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journalist and is presented as such to his readers by the Washington Post. Our journalist class never tires of touting their vital role as intrepid, adversarial watchdogs keeping a keen eye on the politically powerful. Yet here was an influential pundit explicitly defending the immunity granted to Caspar Weinberger on the grounds that the Pentagon chief was in his social circle and was a fine, admirable man and thus—unlike the many common Washingtonians convicted and imprisoned every day for petty crimes without the slightest objection from Cohen—deserved to be shielded from the criminal justice system. A more naked rejection of Jefferson’s “natural equality of man, the denial of every preeminence” can scarcely be imagined.
    What made the pardon even more pernicious was that the person issuing it—George H. W. Bush—had been centrally involved in many of the incriminating acts as Reagan’s vice president and was widely believed to be at risk himself if the trials of Weinberger and the others proceeded. A major effect of pardoning the remaining Iran-Contra criminals was to put an end to the investigations and thus to exempt Bush from accountability for his own crimes. The post-Nixon pattern was reaffirmed: those who are most politically powerful in our society could break the law with impunity. Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra special prosecutor (and lifelong Republican), said as much.
    President Bush’s pardon of Caspar Weinberger and other Iran-contra defendants undermines the principle that no man is above the law. It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence.
Weinberger, who faced four felony charges, deserved to be tried by a jury of citizens. Although it is the President’s prerogative to grant pardons, it is every American’s right that the criminal justice system be administered fairly, regardless of a person’s rank and connections.
     
    The path from the Watergate and Iran-Contra pardons to the immunity now routinely enjoyed by political elites is easy to see. In 1987, when a House committee issued a report finding that Reagan officials had broken the law, a dissenting claim (authored by future Bush 43 White House aide David Addington) was filed by then–GOP congressman Dick Cheney. Despite obvious evidence of lawbreaking, Cheney defiantly argued that the Reagan administration had done nothing wrong, but rather had acted patriotically. Cheney claimed that Article II of the Constitution, by anointing the president “commander in chief,” vests him with virtually absolute power in foreign policy-making; the other branches cannot restrict him even by duly enacted statutes of the Congress. Two decades later, when the New York Times reported that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law, Cheney likewise insisted that it had done nothing wrong and relied on that same theory of presidential omnipotence. When asked how he could advance such a claim in light of the clear dictates of the law, he responded, “If you want to understand why this program is legal…go back and read my Iran-Contra report.”
    Moreover, during the Bush 43 years, serial lying under oath by high-level political officials became the norm. To gain an appreciation of this culture of crime, one might consider the case of Bush attorney general Alberto Gonzales, whose lies about multiple scandals became so blatant that he was eventually forced to leave office. In 2008, the Bush Justice Department’s own inspector general issued a report on Gonzales’s testimony concerning the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program, finding, as Congressional Quarterly reported, that there was “strong evidence…that the former attorney general lied to federal investigators probing his careless handling of highly classified documents.” A separate inquiry in