A leader of this partisan faction was Judge Silberman, an obstreperous neoconservative who had served as a foreign policy adviser to Reagan's 1980 campaign. At one point during the Iran-Contra scandal, Silberman berated MacKinnon Walsh's principal protector for supporting the special-prosecutor law.
"At a D.C. circuit conference, he [Silberman] had gotten into a shouting match about independent counsel with Judge George MacKinnon," Walsh wrote. "Silberman not only had hostile views but seemed to hold them in anger."
On the North appeal in 1990, Silberman teamed up with a younger conservative, Judge Sentelle, to overturn the three felony counts against North. The appeals court vote was 2-1, as these two Republican "law-and-order" judges suddenly were voting to expand the rights of criminal defendants in cases involving limited immunity, which North had secured from Congress before testifying.
Sentelle, a protégé of conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, also served on a second appeals panel that overturned the conviction of Poindexter on similar grounds.
Despite the reversals, Walsh continued to make investigative progress, stripping away one layer of the cover-up after another. In early 1992, he brought obstruction-of-justice charges against former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and several senior CIA officials. The case was moving dangerously close to then-President Bush.
Picking a Partisan
At that point, Walsh received a call from MacKinnon with some troubling news. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who controlled appointments to the three-judge panel that picked special prosecutors, had decided to oust MacKinnon, Walsh's ally.
Rehnquist was pushing MacKinnon out and putting Sentelle in. Rehnquist made this move although it defied the legal language of the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, the law that created the special prosecutor post.
As a safeguard against partisanship on the three-judge panel that picked special prosecutors, the law stipulated that in appointments to the panel, "priority shall be given to senior circuit judges and retired judges."
That provision had always been followed until 1992 when Rehnquist waived its provisions and reached down for an active junior judge, Sentelle.
Beyond Sentelle's lacking "senior" status, he was known as one of the most conservative partisans on the federal bench. A Reagan appointee, Sentelle had named his daughter, Reagan, after the President.
Sentelle also continued denouncing liberals even after his appointment to the federal bench. In one article published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy in winter 1991, Sentelle accused "leftist heretics" of wishing to turn the United States into "a collectivist, egalitarian, materialistic, race-conscious, hyper-secular, and socially permissive state."
By picking Sentelle, Rehnquist guaranteed that future special prosecutors would be more politically attuned to Republican political needs. Through the 1990s, Sentelle did what he was expected to do, make sure that conservative prosecutors controlled the special prosecutor apparatus, especially on politically sensitive cases.
In Senate testimony in 1999, Sentelle explained that he consciously selected political adversaries to conduct these investigations. For instance, Sentelle said he looked for Republicans "who had been active on the other side of the political fence" to investigate President Bill Clinton and his administration.
Beyond the view of many legal experts that prosecutors should be as impartial as possible neither friends nor foes of the person under investigation Sentelle also had applied his selection strategy differently in 1992 when the subject was George H.W. Bush's administration. Then, he picked a fellow Republican, Joe DiGenova, to handle the investigation.
Hunting the President
