
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 19, 1994                   TAG: 9401190138
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: From The Washington Post and Associated Press reports
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

IRAN-CONTRA PROSECUTOR UNLEASHES A FINAL BLAST

A seven-year investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal produced "no credible evidence that President Reagan violated any criminal statute," but concluded that Reagan "set the stage for the illegal activities of others" by encouraging them to win freedom for American hostages in Lebanon and arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh said Tuesday.

In a two-volume final report that was immediately denounced by Reagan, former Attorney General Edwin Meese, ex-President Bush and others, the Iran-Contra prosecutor declared that Reagan's aides withheld information on the scandal from prosecutors and Congress.

Impeachment of Reagan "certainly should have been considered" by the congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra affair, prosecutor Lawrence Walsh told a news conference. But Walsh would not say whether he had favored impeachment and added that the cover-up made it hard for Congress to consider it.

Reagan called Walsh's report a "vehicle for baseless accusations that he could never have proven in court."

Walsh's report portrays Bush as more fully informed about the scandal than he has acknowledged. And it reveals that prosecutors wanted to question Bush about entries in his diaries suggesting a high-level effort in November 1986 to coerce Secretary of State Walsh George Shultz into following the administration line on Iran-Contra.

Walsh also criticized Bush's pardons of ex-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra figures as either "an act of friendship or an act of self-protection." The pardons were issued on Christmas Eve 1992, two weeks before the scheduled start of Weinberger's criminal trial - in which Bush was a potential witness.

"They skirted the law; some of them broke the law," Walsh's report concluded.

Walsh portrait of misconduct at the top of the administration rewrote the history of the 7-year-old scandal originally dismissed by the Reagan administration as involving no illegality and later portrayed by congressional investigators as the product of a handful of uncontrolled aides.

by CNB