Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.
"Mr. Barr," wrote Safire in August of 1992, "could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein's perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine." He added, "They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands."
In August and September of 1992, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate. In December, Barr helped Bush shoot down another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that George H.W. Bush would be prosecuted for his Iran-Contra crimes.
Independent Counsel Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve in 1992, "plans to review a 1986 campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush." The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the crimes.
"But," noted Johnston, "in a single stroke, Mr. Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh's effort, which began in 1986."
Walsh didn't take it lying down, even though he knew the cover-up was now finalized.
Johnston noted that, "Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President's action, charging that 'the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.'"
As Johnston reported, Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented, "evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public."
Walsh had been fighting to get those documents ever since 1986, when he was appointed and Reagan still had two years left in office. Bush's and Weinberger's refusal to turn them over, Johnston noted in the Times, could have, in Walsh's words, "forestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan" through a "pattern of 'deception and obstruction.'"
Barr successfully helped Bush decapitate the investigation into Bush's crimes.
Now it appears that Barr is doing the same sort of cover-up work for Trump.
Part of a Pattern Among Republican Attorneys General
It's amazing the power that an attorney general has, particularly when wielded by a man who thinks himself above the law and immune to public opinion.
Back in Nixon's day, for example, Jeb Magruder told reporters Nixon had ordered his own attorney general, John Mitchell, to cover up parts of the Watergate break-in. (Magruder later went to prison for his actions.)
John Mitchell's wife Martha learned about it and was in the process of telling United Press International reporter Helen Thomas the story over the phone when one of John Mitchell's men burst in as she was saying, according to Thomas, "You just get away."
Stephen King, then an ex-FBI agent whom Mitchell had assigned to watch his wife, had, according to Newsweek's account of how veteran crime reporter Marcia Kramer heard it from Martha Mitchell, broken into the room, pulled the phone out of her hands and out of the wall, and then beat her black-and-blue and sedated her with an injection.
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