Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 9, 1994 TAG: 9402090215
SECTION: NATL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals released hundreds of pages of previously secret court documents filed in December by former President Reagan and former Attorney General Edwin Meese seeking to block the Jan. 18 release of the prosecutor's report.
But North's name was absent from the court files. One court document had black ink blotting out the name of a third party seeking to suppress the report. The name was North's, and it was blacked out by court officers at the request of North and his lawyers, according to the sources, who have closely followed the seven-year investigation of the scandal.
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said North's lawyers removed from court files their secret motions seeking to stop release of the report.
``We just don't have any comment,'' North lawyer Nicole Seligman said when asked about the former White House aide's decision to keep his court motions off the public record.
North is seeking the Republican nomination for the Senate seat held by Charles Robb, D-Va.
The report by prosecutor Lawrence Walsh concludes that Reagan acquiesced in a cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal spearheaded by Meese. It also concludes that North regarded Reagan's comments about secretly assisting the Nicaraguan Contras as ``an invitation to break the law.''
In the newly released court papers, filed Dec. 3, Reagan's lawyers complained that Walsh's then-secret report ``contains page after page of innuendo that former President Reagan and others might have transgressed criminal laws.''
Walsh's report ``is fraught with scurrilous accusations intended to damage the good name of honest public servants like former Attorney General Edwin Meese,'' lawyers said in the newly released court filing.
Meese's lawyers asked the appeals court judges to delete from Walsh's report ``accusations ... pertaining to any alleged criminal conduct on the part of Edwin Meese.''
Reagan asked that the court refuse to release Walsh's report ``to the public or any other entity or person'' unless it was rewritten to remove ``opinions, conclusions and innuendo.''
The sources said North made similar objections. Walsh's Dec. 8 court filing arguing against suppression addresses Reagan's objections side-by-side with the objections of the blacked-out third party.
Unlike Reagan and Meese, North was tried and convicted of three felonies in the Iran-Contra scandal. The convictions later were set aside and eventually dismissed because prosecutors were unable to show that North's trial was free of taint from his immunized congressional testimony in 1987.
by CNB