『Iran-Contra: The Reagan Scandal』のカバーアート

Iran-Contra: The Reagan Scandal

Iran-Contra: The Reagan Scandal

著者： YesOui
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The Reagan White House selling arms to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, both illegal under separate laws. Oliver North running the operation from the National Security Council basement. The Boland Amendment. The hostages in Lebanon. The Ayatollah's regime. Fawn Hall shredding documents. The Tower Commission and the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987. North's Marine uniform testimony. Reagan's "I don't remember" defense. Poindexter's conviction, then reversal. The biggest scandal since Watergate. — a daily series with new episodes every day.© 2026 YesOui.ai 世界 政治・政府 政治学
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  • Walsh vs. the System: When Convictions Weren't Enough

    Walsh vs. the System: When Convictions Weren't Enough
    2026/10/12
    (00:00:00) Walsh vs. the System: When Convictions Weren't Enough
    (00:01:17) What Walsh Was Dealing With
    (00:02:58) The Immunity Problem
    (00:04:43) Poindexter's Rise and Fall
    (00:06:16) Reagan's Memory and the Question of the Top
    (00:07:30) The Pardons
    (00:09:01) What Eight Years Tells Us

    December 1986. Lawrence Walsh, a 74-year-old former federal judge, is handed a mandate to prosecute crimes the Reagan White House spent months burying. Documents were already shredded. Witnesses were lawyering up. And the legal traps were already set.

    This episode tracks Walsh's eight-year investigation as Independent Counsel — not the televised spectacle of the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, but what came after. The quiet, grinding legal battle to hold Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others criminally accountable for their roles in the arms-for-hostages scheme and the illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras.

    Walsh built real cases. A jury convicted North on three felony counts in 1989 — aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, destroying documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity. Poindexter followed with five felony convictions in 1990. These were serious findings against senior officials who had broken the law.

    Then the immunity problem unraveled everything. Congress had granted both men limited immunity to testify publicly in 1987. That decision, made to get their accounts on record, created a legal shield that appellate courts used to vacate both sets of convictions. Not because the facts were wrong. Because the procedural architecture around the prosecution kept collapsing under the weight of what Congress had done first.

    The episode examines what the Walsh investigation actually reveals about the limits of legal accountability when the people being investigated control — or have already damaged — the institutions doing the investigating. The Boland Amendment. The Tower Commission. The shredder that jammed. And the question that runs through all of it: can the law hold power to account when power shapes the law?

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
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    13 分
  • Cover-Up as Evidence: Fawn Hall, the Shredder, and What Got Left Behind

    Cover-Up as Evidence: Fawn Hall, the Shredder, and What Got Left Behind
    2026/10/11
    (00:00:00) Cover-Up as Evidence: Fawn Hall, the Shredder, and What Got Left Behind
    (00:00:50) Two Illegal Schemes, One Operation
    (00:03:00) Oliver North and the Basement Operation
    (00:04:18) Fawn Hall and the Shredder
    (00:05:51) The Tower Commission
    (00:07:05) The 1987 Hearings and North's Uniform
    (00:08:46) Reagan's Defense and the Memory Question
    (00:10:07) Convictions, Reversals, and Pardons
    (00:11:33) What the Cover-Up Revealed

    When a shredder jams, it usually means nothing. But on November 21, 1986, the machine that jammed in Fawn Hall's office inside the Old Executive Office Building was full of documents that exposed one of the most serious abuses of executive power in American history. This episode unpacks the Iran-Contra scandal at its operational core — what was actually happening, who was running it, and how the act of destruction became the act of confession.

    The Reagan administration was simultaneously running two illegal schemes. First, it was secretly selling arms to Iran, in direct violation of an active arms embargo, on the internal justification that weapons could win goodwill with Iranian moderates and free American hostages held in Lebanon. Second, the profits from those sales were being secretly funnelled to the Nicaraguan Contras — explicitly prohibited by the Boland Amendment, a law Congress had passed in 1984 to end exactly that kind of support.

    Running the operation was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, an NSC staffer working out of the White House basement with extraordinary operational reach for his rank. His superior, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, knew. How far up the chain knowledge extended became the scandal's defining unanswered question.

    When a Lebanese magazine broke the story in November 1986, North and Hall spent days shredding files and smuggling documents out in Hall's clothing and boots. The shredder jammed. Fragments survived. Investigators had enough.

    This episode also examines the Tower Commission — the review board convened by Reagan himself — and what its findings revealed about institutional failure, plausible deniability, and a president who said, repeatedly, that he could not remember.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
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    14 分
  • Christmas Eve Pardons: How Bush Buried the Iran-Contra Reckoning

    Christmas Eve Pardons: How Bush Buried the Iran-Contra Reckoning
    2026/10/10
    (00:00:00) Christmas Eve Pardons: How Bush Buried the Iran-Contra Reckoning
    (00:00:40) Where the Story Stood
    (00:02:03) The Weinberger Case
    (00:03:29) Five Others and One Pattern
    (00:05:02) What Bush Knew
    (00:06:17) The Legal Architecture of Accountability
    (00:07:42) Political Calculation
    (00:09:39) The Constitutional Question
    (00:10:57) What Was Never Resolved
    (00:12:37) Closing

    On Christmas Eve 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed pardons for six Iran-Contra figures — and in a single afternoon, dismantled what remained of Lawrence Walsh's six-year prosecution. This episode examines the moment the Iran-Contra scandal was officially buried, not by the courts, but by executive power.

    At the centre of the story is Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's Secretary of Defense. Walsh had indicted Weinberger on five counts of obstruction, perjury, and false statements, alleging he had concealed detailed personal diaries from investigators. Those diaries, Walsh believed, held evidence linking the most senior Reagan officials — possibly including Bush himself — to knowledge of the covert operation. The trial was set for January 1993. Bush pardoned Weinberger on December 24. The trial never happened.

    Also pardoned were Robert McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clair George — men who had pleaded guilty or been convicted for their roles in the affair. Their records were wiped clean.

    Bush justified the pardons as an act of mercy toward patriotic public servants and accused Walsh of criminalising policy disagreements. Walsh's response was unambiguous: the pardons were the final act of a cover-up, and they were issued by a man who was himself a potential subject of the investigation — a vice president who had attended key meetings and withheld his own diary from investigators.

    This episode examines what justice almost looked like, and exactly how it was prevented.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
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    15 分
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