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Minority Report of Members of House and Senate Select Committees on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, November 18, 1987.

Author Name, ProPublica

2022-06

Description

After his tour in the Nixon White House, Dick Cheney won election to Congress from Wyoming, in a campaign memorably reported in VICE featuring his wife, Lynne Cheney, doing the honors, denouncing bra-burning on the campaign trail while Cheney recovered from the first of his heart attacks. (Amy Adams has a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her troubles.) Cheney quickly rose in the Republican leadership, who in 1987 assigned him a coveted spot on the joint House and Senate investigation of the Iran-Contra affair that had cost President Reagan the greatest one-month decline in approval ratings in Gallup Poll history. While serving on the committee, Cheney praised serial prevaricator Oliver North (eventually convicted of three felonies, now serving as president of the National Rifle Association) as “the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard.”[7] At the conclusion of the hearings, Cheney, five other House Republicans, and two Senate Republicans issued a minority report (largely authored by committee staffer Michael J. Malbin, a political science professor) disputing the majority conclusions. Warren Rudman, the Republican vice chairman of the Senate side of the investigation, called Cheney’s Minority Report “pathetic” and paraphrased an Adlai Stevenson quip, stating, “this particular report is one in which the editors separated the wheat from the chaff and, unfortunately, it printed the chaff.”[8] The Minority Report described the bipartisan Majority Report as “hysterical” and insisted that although “President Reagan and his staff made mistakes in the Iran-Contra affair,” they were merely “mistakes in judgment, and nothing more. There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for the 'rule of law,' no grand conspiracy, and no administration-wide dishonesty or cover-up.” Cheney’s view of unbridled executive power is clearly evident in the Minority Report. Even as the report acknowledged that Reagan violated the 1984 Bolan amendments by raising third-party funds for the Contras, it reached the conclusion that the President was allowed to break this law because, “we are firmly convinced that the Constitution protects such diplomacy by the president or by any of his designated agents —whether on the NSC staff, State Department or anywhere else.”
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[1] URL: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/18221-national-security-archive-doc-05-minority-report
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
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