, okay, this fear that we have, this thing that's going to come is so bad that no matter what, we have to stop it. And that means if our leaders lie, if our leaders cheat, if our leaders steal, doesn't matter because they're protecting us from this, this super bad bad. And in this case, the whole thing that they were, they were. So everybody was afraid of was something that was shown to not necessarily be legit anyway, you know? And so that's where, to me, I wonder, when I see these types of things now, some people in any society respond more to fear. I, you know, they're just fear driven. You can tell them, oh, this boogeyman is coming, and they'll say, okay, do whatever you got to do, you know, just stop it no matter what. And other people don't, you know, like, that's just the nature of a society. And so you never know 100% when people are out here waving these flags. As far as these fear based things, oh, fear crt or fear this or that, whether they are actually just people who respond more to fear. And so that's all that consumes them or if it's an opportunistic play where they're not necessarily, but they see that I can grab ahold of these, the people, this 30% in society that just responds more to fear if I use these, these type of triggers, these type of cues to make them afraid, and then they'll look to me to save them, and they'll give me a blank check, so to speak. But for that reason, though, you never know when people are making these arguments. And I would include this situation, whether this is just pretextual, whether Oliver north or, you know, whoever else just wanted to, wanted to get in there and knock out the Sandinistas. And so they were like, well, how can we do that? Well, if we start talking this domino theory that allowed us to get into Vietnam, then we can scare up enough people to try to get it done. And when it didn't work on a congressional level, they were like, hey, all right, we'll scare up enough people. But it also equally could be that these are just fear driven people. And so they were like, oh, well, Congress won't do it. We got to do it anyway, because if we don't, the world's going to end, and, you know, yada, yada, yada. So you can never really, that's a chicken and egg type of question, but it ultimately is. You can see, it's fear driven actions where you, you dismiss procedure, you dismiss even what's legal and what's not legal and just say, we got to do x, we got to do y. Doesn't matter. And that's dangerous for a democracy, basically. That's dangerous for the operation of rule of law, because rule of law can't work with ends, justify the means, do whatever you got to do to get this, you know, get this done.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, that's why I say there's, there's the cultural parallels of our recent generational stuff with the Middle east, because, to your point, the fear of communism led to some irrational behavior and decisions, I would say, sure, by many Americans on the ground level, but as we're seeing here by some in the government as well. And I think that we've talked about this in different types of discussions, and not to be on a tangent, but like, the attention of, let's say, state legislatures in the trying to make sure that sharia law is never passed as a way of being in the United States when we already have a First Amendment that says that a religion can't be legislated into law in this country. Were they genuinely just ginned up with fear because of the new bogeyman that was no longer communism but islamic terrorism? Or were they just being opportunistic and scaring american people? But then knowing in deep inside that there was no chance Sharia law was ever going to really come? You know, like you said, that's exactly what I mean. Like today, like CRT, like, yeah, we.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Can'T look at the individual actor a lot of times and tell whether or not they're just dominated by their own fear or whether they're just trying to use other people's fear for their own power gains.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I mean. Like, it's interesting, this whole thing with Iran Contra, because I feel like what we've learned, I think you're absolutely right. It's a little bit of a wasted exercise of time to try and figure out how much Ronald Reagan knew or didn't know specifically, because it appears that, you know, that that information is murky. But there's enough going on that you don't need to know that, to know that this was, was just a big scandal. And I, let me add one thing.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: To that, because also, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. Ultimately, it's his responsibility whether he knew or not. It's not that important.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Well, let me comment on that, because what I was going to say about Reagan is I do believe Reagan seems to be the type when you look at his life arc and when he came, you know, into being an adult, you know, kind of post world war, sorry, World War two, he seems to have been someone that believed in the red scare in the 1950s, and he seems to be someone that, when he became governor of California in 66, did believe things like, you know, certain civil rights groups were being infiltrated by communists and stuff like that. So it's not a stretch to believe for, to believe that Reagan believed in the domino theory and that if we began to have communist influences in South America, that that's something that, whether he genuinely believed that this was the right thing to do or he was manipulated into doing it, again, I can't, I can't. No, but I could see him being a true believer of hate.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: He could believe it, though, and not, no, like you're saying. And the whole point was like, again, because the buck stops with him one and two, because it's one of those things that when you look at it from the big picture standpoint, if he knows, then okay, he knows. But he also operated his White House generally as kind of a delegation type of thing, too. That was, it wasn't only with Iran Contra where it was like, oh, this guy's kind of hands off with these, a lot of the details. He might have agreed with the ideology, but knight might not have known. It just had like minded people in power that moved, moved the ideology forward. And now you don't got to keep me posted on everything you do. Like, that's how we operate. So. Yeah, but again, because the buck stops with him. It, he's responsible. And, you know, it doesn't really matter from a deal like the, or at least it doesn't matter from a liability standpoint, I would say it doesn't matter if you want to say, oh, well, how will we remember him then? Yeah, you can get into all that. But again, for this show, our purposes of this show, I don't think we really need to get into that.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: One thing I want to add.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: Well, I want to keep us moving, though, because, and you might be able to get to it, what you want to say. But, like, what to you stands out about the illegality of the scheme and also, like, how, you know, it was investigated and or, you know, the ultimate resolution, which involved basically congressional hearings, special prosecutor being appointed, charges being brought, all like, guilty pleas, some kind of, you know, all this stuff, and then a lot of actual pardons by George HW Bush, you know, before he left office in 92, you know, but so what about that? And again, for all the details, there's so many details, we would never get to it in a podcast. But, you know, like, what stands or what would you want to, you know, hit on those topics?
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, to me, there's a few things that stand out. One is kind of the lack of accountability in a certain sense, granted by the pardons. Like, the system did work in a certain sense after reading some stuff, but, but the pardons just was like, okay, I guess everybody just gets to go and, you know, that's one thing. And just to kind of bring in from the last section that I was going to say is, you know, in watching one of the documentaries you watched in preparing, it was a good reminder, watching Ronald Reagan take responsibility for it in the end, even on national tv in the Oval Office. And I just thought, you know, because I know this is not an opinion about Ronald Reagan and his presidency, because I know a lot of people like him, a lot of people dislike him, but it was refreshing to see a president and just a leader in the United States political scene just saying, the buck stops with me. And this, and this was under my watch and this was wrong.
So that was just something I thought, like, wow, that was, that was something we don't see anymore in our leaders.
The, the, but to your point about.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: I can't say, you can't say that broadly about our leaders. You say that about Donald Trump and kind of the people that want to follow in that kind of footstep. But there are leaders that will admit them when they're wrong.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: I don't know, because I think, and not to go on a tangent, I think part of it is the ecosystem. I mean, if, if a politician, anybody today says, hey, this happened under my watch and I was wrong, and this is da da da, there's a whole.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Ecosystem that's, but you're speculating on everybody else except one person. The one person we've seen do that. They won't even admit they're wrong about a hurricane, you know, the path of a hurricane. But you're saying, oh, I bet nobody else would, too.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: But that's, I've seen, I mean, again, I don't want to get off track here, but examples of Joe Biden where he could have said, hey, I could have done better, I could have done this, and he doesn't. I'm just saying that it's in today's hyper polarized environment.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: I would be interested, honestly, if we're going down that road, like, give me an example of something major like this where he just was like, oh, well, no, I would say the way that.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: The public responded to the withdrawal of Afghanistan, you know, there was no acknowledgement that there was some sloppiness to it and all that. And I'm just making the point that it doesn't pay for someone to come out in today's world at the same way it may have 30, 40 years ago to say, hey, I was wrong. Because just the way that our ecosystems now are is that there's a whole, like, cottage industry that is ready to just tear you down.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: But that's going to happen regardless of whether you do it. Like, I would say the, there was, there was no fault to admit with the withdrawal of Afghanistan. They set out to do something and they accomplished it. Whether. I don't think they set out to say, this is going to be perfect. So are you saying that if someone's saying that something's not going to be perfect, they got to apologize for that? You know, like, I would say what this was was a commission of a bad act. We aren't supposed to do this. We're gonna do it. This wasn't, oh, we're gonna set out to do something. And it was, it didn't go with smoothly as we hoped. And so therefore, let me apologize. It was like, yo, hey, we broke the law here. We set out to do things that we were not supposed to do, and we did them. We apologize for that. And so that's. I don't think that's a fair comparison, basically, to say, oh, well, you used to be apologizing. If he sets out to do something that's legal accomplishes it, but it just doesn't go smoothly. Like, to me, that's a completely different thing.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Okay, so then we'll keep it moving. Cause I don't wanna go on tangent, but the.
But that's what I was saying. I'd really get back to the thing of the lack of accountability. Cause it seems like the system worked in terms of, and similar to what we've seen in the last two and a half years. Post January 6, the congress held hearings. It brought to light what happened to the american people and to the justice system.
Then the justice system carried out its duties. There were grand juries and indictments, and people were convicted. And that's, to me, what was surprising, the level of the people that were convicted. So you got Caspar Weinberger, who was secretary of defense. He was indicted on two counts of perjury.
The national security advisor, Robert McFarland, convicted of withholding evidence. Elliot Abrams, assistant secretary of state, convicted of withholding evidence. I mean, the list is long enough that I can't even read it, bottom line.
And to find out that everybody except for one guy named Thomas Kleins, who was the lowest ranking guy, it seems he was a former CIA clandestine officer. And basically he, they found him embezzling money, basically. And he served prison for that. He's the only one that served a prison sentence. Everyone else was pardoned by George Hw Bush. So again, in joking with you in a private conversation, I said, man, I didn't realize how consequential the 1988 election was because, and again, I'm saying this for the audience sake, not as a Democrat or Republican or someone who, who says, hey, the outcome of that election, jail. Yeah, the outcome of election would have been better or worse from a policy standpoint. It's just more of had because again, I'm going to draw arc of time here. 1988, you've got all of these pardons. And Christmas eve of 1992, after George HW lost to Bill Clinton in the 92 election.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: And what happened, that's when the pardons.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Happened is that's what I said. That's what, but think about it. Eight years later, some of these same players are, or let's say eight to ten years later are designing the invasion of Iraq.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: Well, before you get into that, let me, you know, maybe just get, throw a comment out there. I agree with you that the system worked. You know, you had investigations, you had hearings and then you had Justice Department stuff. One of the things I noted is the, as with, as we see with a lot of these things, the actual, like, it's hard to get people on the goods of actually what they did wrong. But usually what ends up happening is the COVID up aspect of what they did wrong opens the door for the criminal liability. And that's what happened here, too. Even the list, short list you just gave us was about, you know, convicted for perjury or for, you know, holding withholding evidence and stuff like that. And so that cover up piece is a very big piece of it. And we see that in other, like that rhymes, as we know, in future times and pastimes. It's like, oh, yeah, the COVID up was what, you know, like what really law enforcement was able, they were able to do something, you know, so law enforcement isn't perfect because they come after the fact and people have time to cover stuff up or try to cover stuff up, but in the act of the COVID up is when you can have liability. You raised a good point also with the lack of accountability. And I know you want to get back into that part, but the fact that, I mean, and this is the system, I mean, this is how it works. You had a special prosecutor appointed, like, I think it was 86, and that special prosecutor worked for like seven years. He worked all the way to 93. And he stopped eventually because after George Hw Bush pardoned so many people, then that meant all their acts, you know, they couldn't be prosecuted for that anymore and, you know, and so forth. And anybody who had been convicted, you know, was wiped away. And so that's when the special prosecutor was like, all right, well, essentially my work is done at that point. And so, but it was seven years the special prosecutor was out here gathering evidence and doing all, still working on it. And so there was a lot going on. And ultimately, what I find is that when you're talking about holding people in power accountable, it's even more important, not less important, more important for the system to be allowed to function in that way, because that actually is our protection that's built in to stop people from taking over the government is the fact that no one is above the law, that the people in power are still subject to the law. And so I think it's very important. It's a good lesson that, hey, you know, like, it's a bad. The wrong lesson is learned from the pardons, but the right lesson is learned that, hey, no, even you, if you're in power, you're right, you know, right hand of the president. You start doing illegal stuff, then you can get prosecuted for that still.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's why I agree. Like this.
First I thought coming into this without all the background that the system didn't work. And then in preparing for today, I realized, like, we're talking about the system worked. It's the pardons that gave people, especially the younger people who are in the administration or around it at the time. And I'm talking about people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and kind of those guys, Paul Wolfowitz, guys like that.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: William Barr.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: Yeah, William Barr.
So they saw this and they said, okay, well, next time it's time to do something that may not be, that Congress might not be okay with and may not be 100% above the level we know how to handle it. And I believe that that moment was the invasion of Iraq, post 911, the ability to manipulate the system to carry out kind of a pet project that didn't have much to do with anything else in terms of the war on terror, which we all seem to acknowledged now, and there were no weapons of mass destruction and the same thing, like, none of those architects of getting us into that whole shenanigans really ever. I mean, I don't know if there's anything to prosecute them about, but they never got just called out, you know.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Well, they knew how to play the system, though, because they live through it. Like, not just they knew how to play the ends justify the means game. Hey, we want to do this. Let's figure out. Let's figure out a pretext. But then they knew how to cover their tracks as far as what was happening. You know, Oliver north was, remember, that was one of the interesting things about the, the mid eighties is that was when email was first starting. So they had a bunch of emails that north was sending emails. Well, let me say, let me send a bunch of emails. And then when he tried, he was, you know, he was shredding documents trying to, when he knew that they were coming for him, he thought he could just delete the emails from his computer. But he didn't know because it was, email was so new that they're on the server, too. And so, like, all of the kind of ways to get away with it and to not get caught with perjury or, you know, things like that were learned as well, which is unfortunate. You know, that's kind of the give and the take of, of any type of law enforcement situation. But you're right, they came in knowing, okay, if we want to go skirt the rules, here's how we have to do it. Here's what we have to avoid. And so they kind of learned from it, you know, and then, you know, law enforcement is always going to face that, though, in terms of the people who are trying to skirt the law are always going to try to. Well, not always, but I, a lot of times are going to try to do it a little smarter than the people who came before them.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And this is another reason why certain actors really, you know, and I guess through their own rhetoric and ginning up the people that support them in politics, really always can't stand the media. I mean, the media is not perfect by any means. Let me, let me not sit here and sound like that. But, you know, without the media, we don't know about these things. And so I think that's why also, just like we've identified that post Watergate, there were certain actors in power that said we need to create a separate now lane of information so that we can at least control a narrative for enough Americans that we can keep our, our goals continue to kind of play out. I feel like that's part of, I didn't realize this until preparing for today, but I feel like. Cause we focus so much on Watergate and the need for just a separate narrative. But that, that separate lane through organizations like Fox News Channel and others was.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Exactly in particular because Ailes was the one who spoke about Water and saying, hey, we got to create another lane. So, I mean, and he created the Fox News kind of model. So I just wanted to give that connection from what you're talking about too specific because it does connect specifically to Fox News.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: But the reason why I do pick on Fox and others, I mean, definitely the kind of, this is where the, we've joked that the, the corporate media is not that liberal. They're out for making profits.
And so because it was the first time in my lifetime post 911 where I saw anchors on tv, specifically guys like Sean Hannity and at the time, Bill O'Reilly, go from being, because I used to watch Bill O'Reilly's show at night and all that prior to that era, and he was more of a normal commentator that would just talk about regular stuff after the 911. And the lead up to the Iraq war is when I, for the first time, I started hearing this rhetoric like, you're either with us or you're against us. You know, this, this thing about putting Americans in this place that if you don't follow this, you're somehow on the out. And I think if you remember that era, right. They intimidated a lot of politicians, too. Remember one reason, and this is why these things are all fascinating because they cascade into unintended consequences for people. People. One reason that Barack Obama was able to wipe the floor with Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary was her vote for the Iraq war. And she could never kind of walk that back to the base of the Democratic Party. And she ended up kind of saying, well, that's just the way everybody was kind of going. Like, I would have hurt myself as a senator from New York, especially from New York, after 911 had I not voted for the war. So I feel like it's kind of like they learned the lessons of, hey, if we want to do something that we had planned already is not just about doing this, this covert stuff behind the backs of Congress and everyone else and covering it up. We also need this, this, this propaganda, Lane.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: Yeah. This media kind of pressure campaign because.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Remember when, what they did to Dan rather.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: So that's what I mean.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: And that's part of it is because there is a worldview that's at play here. Like Oliver north, remember, through it all, was unrepentant. He thought he did the right thing. He was like, this thing is important. And I would, I thought it was the right, it's the right thing to do to get the contras and the contras, I mean, to kind of give that a little more substance. They weren't like angelic people. You know, they were terrorists as well, you know, and so, but they were just on the right side of, hey, american companies can come in and do what they want versus, you know, like the other side, you know, saying, oh, well, no, no, we gotta decide that would be considered more at the terms at the time, more left leaning or leftist, so to speak, which was not as friendly to american corporations. And so there's a world, if you share that worldview, then, and that's really what was done with the Iraq war, is what you're pointing out, is saying this pressure campaign, or propaganda, however you want to call it, and say, everybody needs to get on board. This is the american thing to do. And so you get people who, if, without that pressure campaign, might be more hesitant, you make them back into a corner where they gotta. They just gotta support it or else, so to speak. So. But, yeah, I mean, that's what's, we're getting ahead of it, you know. Cause I did want to ask, you know, what we can learn from, you know, in our politics today, which we've touched on a little bit. I mean, I'm still gonna. I still want to go there. But the other thing I'll say that stands out about it. And I said earlier, remember, about the illegality. A lot of it came from, you know, if Reagan wants to say, hey, we don't negotiate with terrorists, and then he actually negotiates with terrorists behind, you know, like, nobody really knows. That's not really a crime. You know, like, that's like, okay, yeah, that might be good strategy, so to speak, you know, to publicly say one thing and to privately kind of, you know, make, make things happen.
But so that wasn't really, wow, that sounds scandalous. That wasn't really like, oh, you know, we got to have hearings about this. You know, like, it was. It was more about, you know, again, we're setting out these, either international policies or we're setting out, you know, no, don't sell weapons to Iran, or we are. There's a law in the books that Reagan signed as, you know, part of a defense bill that says we're not going to fund the contras. And it's so, it's these laws that are being broken that we agreed to, you know, we as a nation, you know, and again, you can't just opt out because you say, oh, we're the executive branch. So to me, that's that. But that's what I was going with before, and I was talking about how. What's up?
[00:41:44] Speaker B: I'm just laughing. I'm thinking about the Native Americans and broke agreements with it. Like, don't ask them about the United States government breaking agreements, breaking agreements. Yeah.
The whole joke of indian, given the.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: Native Americans, they would be saying, yeah, that's what we were talking about.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. They'll be at the front of the line just shaking their finger at all of us.
[00:42:06] Speaker A: But it's. But, but it definitely is something where you see that, again, that's the system almost protecting itself, you know, so to speak. Like, the system has this stuff in place to make sure that no one man can take over or no one, you know, collection of menta can just take over and override the system, or at least it has all these defenses in place to make that very difficult. Yeah.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: And that's. It's an interesting evolution of our conversation here because I didn't even think to go in this direction before we started.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: But let me ask you this, because I think you can get to this point where you're going, but just real quick. So in addition to what you're coming with right now, but just also get into what we can, we learn, like, again, we haven't gone through all the details of this, but we went through the overriding arc. What can we learn as a society from Iran Contra, you know, through what we're going with politics today?
[00:42:53] Speaker B: Well, one thing I learned is that being an arms dealer is very profitable. So if it wasn't so, such hazardous.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: You should have learned that in the Iraq war, too.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: I was gonna say if it wasn't so hazardous to one's health, I'd probably have taken it up. But that's for a different life in a different parallel universe. But no, on a serious note, I mean, that's kind of where I was gonna go. You got it right, that just the parallels to where we are today in such a different way. But there's these big similarities, like you're saying. So. And what I'm getting at is the kind of post January 6 insurrection behavior of the system to protect itself as well, in terms of, like you cited already having special counsels, having, you know, congressional hearings to bring this stuff to light to the american people, having these grand juries, juries finding that there's enough evidence when they're seeing it in their, in their, you know, the grand jury hearings and in the courtroom, that there's enough to convict and. And also the power of pardons. You know. You know, like I was saying that I didn't think until reading and preparing for today how different certain things might have been as far as I was going earlier with the. Had just the 1988 election gone differently, like, had there not been a Lee Atwater putting a little Willie Horton hat out because, and I'm not saying it again for policy reasons, it's more.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Not commenting on that. Better or worse.
[00:44:19] Speaker B: Yeah, it's more of, Dukakis would not most likely have pardoned anyone, and they would have been held to account, which means, would the people who came in their shadow been as confident to pull the same levers of power and make the same moves and an even heightened way, as we discussed a decade later for the Iraq invasion, trying to keep.
[00:44:44] Speaker A: Stuff from Congress or trying to get all that, you know, that's a good point.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: So that's what I mean. Like, like, it just made me realize, wow, that's. Had Bush lost, this may have just that part of things may have played out different then. The other thing is, well, and even if had he lost, someone like Clarence Thomas would have never been appointed to the Supreme Court. So it is, you know, it's a consequential election, for sure, because Thomas and I think a couple other that were appointed during his time were influential in the decision of the 2000 election to stop the counting of votes in Florida. So there is a lot to say about the 1988 election, actually, I just realized. But on a serious note, even similarities and parallels of things like Fon hall shouldn't say things, but people like Fawn hall, who was Oliver North's assistant, who testified in front of Congress that she shredded documents and took classified documents out of the office. And it reminded me of the young lady, Cassidy Hutchinson, last year during the congressional hearings, who was kind of the first underling, let's call it. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but just not an elected person of power, but really a staff person to really, in those hearings, show the american people like, wow, this was pretty crazy. You know, behind the scenes, people were doing this stuff on purpose, trying to disrupt the system. And so that's where I feel. Then back to the pardons. I know we spoke of this privately. When I think of the pardons of people like Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon specifically, who then Manafort seems to have gone off into the sunset, but Stone and Bannon have been involved with disrupting other things. Like, think about the whole storming of the capital in Brazil in the last year, that that was a Steve Bannon. He was the architect of that. So you figure if he doesn't get pardon, certain things don't happen after the fact. And it just reminded me of something similar, like these players. And I'm not saying that we should do away pardons. I just think it's just interesting.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: It's just interesting to see. Yeah, it's just interesting to see like you take the system with its good and bad and this is one that's just, it has an interesting consequence because you're right, it does provide an air of. It actually enhances the ends justify the means thinking. Because it's like, hey, we gotta have the presidential power because we can do whatever we want to do and then throw a pardon at the end and we'll be okay.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: Well, that's why. You're absolutely right. I'm glad you said that because I thought about this during our conversation, but I was gonna forget to say it because that's. You're absolutely right. That, because I was thinking that that's why George hw went all out to win that election. Because he, you know, looking at this now, he knew that it was not going to be pretty for him and many others had he not had his lever, hands on the levers of power. And I think that that's why we should be prepared for the next year until the 24 election because there's other people out there running for office now that really, really know that if they don't get their hands on power, their lives and the lives of people around them might be much different to a negative weight.
[00:47:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:48] Speaker B: And so, and so they do, they.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: Can issue pardons for people and I mean, and that's part of the discussion already. Is there been all, I'm gonna pardon all these people and so forth.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: You know what I find interesting makes.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: It more, I mean it's hard to say that the president presidency is even more consequential than we think. But in many ways it is in that sense that you can kind of the whole, so, because what I was gonna say is that one of the lessons we can have from this is that the system does have to play outd like it does have to, like we don't want a system where these guys go to jail the next day, you know, because then that's gonna play out in other ways as well where it's just like, oh, okay, well you can accuse anybody of anything and then you're gonna do that to your political opponents. Like let the process play out in the open and you know, like the public sees it. That doesn't mean that voting is the only accountability. There's laws, the laws have nothing to do. You don't rob a bank and just say, okay, well, let the, let the votes decide whether I go to jail like you do something wrong, you know, you gotta deal with the law enforcement consequences. But then if you're a politician, you also have to deal with the political consequences as well. That's not one or the other. But ultimately, it does mean that because we look back at all this now, and it's like all of this, we saw, we see all this stuff that happened between 85 and 93, like, oh, wow. And we talk about it in a 45 minutes or 50 minutes show, you know, but it's like that, living through that was a lot. It just like what we're living through right now. We know, we talk when, 20 years, we'll talk about, oh, yeah, the time between 2020 and 2024 or whatever, when, you know, like, there was an attempt to take out the kind of the constitutional system and just stay in power regardless of how votes turned out. You know, so we got to let the system play out. And then ideally the, there are a couple of eject buttons. But besides that, you can, you know, like, the system does tend to have its, allow it, the defense mechanisms can still operate. That doesn't mean they're going to be perfect, you know, but they, they can operate. And so that, to me, was one of the biggest lessons is that we're just living, we call it living through the dash, you and I. But we're just living through one of these moments where the, the actions that have happened are being kind of, you know, vetted out and, and played out this and we'll see, you know, when it ends up happening.
[00:49:54] Speaker B: And what I find kind of fascinating is the one individual who you already named who's kind of like, connected to both the Iran Contra directly. And then our recent, what we're talking about the recent attempt to usurp power in a certain way with January 6, which is William Barr.
[00:50:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: You know, he was a 41 year old attorney general back then who did that thing, they call it the Christmas Eve massacre or something, had some name like that where they just pardoned everybody in the shadow of Christmas Eve and.
[00:50:23] Speaker A: Then lost the election. You know, like next January is when the transition of powers.
[00:50:27] Speaker B: And it's interesting to, to see him on this tail end of his life here. Obviously, he's an older man now. He's in his seventies. But then it was the day after Chris, I mean, this guy's got a special relationship with Christmas. Think about it. The day after Christmas. It was December 26 when he resigned, almost 30 years later in 2020 from the Trump administration.
And I always found that curious. And January 6 made me realize why. Cause I thought this guy just served all this time. Who resigns to the day after Christmas when you're gonna be out of work in two weeks anyway, you know, on January 20, it was gonna change. And then I learned, I said, okay, after January 6, like, okay, this guy.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: He didn't want to be a part of.
[00:51:07] Speaker B: Yeah, he got window what was coming, and he didn't want to be a part of it. Which tells me this probably may not end the same way for this cast of characters as it did for the Iran Contra cast. Like, well, not all.
[00:51:17] Speaker A: It depends, because remember, there were convictions there, too. It's just there were pardons. So it depends on who's in power at the various points on whether or not, like, I guess whether it sticks is one thing, but, yeah, I found that telling, too. He was just like, look, I ain't going down this.
[00:51:30] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: I'm not.
[00:51:33] Speaker B: This guy's seen how to pull those levels of power, and he realized, but you know what, that's interesting, too, which is a whole different, just a quick, fun tangent is it's also because, you know, even if you're corrupted and you want to do things that may not be legal as a leader, you still have to, have to have the confidence of your henchmen. And what it tells us is George HW Bush and that kind of class and generation of politicians, they were able to gain the confidence of someone like a William Barr. He might have been a young guy, say, okay, this is kind of sideways, but I know, you know, well, believe what you're doing.
[00:52:09] Speaker A: Yeah, but there's something else going on there that you have to mention. And that is it goes back to what we're talking about, the hand, having your hands on the presidency. It mattered, like, because Bar went along with what, you know, like the, the whole Muller stuff and trying to undercut the Mueller stuff. Suddenly it's not like he didn't while.
[00:52:24] Speaker B: He was the attorney general.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: Well, let me know. Let me.
[00:52:26] Speaker B: President Trump lost his confidence.
[00:52:28] Speaker A: Well, I don't necessarily think it's that necessarily, though, because he may not have had it, but when he has the power of the pardon, then he can you can you have more flexibility. Bar just saw that in two, three weeks that the power of the presidency to do pardons wasn't going to be there anymore. And if Trump would have won or, you know, if Trump, if this was in 2000 or in 2018, Barr might have been on board with this because, like, well, we'll see how this shakes out. And we have to issue any pardons. We have two years to do so. But he's at the tail, and that's what's happening now. Like, the, without the ability to do pardons, if anybody gets convicted of something, they're just, they're just stuck, you know? And so I think bar also recognized that piece of it is that you can't do something at the very end and not have time to pardon yourself if it doesn't go right. So, I mean, I'm sure there's some, there's some confidence issues there, but there's also just the mechanics of it. Like, if we fail here, we can't pardon ourselves.
[00:53:19] Speaker B: Look, I also think that from what we've seen now, that's all been played out. I'm sure it was so chaotic at the tail end of this recent administration he was involved with in comparison to when they lost in 1992, just, he probably was like, man, I just got.
[00:53:34] Speaker A: To get out of here and think about it. They were looking back at things that had happened over the last six years, whereas they were trying to go down the road in 2020. Like, we haven't. We're about to do the stuff, harden ourselves.
[00:53:48] Speaker B: We did years ago. That's what I mean by he lost the confidence of the underling, where people are probably looking at us saying, okay, dude, I can't follow you down. Like, the serious people like William Barr, that could maybe actually move levers of power behind the scenes, that they probably were like, man, this is too crazy.
[00:54:03] Speaker A: I can't.
[00:54:03] Speaker B: I can't be part of this. So anyway, that's, that's our fun speculation.
[00:54:08] Speaker A: Yeah. But no, I think ultimately, though, like, there is just seeing this type of stuff, it does allow you ideally, to have a little more perspective and not go too high or too low, you know, with the, with whatever's happening in the current day, because this was all the rage in its current day. And then nowadays, people haven't thought about this for decades, you know? And so each kind of thing where each generation lives through their things that are, like, all consuming, but we do still have people that are supporting the constitution and that are trying to keep, put the constitution above the people. As long as you still have that, then the system still has a chance to keep pushing. And that's what we're seeing now.
But this too shall pass, and there'll be some other fight in ten years or 20 years that everybody's all the rage. And so when we look back at this, like, oh, yeah, remember that. So ideally, at least, provided the system holds, which, again, all you can ask for at this point is that people are still fighting for it. And then I. You got to show up at the voting booth and make sure that your voice is heard, because the system, that's the lifeblood of the system. So. Yeah, I think we can wrap from there, man. We appreciate everybody, for joining us on this episode of call. Like, I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us. Tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:55:16] Speaker B: I'm a contra. Because that sounds cool. Reminded me of that video game we used to play as a kid.
[00:55:21] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.
Code to get unlimited lives or anything like that.
[00:55:27] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:55:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:28] Speaker B: So there you go, man.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: Back in the day, that was our. That was our, like, most knowledge of Contra at the time. It was like, oh, yeah. You know, like that video game. So.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: But now, anyway, I'm too big on it. Yep.
[00:55:39] Speaker A: Yep. All right. We'll talk to you next time.
