In the first week of November, 1992, with a presidential election looming, and with the incumbent president, George H.W. Bush, looking to be in some difficulty due to a bizarre three-way race, and due to a surprisingly strong challenge from Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, an announcement shook the race to its foundations. Four days before the election, Lawrence Walsh, the lifelong Republican who had been appointed as the special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra scandal, announced the indictment of Caspar Weinberger, who had been Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan while the illegal arms-for-hostages scheme had been implemented. This was Walsh's second bite at this particular apple; he had secured an indictment against Weinberger five months earlier. That indictment had been dismissed on technical grounds.

Walsh came back at Weinberger because he believed that Weinberger had lied in a previous proceeding when he said that he had not kept diary notes of his meetings on the subject of Iran-Contra. It turned out that, not only had Weinberger done so, but that some of those notes put then-Vice President Bush at the center of the scandal, despite Bush's six-year assertion that he had been "out of the loop." As David Cay Johnston wrote in The New York Times:

The new indictment had accused Mr. Weinberger of making a false statement when he told Congress in 1987 that he did not keep regular notes about his activities at the Pentagon. In fact, the indictment said, he took thousands of pages of diary notes during his years in office. The indictment had ignited a furor because it quoted a previously undisclosed entry in Mr. Weinberger's diary that sharply contradicted Mr. Bush's longstanding contention that he did not realize until after the Iran-contra affair was disclosed in 1986 that the weapons sales to Iran were an arms-for-hostage deal.

What is more important to our purposes now is the years-long political campaign conducted by Republican politicians, and by the nascent conservative media apparatus, to demolish Walsh's investigation and to protect both Reagan and Bush from culpability in the sale of expensive US arms to the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world as a bribe to gain the release of American hostages. This investigation could not be allowed to stand. The assault was well-documented by Walsh in Firewall, his memoir of his time as special prosecutor. I suggest that Robert Mueller and every one of the lawyers he hires pick up a copy, because that's what's coming down the road in their direction, and at full gallop. In fact, the advance guard already has arrived.

Leading the pack is N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of civilization's rules and Leader (perhaps) of the civilizing forces. I thought Gingrich had already moved along to his role as a part-time gargoyle at the Vatican by now, but, over the weekend, he emerged in the vanguard of the fight to short-circuit Mueller's investigation of the president*, his associates' ties to Russia, and the effort he's made to cover up those ties. From The Hill, quoting Gingrich on the electric Twitter machine:

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Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair. Look who he is hiring.check fec reports. Time to rethink. — Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) June 12, 2017

It's important to remember that, without a gift for hypocritical political slander, Gingrich would have spent his life teaching history to undergraduates at Bugtussle State Teachers College. It's especially important to remember this when he waxes wroth about anyone else's political motivations.

"I think Congress should now intervene and they should abolish the independent counsel, because Comey makes so clear that it's the poison fruit of a deliberate manipulation by the FBI director leaking to the New York Times, deliberately set up this particular situation. It's very sick."

("Sick," by the way, was one of the words on Gingrich's famous suggested list of calumnies that conservative politicians should employ in their campaigns, which remains his lasting gift to American politics. There it is, right between "shame," of which Newt has none, and "spend(ing)," which is something Newt knows how to do.)

The new attacks are hilariously ironic. At the time of his appointment, Mueller was praised by Republicans and Democrats as a perfect choice for the job, and conventional wisdom had it that Mueller's appointment was a godsend to the Republican Party, because Mueller's investigation removed the matter from the polarized national legislature and gave the GOP a way to distance themselves from a renegade president. And this was only three weeks ago.

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What changed, of course, were the stakes. James Comey testified last week. Mueller started putting together what is by all accounts a lethal team of professional prosecutors. It became clear that he considered his mandate to include a great deal beyond Michael Flynn and what the president* whispered to Comey out of earshot from everyone else. It became clear that Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III appeared to be up to his knees in something unseemly. Meanwhile, the president* couldn't keep his trap shut and couldn't stop screwing up on the big stage. As the situation grew darker, the Republicans decided to hunker themselves down with the president* in the hopes of passing the retrograde policies of their dreams. There already are calls for Mueller and Comey to be investigated. It took them six years to get around to demanding that the same be done to Lawrence Walsh.

This is going to be a long, bloody, and (yes) partisan political fight, and god bless it for that. There are serious constitutional and democratic principles involved here that touch upon what we think we are as a nation. A fight over those things should be long and bloody and partisan. Don't let the voices of "moderation" and "civility" convince you otherwise. There is no gentle, easy way out of the predator-laden swamp into which we voted ourselves last November. Business is no longer usual.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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