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2009 by the DOJ’s inspector general—this one involving the scandal arising out of Gonzales’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys—found that he “may have lied to Congress.” And a 2009 report jointly issued by the inspectors general of five different cabinet agencies concerning the NSA wiretapping concluded that Gonzales had provided “confusing, inaccurate” statements when testifying to Congress about government eavesdropping. Yet even though lying to Congress and federal investigators is a felony under U.S. law, none of those incidents led to any criminal investigations of Gonzales, let alone indictments or prosecutions.
    This nonchalant attitude toward Gonzales’s lawbreaking followed the template established during the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, where high-level officials had similarly been let off the hook. Tellingly, Oliver North, a key figure in Iran-Contra, became a beloved folk hero on the right because of how proudly he boasted of lying to Congress. Consider the following exchange between North and John Nields, counsel to the congressional joint committee investigating Iran-Contra—an exchange that boosted North into superstardom among the Republican faithful and many in the media class.
    NORTH : I will tell you right now, counsel, and to all the members here gathered, that I misled the Congress.
NIELDS : At that meeting?
NORTH : At that meeting.
NIELDS : Face to face?
NORTH : Face to face.
NIELDS : You made false statements to them about your activities in support of the Contras?
NORTH : I did.
     
    North then proceeded to proclaim that lying to Congress had been the patriotic thing to do. Days later, North’s loyal secretary, Fawn Hall, captured the prevailing ethos at the Reagan National Security Council when she declared, “Sometimes you have to go above the written law.”
    Indeed, many of the key culprits from Iran-Contra—including Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, John Negroponte, and Otto Reich—went on to occupy important positions in George W. Bush’s administration, while several others ascended to positions of influence in the political and media establishment. Less than a decade after his indictment, Oliver North became the GOP Senate nominee in Virginia. After almost unseating the incumbent, Senator Chuck Robb, he was rewarded with a Fox News contract. Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, left the government under a heavy cloud of scandal but soon ascended to the position of publisher at Forbes magazine. In 2002, he was the featured witness at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, where he advocated an attack on Iraq while all the senators in attendance—led by committee chairman Joe Biden—treated him with the utmost deference.
    That Iran-Contra participants were rewarded with high-profile media posts and sensitive jobs in the Bush 43 administration highlights that lying to Congress is no longer considered a shameful act and is indeed seen by some as perfectly normal, an exercise of a legitimate right by the president and those who work under him. This lenient attitude completely disregards the fact that the law, as enacted by the American people through their representatives in Congress, unambiguously classifies such behavior as a felony.
    The embrace of elite immunity is by no means confined to one party. The conviction that political elites should be shielded from accountability is fully bipartisan and has been embraced by every administration over the past several decades. When Bill Clinton campaigned for president against the incumbent, George H. W. Bush, in 1991, he repeatedly argued that there was serious wrongdoing requiring urgent investigation and possibly prosecution. Clinton was referring not only to the Iran-Contra affair but also to the so-called Iraqgate scandal. Iraqgate entailed well-documented allegations that officials in both the Reagan and Bush administrations, in their efforts to fuel Iraq’s war with Iran, had secretly and illegally