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→Independent counsel investigation
[[Michael Ledeen]] was an early player in the affair, and eventually arranged for arms sales to Iran though the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. John Poindexter later resigned, but returned to work under [[George W. Bush]]'s administration. Oliver North was also a major player in the affair and was called upon to testify before Congress and was questioned for a number of days. His strong answers in the face of Congressional grilling led him to become a type of folk hero at Congress's expense. [[Caspar Weinberger]] was indicted, and pardoned by [[George H.W. Bush]].
[[Michael Ledeen]] was an early player in the affair, and eventually arranged for arms sales to Iran though the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. John Poindexter later resigned, but returned to work under [[George W. Bush]]'s administration. Oliver North was also a major player in the affair and was called upon to testify before Congress and was questioned for a number of days. His strong answers in the face of Congressional grilling led him to become a type of folk hero at Congress's expense. [[Caspar Weinberger]] was indicted, and pardoned by [[George H.W. Bush]].
==Independent counsel investigation==
In the opinion of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who investigated the affair, under the Arms Export Control Act <ref>http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode22/usc_sup_01_22_10_39_20_II.html</ref> such sales to foreign powers not deemed under the term of the act friendly are illegal.<ref>http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/execsum.htm</ref> Payments to the Contras from the proceeds of private sales, while not illegal, in the opinion of critics were considered highly unethical. Later such arrangements were made explicitly illegal by the [[Boland amendment]] to the Federal Appropriation Bill. The independent counsel's opinion alleged that the Reagan administration set about misleading congressional inquiries and may have withheld some documents.
The week after the story was blown open by media outlets in the wake of midterm congressional elections after [[Democrats]] retook the Senate in November 1986, President Reagan returned to the airwaves to affirm that weapons were transferred to Iran, but he claimed they were not part of an exchange for hostages. In a speech in March 1987, he acknowledged that the arms were in fact exchanged for hostages, saying that "what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages." <ref>http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/reagan/irancontra.html</ref> The Reagan administration cooperated with the investigation, and no wrongdoing was ever proven. Reagan later stated in his autobiography that, "until Ed Meese uncovered North's memorandum, I had not heard a whisper about funds being channeled from the Iranian arms shipments to the Contras, and I would have not approved of it if anyone had suggested it to me....Yes, I believed in helping the Contras; ''but no one, including the President, is above the law''." <ref>''An American Life, The Autobiography of Ronald Reagan, pg. 542''</ref>
[[Michael Ledeen]] was an early player in the affair, and eventually arranged for arms sales to Iran though the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. John Poindexter later resigned, but returned to work under [[George W. Bush]]'s administration. Oliver North was also a major player in the affair and was called upon to testify before Congress and was questioned for a number of days. His strong answers in the face of Congressional grilling led him to become a type of folk hero at Congress's expense. [[Caspar Weinberger]] was indicted, and pardoned by [[George H.W. Bush]].
==The fair haired boy==
In March of 1986 a meeting was held in a bunker at Camp Robinson located in North Little Rock between Bill Clinton, Clinton's aide Bob Nash, Terry Reed, Max Gomez, Felix Rodriguez, Oliver North, resident CIA agent Akihide Sawahata and an unidentified man in charge (possibly [Robert Gates]] or [[William Barr]]) who said he was the emissary for CIA Director Bill Casey.
Casey's emmisary said to Clinton,
{{Cquote|The deal we made was to launder our money through your bond business but what we didn't plan on was you and your******* ******* here start taking yourselves seriously and purposely shrinking our laundry.})
The emissary stated intelligence agencies have the same problem drug traffickers have, laundering cash and finding a bank willing to break the law by not filing documentation required. The substantial bond business gave the state a huge cash flow that would allow dirty and clean money to co-mingle. All they lacked was a dirty banker to cooperate with them by ignoring the federal banking laws. They found this within the Clinton administration. The banker was the [[Arkansas Development and Finance Authority]] which was a creation of and
directly under the control of Governor Bill Clinton. More than $100,000 was paid by ADFA in legal fees to the [[Rose Law Firm]].
A state investment bank was [[capital]]ized by large cash transfusions that the CIA was taking great pains to hide. This solved the CIA's dilemma of funding the Contras, but no legal way to deliver it directly. The agency was barred by Congress with the Boland Amendment from
converting the cash into weapons and training the Contras.
The CIA needed other companies that would be a source of secretly produced weapons which would find their way into the hands of the Contras. Those businesses needed payment to perform these services for the CIA and that cash came to them conveniently in an illegal undetectable manner through ADFA in the form of industrial development loans.
But the laundry was shrinking. CIA knew Clinton and his people had not abided by his agreement with the agency. The emissary remonstrated sternly,
{{Cquote|Our deal was for you to get 10% of the profits, not 10% of the gross...This has turned into a feeding frenzy by your good-ole-boy sharks and you've had a hand in it too, Mr. Clinton ... Our deal with ''you'' was to launder ''our'' money. You get 10% after costs and post-tax profits. No one agreed for you to start loaning out money to your friends through your ADFA so that they could buy machinery to build our guns. Mr. Sawahata tells me that one of ADFA's first
customers was some parking meter company that got several million dollars in ... how shall we say it. .. in preferred loans.}}
==The fair haired boy==
==The fair haired boy==