Regarding Barcella's claim that he had urged an extension of the investigation and that Hamilton had turned him down, Hamilton suddenly bristled.
"That would have been an extraordinary development," Hamilton said, indicating that he would have remembered that. "We would not have closed an investigation if there was pending evidence."
When I asked Hamilton about the Russian report, he responded, "none of that is ringing a bell with me." I then e-mailed him a PDF file of the Russian report.
Barcella's Response
I also contacted Barcella, who is now a lawyer in private practice at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP. He responded via e-mail, beginning with some personal insults:
"It's sad that after so many years, you're still obsessing over this. It's equally sad that you have insisted on one-sided interpretations and twisted characterizations of things. Nonetheless, at the risk of feeding your quixotic obsession, here's my best recollection, recognizing it is at best partial after nearly 2 decades.
"The information from Russia came in literally at the last minute. It's [sic] source was unclear and needed verification. The information was hardly self-authenticating and lacked detail. Russia was in chaos in this immediate post-Soviet Union period and information and disinformation was spewing out like and uncapped oil well.
"The Task Force report was either printed or at the printers. The Task Force authorization was expiring or expired. It was only authorized for that Congress and that congress had expired. I spoke briefly w/ Lee [Hamilton] and don't recall whether I showed him the Russian report or not.
"He felt ham-strung, as there was a new Congress, a new(and Democratic)President, a new Administration and new priorities and nothing could be done w/o a whole new re-authorization process. The original authorization had been very acrimonious and had taken weeks and weeks.
"He wasn't sure there was any stomach for fighting for re-authorization, particularly given the thoroughness of the investigation and confidence in the results. There's no doubt in my mind that if It were up to Lee, he would have given me the green light.
"The realist in him knew that the House leadership wasn't going to break their pick on a re-authorization fight."
Hamilton, however, told me that he had no recollection of any such re-authorization request from Barcella. After receiving the PDF file of the Russian report, Hamilton also reiterated that he had no recollection of having ever seen it before, nor did his staff aide on the task force, Michael Van Dusen.
Barcella's contention in his e-mail about "the thoroughness of the investigation and confidence in the results" is also open to question.
On Dec. 8, 1992, recognizing the report's shaky conclusions, Barcella ordered his deputies "to put some language in, as a trap door" in case later disclosures disproved parts of the report or if complaints arose about selective omission of evidence. [For the "trap door" memo, click here.]
After the trap-door memo, more late-arriving evidence implicated the Reagan campaign, but that material was either shoved aside or misrepresented in the final report.
For instance, a detailed letter from former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr dated Dec. 17, 1992, and describing his first-hand account of internal battles with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over whether to conspire with the Republicans was dismissed as "hearsay" that lacked probative value.
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