Over the next two years, multiple administration officials would work to circumvent Congress’s prohibition on American involvement, first through fund-raising — soliciting $32 million from Saudi Arabia over several years — and then through illegal arms sales to Iran, spearheaded by a National Security Council staff member, Oliver North. In 1986, the scheme exploded into public view after the Lebanese magazine Al Shiraa published the story of the arms sales to Iran and Sandinista forces downed a cargo plane carrying weapons and other supplies for the contras.

The scandal implicated top cabinet and administration officials, with strong evidence tying Vice President George H.W. Bush to the conspiracy as well. Figures with direct involvement, like North and Adm. John Poindexter (who succeeded McFarlane as national security adviser), altered records and lied to Congress in an attempt to stymie investigators and insulate the president from culpability.

The particular twists and turns of Iran-contra don’t mirror the Russia scandal’s. The politics, however, do. As with Trump and Russia, the White House itself was defiant. “Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North put their careers on the line to protect our country,” Pat Buchanan, then serving as White House communications director, said at a rally in Miami in December 1986. “If Colonel North broke any rules, he will stand up and take it as the Marine he is. But I say, if Colonel North ripped off the ayatollah and took some $30 million to give to the contras, God bless Colonel North.”

Most Republicans outside the administration also stood firmly behind the Reagan administration, even in the face of clear wrongdoing. “I don’t want you prosecuted,” Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said to North during the colonel’s testimony before a House and Senate select committee on the scandal in 1987. “I don’t. I don’t think many people in America do. And I think there’s going to be one lot of hell raised if you are.”

The minority report of the select committee — written by its Republican members, including Dick Cheney, then representing Wyoming — was dismissive of claims of malfeasance. “The bottom line,” it reads, “is that the mistakes of the Iran-contra Affair were just that — mistakes in judgment, and nothing more. There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for ‘the rule of law,’ no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or cover-up.”