Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans & The Iran-Contra Arms Dealing Scandal (Part II)

Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards Podcast is back for Round 2 of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Robert and Ed tee up the uncanny conclusion to this epic saga including some questionable offers of immunity, and unveil whether accountability comes to fruition. (Spoiler alert, it won't.) And don't forget to watch on our SNAFU YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod http://www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Officer, I know you found that half-empty 40 in the center console of my car, but my heart tells me I haven't been drinking tonight, you know? I obeyed the speed limit at all times. I wasn't going 16 in a 50.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or as drunk people often do, they're going like 25 in a 60.

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• 2:03Speaker 01

  Hey everyone, I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, the show about history's greatest screw-ups. It's part chat show, part history lesson, and a big ol' group therapy session for all of humanity. We're back for part two of the Iran-Contra affair with our incredible guest, Robert Evans. Now, if you haven't heard the previous episode, I strongly suggest you jump back and listen to that episode, and then jump forward again to this moment right now, and jump back into this episode, because we are going to wrap up our incredible recounting of the Iran-Contra affair. Robert Evans, of course, is the host of the incredible

• 2:46Speaker 01

  podcast Behind the Bastards, which I highly recommend. Tons of incredible episodes. The best two episodes are the ones on which I was a guest on that podcast.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  People should certainly check out the one on Curtis Yarvin that you guested for.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a fun one. That was a particularly interesting one. Robert, thank you so much for coming back.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me back.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  I am going to give a quick recap for our audience, just in case there's been a little gap in time. So, here's what went down before we move on. It's the 1980s, Reagan was president, and quite simply, he hated commies. Like, he really hated them. So, he funded paramilitaries in Nicaragua, called the Contras, through the CIA, in the hopes that they would defeat the commie government run by the socialist group, the Sandinistas. Separately, the US imposed an embargo on Iran due to their support of the group Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist group that had taken 25 Americans hostage in 1984. To save

• 3:48Speaker 01

  those hostages, Reagan's National Security Council guys, including Lieutenant Oliver North, secretly decided to trade weapons in exchange for some cash and the release of said hostages. Pretty dodgy, especially considering that there was, once again, a literal embargo against Iran.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that we applied a status to Iran that was, "These guys, we absolutely shouldn't be selling missiles to." Like, that was their legal status.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. You could sum this up as, "Hey, we're never, ever gonna sell missiles to Iran." But, also, Iran, do you guys want some missiles? But, like... Yeah, sure.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Iran was also at war with Iraq.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And they needed weapons for this war.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  And they had, in fact, secretly reached out to the US to ask if they could buy some weapons off us. And the answer, of course, should have been, no, we're not dealing with you. There's an embargo going on. But Ali North and his bosses at the National Security Council saw an opportunity here. They wanted a win for Reagan, i.e. they wanted to free some hostages and avoid another Carter-esque snafu. So they decided to go ahead and make a deal with the Iranians. They would secretly sell weapons to the Iranians on the condition that American hostages in Lebanon would be released.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  That's, yeah, yeah. It's, and people, we don't talk enough about the Iran-Iraq war. Like, just so that people know, this is like a World War II, like, kind of conflict in terms of you've got these mass human wave charges, like particularly that like Iran is doing, because they have, they lack so much else in terms of military infrastructure and these huge tank battles that very much are like something out of the Second World War and hideous casualty numbers. And the US, by the way, we are heavily involved in both sides. We kind of helped push Saddam in the early stages of the war. We provided like targeting assistance and whatnot for him. And obviously, we're about to do that for Iran. This is such a messy time in history for us and such a horrible war that doesn't get covered enough.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Amen. I find it interesting, the, you know, in a situation like this, you know, there's clearly political motivation to sort of protect Reagan from another, you know, from the fallout of a hostage situation. But then, of course, there's the very human concern for these hostages and the predicament that they're in.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  And I, again, this is sort of getting back to one of my earlier questions, but like, is it possible to parse the motives here? You know, like, is it, is this more about the, the political machinations?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And and sort of protect protecting Reagan's political reelection possibilities? Or is it, we gotta get these Americans home? And again, it's some of both.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Some of both, and it's gonna depend.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  The more cynical side of me is like, maybe it's more about the political ramifications.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  At the at the at the level of like, Ollie North, and certainly like, people in the Reagan White House. It's it's mostly politics, but you have a lot of people involved at different levels, including folks who like, knows some of the people who have been taken hostage. And so there's absolutely folks who are involved in this too, whose primary, or at least a major concern, is like, well, but my buddies are captive too.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Amen. And I do think the American military has an incredible track record of just going after our own. And and and like, you know, fighting, you know, this recent.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  It's pretty important for morale.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  It's important for morale, right?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Well, sure. Yeah, you're right. But yeah, this extraction from Iran that just happened a month or two ago was was a was an incredible, incredible story. And does speak to it, I think, is a is a pretty beautiful ethos in American general disposition, but certainly our military disposition of like, we don't, we leave no one behind. We go back and get people.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  It's this, it's interesting, because like, the you also have around this time, these these conspiracy theories about like, soldiers left behind in Vietnam, that really certainly by by 79 was not accurate. Like, there weren't huge numbers of Americans like, in captivity in Vietnam. Like, they would have had nothing to benefit from just keeping those guys. But because there is this attitude, this deeply, especially among former servicemen, like, we don't leave people behind, the belief that there were all these guys still trapped in Vietnam, is in this period of time, a huge political, like, football, right? Like, it's a thing that that that is like massively important to a lot of people. Just because, like, even though it's not accurate that those guys are there, because the idea that people were left behind was so offensive to so many people.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Right, right. All right, well, let's jump a couple of years later to the fall of 1986. And we're actually, now, we're gonna go back to Nicaragua. So in October of that year, a US military plane was shot down in Nicaragua. The lone survivor of this this this plane being shot down admitted to the Sandinistas that he was delivering weapons to the Contras for the CIA.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Then, a month later, a Lebanese magazine, Al Shirah, got a scoop that the US had been secretly selling missiles to Iran for the release of American hostages. And by the way, only three hostages had actually been released. So the efficacy of this whole scheme is like, is very much in question.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  What did I never, do you know the ratio of like missiles to guys we were getting?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  That I don't know.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  I actually don't know off the top of my head.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I don't think it was good, because I'm assuming they said a lot of missiles.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  A lot of missiles.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Anyway, this is quite a one-two punch, right? This downed pilot confessing to the Sandinistas that the CIA is helping the Contras, and then, of course, this article coming out in a Lebanese magazine, basically exposing that scandal. So, in response, Reagan did what he was best at. He got on TV. And on November 13th, he addressed America from the White House. And we actually have a little audio clip to play from that press conference here.

• 10:16Speaker 06

  Now, my fellow Americans, there's an old saying that nothing spreads so quickly as a rumor. So I thought it was time to speak with you directly, to tell you firsthand about our dealings with Iran.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Just a little taste of it. But I'll tell you, later in the video, Reagan says he wasn't doing any backdoor trades with Iran. He says, "We did not, repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages." Sorry, I had to work in my Reagan voice.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  No, that was a good Reagan voice.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. But he does say explicitly, "We did not trade weapons or anything else."

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Couldn't have been clearer.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Couldn't have been clearer. Couldn't have been more clear, of course.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out, straight-up lying doesn't put it into things. And soon it will be revealed that these scandals actually had a lot to do with each other. Once all of this starts leaking, Reagan's attorney general, a man by the name of Edwin Meese, stepped ...to figure out just what the heck is going on here.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Uh, so a couple of weeks after this, uh, after this presidential address, on November 25th, 1986, Mies goes on TV to address the nation. And here's where things get a little wild. Mies confirms that yes, the US had actually been selling weapons secretly to Iran. And yes, the US had been backing the Contras in Nicaragua. But then he drops the real bombshell. These were not separate operations. They were the same operation. What? Yes, because Edwin Mies had found what is known as the diversion memo in Oliver North's office.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Now, this memo showed that money from those secret arms sales to Iran wasn't just sitting around, it was being funneled off the books to fund the Contras. So suddenly, what looked like two different scandals snaps into focus as one tangled scheme. Attorney General Mies also had another very important point to make at this press conference, and that was that President Reagan did not know about any of this.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  No, no, of course not.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  He was completely in the dark, totally innocent of any wrongdoing. So, Mies' press conference is kind of like a confession and a cleanup all at the exact same time.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's a remarkable line to try to cross of like, well, we have to admit to breaking the law that the president said that we absolutely didn't do, and also these two things that we said weren't connected are connected, but the president didn't know. But also, he's still a good president. He just didn't know.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, does, does, does a scandal that goes from two bad things to one incredibly complicated big bad thing make it better?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  It's more efficient.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Or more impressive?

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  It's kind of like, this feels like the Usual Suspects moment where you're just like, "Oh, yes, Kobayashi, I get it. He is Kaiser Soze." And we all feel kind of smart and dumb at the same time.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. What we expect from a president, like, it feels a lot like it's declined over the last couple of decades rapidly. But also, like, the, I guess it's just shocking to me the degree to which a lot of people, including people who really liked Reagan, were willing to convince themselves, "Well, he can't, even though there's literally no way this could have happened without Reagan's sign-off, he must not have really known." Like, the amount of slack that he was given for this has always really surprised me. I've never understood it.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Well, we will believe what we want to believe, right? Like, we're just, so much of our, what we think is our rational analysis is just motivated reasoning. And I think that's a prime example of it. Do you remember what Saturday Night Live was doing at this time? They had a brilliant, ongoing series of sketches in which Phil Hartman played Reagan. And they really played with this dichotomy of him being perceived as just this sort of, like, you know, real friendly, just kind of cowboy, who was nice to everybody, but a little bit, kind of, maybe clueless, but that's okay, because he was doing the right thing, his heart was in the right place. And so they'd have these scenes with Phil Hartman,

• 14:53Speaker 01

  you know, like, doing a photo op with a Girl Scout troop or something cute, and then he'd kind of usher them out of the Oval Office, and then he'd be like, "Get in here, everybody!" And he'd pull in all the, everyone, and sit them down, and pull down a map of Iran or wherever, and be like, "Okay, this is what we're gonna do." And then he'd be just barking orders at everybody, and just sort of highlighting that extreme dichotomy of, like, the performance of a kind of, like, a guy who, hey, he got sort of taken for a ride on this whole Iran contra thing.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Grandpa's memory's not great, but his heart's in the right place, and then this, like, blood-soaked madman, yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Go back and watch these old Phil Hartman-Reagan sketches. They're incredible and they're very sort of emblematic of this moment. So Edwin Mies's press conference turned out to be one of those classic moments of trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it. He sent Congress completely spinning out. They're like, wait, wait, wait, what? This was one giant conspiracy? Alright, we gotta get to the bottom of this.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  This is way worse.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, also worth noting that Mies and Reagan were old pals. So it's pretty crazy to think that an attorney general appointed by a president could do a thorough job of investigating his boss, right?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Naturally, everyone in Washington immediately spun into investigative overdrive. The House launched an investigation, the Senate launched an investigation. Reagan, not to be outdone, also appointed a commission led by ex Senator John Tower to investigate. And just for good measure, he brought in independent special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh to investigate and bring charges. Now, Robert, when everyone is investigating everyone else this hard, is that due diligence? Or just like a kind of Shakespearean level of thou dost protest too much?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's like ass covering on a grand scale. Especially, I mean, it's, I guess it's, I'm sure, because like you do want, some of those investigations seem like they're appropriate, right? Like Congress investigating the president seems like it's something that's Congress ought to be doing. The president having his own investigation to like what his guys were doing is a lot of like, we're gonna make sure the foxes really get a good line on what's happening in this hen house, you know? Like that, that, that strikes me as, as fucky.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Just the sheer volume, I mean, it starts to feel like, like layers upon layers of nothing to see here.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Right?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  It's just, it's, we're all investigating so hard that you can no longer see through the, the mess.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Right, and, and it's also like you don't need to look, like nobody else needs to be looking like we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna keep an eye on this. Don't worry, like the truth will come out for sure, we've got it.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Hey, we got this.

• 17:39Speaker 03

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• 20:14Speaker 01

  All right, so a few months later, in February of 1987, the Tower Commission released their report confirming what the diversion memo said and stating that the National Security Council needed reforms after acting far too independently of Congress.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  The level of criminal lawbreaking in the NSC had become so undeniable that Reagan gave his follow-up to his earlier statement. And I'll forego my Reagan imitation this time, just to get this language across. He said, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Amazing, amazing sentence.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  How incredible is that language?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  You've been in more than a few writers' rooms, Ed. Can you imagine how long it took to break that line? Because Reagan wasn't writing that himself. Like, there was a room full of guys up until like 4:00 in the morning being like, "How do we put all this in a sentence?"

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is not just a word salad. This is like a word salad bar. It is a full-on buffet of words scrambled up into some what's supposed to be delicious, but it's still kind of leaving a terrible taste in your mouth. I just want to go back to this. "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true."

• 21:37Speaker 00

  But it's not.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  "Still tell me this thing that I said to you a few months ago is true." But the facts and the evidence, in other words, he's... Externalizing this, he's not saying like my own analysis is of what I said is revealing that I lied to you. He's saying that these other things, these facts and this evidence are telling me that what I told you before, it's not true.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Officer, I know you found that half-empty 40 in the center console of my car, but my heart tells me I haven't been drinking tonight, you know?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  And my best intentions tell me that that doesn't even exist. That 40 is not even there sloshing around in the backseat.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I obeyed the speed limit at all times. I wasn't going 16 and 15.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or as drunk people often do, they're going like 25 in a 60.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Right, one of the two.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  All right, in July of this year, Oliver North and other members involved in the Iran contra affair testified before Congress in live televised hearings as part of both the Senate and House-led investigations. What came out led to wave after wave of indictments from Lawrence Walsh against Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others who had clearly been involved. One of the most insane reveals was that while Mies had claimed to be investigating the NSC's activities, he had actually given Oliver North and John Poindexter a heads-up that he would be coming by. And this gave Oliver North enough time to host a quote,

• 23:16Speaker 01

  "paper shredding party" and destroy or alter thousands of pages of documents before Mies and his team could collect them. Now, that is the actual language. The North said that they had a shredding party. What does calling it a shredding party do to the way we hear something like that? Because it's very different from destroying evidence. It is a shredding party.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  I think it sounds worse because that just sounds like you're deliberately like you are thumbing your nose at any idea of accountability, right? As opposed to like, well, we had a crime party. And I'd be like, well, yeah, you did commit some crimes, but at least you're saying it, right?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  I think it, but I do think in this way that like, language is powerful and it sort of sets us, sets a tone that this was sort of a casual thing and not that big a deal. But it was such a big deal.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  It's a really big deal.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  North's shredding spree didn't erase the scandal, of course, but it erased enough of the paper trail to keep the full story just out of reach. The diversion memo exposed the basic scheme, but anything that might've clearly implicated higher ups, like for example, Ronald Reagan, well, that stuff was gone. So all of this came out in the congressional investigations. North and Poindexter got their comeuppances and justice was served, right? Right?

• 24:44Speaker 00

  In the same way that like, if the mafia appoints a fall guy to take the pin for like a crime, then like, was justice served? Well, yeah, that guy did something, right? But there's other guys that aren't getting.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Well, here's the best part. Because it's even like, the accountability is even worse than you think. I mean, that's part of the, that's part of the beauty of snafu is that, is that accountability is just this ephemeral concept. It doesn't actually apply to anything. You remember there are multiple simultaneous investigations going on here. In a way, they unintentionally undermined each other, which all became sort of its own snafu. So despite the fact that Walsh brought charges against Oliver North and Poindexter and other members of the National Security Council, Congress had already offered North and Poindexter immunity from charges in exchange for their testimony.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  So that meant that 11 individuals were found guilty in either carrying out the plot or in trying to slow down the investigations, but. Not Oliver North or Poindexter, or whether or not they were found guilty, they were, uh, they got off.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Completely got free due to their immunity. Make this make sense to me.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Seems fair to me. I mean, the, the, the sense is that like, the people running the government really wanted to do this and they didn't want their, their friends to get in trouble for breaking the law, right? Like, that's, that's the sense. And it's not so different than the way things work now. Like, it, it's, it's the problem with investing people with power like this and then having the accountability also be them, right? Like, ideally, I get what the founding fathers were trying to do with the separation of powers. And there's a, you know, there's a lot of wisdom in there. It worked out in some ways for a while, but maybe we need like another separate power. Like, a guy who like, doesn't have any other power but if the president's like fucking up, he can like spritz him with like, like, you know, little pepper water, right?

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Like you would with like a, like a misbehaving cat or something like that.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like, the, the guy who, whose job is to like, hold the president to account? Some dude who can, who's, who's, who's like an appointed law enforcement type thing representing the people whose job is to make sure that shit like this doesn't happen, but we'll never do that, right?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Like, because nobody in power would want that to happen. I don't know.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I'm not a legal theorist and I, but I, I would love to kind of hear from a legal expert, some of the theory behind offering immunity to people for their testimony. Uh, it seems like a fair trade, but then you open yourself up to these situations where the person you just offered immunity to.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Might have committed like such a more horrendous crime than you ever even realized. And maybe you got some evidence to help you in this other area, but.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  It's not worth it.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in this case, it's 11 people lower on the totem pole that got, you know, raped across the coals.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Fucked over it.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  And was that worth it? Like, was that, was that a worthy trade off to, to like? Get those people busted if the ringleaders are getting off.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  I think it's a reasonable concept, offering immunity in a situation where like, for example, you're going after like an organized crime ring and you have some guys that you've caught, you know, doing street level dealing or like pimping or whatever. And they're kind of like street level criminals who are willing to roll on their bosses. So you offer them immunity to the lower crimes, you can get the bigger. This is kind of the opposite, where like you're exonerating basically, or you're giving immunity to the guys nearer to the top in order to fuck the people at the bottom who didn't really make much of it, like who weren't like the power players, right?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like it seems like you want to be real savvy about who you're offering immunity to. Like if you like, I would have, and I don't know, not knowing what those 11 people were specifically, you know, charged with, I still, my, my feeling is, I feel like I would have rather given all of them immunity than to, in order to bust Oliver North and Poindexter.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Than the other way around.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it'd almost be like if years from now, we get like criminal prosecutions as a result of like the Doge stuff that was happening and they like give immunity to, to big balls or whoever his name was that was like stealing people's data in order to bust like a security guard who like improperly didn't lock up one night. It's like, well, that doesn't seem right.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. There's a crazy case where a guy was accused of murder and, and someone who was there was given immunity to testify. And once he was given immunity, he claimed to have committed the murder.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Which was, which was pretty demonstrably untrue, but it, it, it enabled the, the actual murderer to be, get off the hook.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  That's really funny.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Isn't that wild?

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  It's like, these are, these are sort of unwieldy things when we unleash them out there.

• 30:00Speaker 03

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• 30:30Speaker 01

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• 32:32Speaker 01

  So even after this whole media circus ended, new evidence was still leading to new revelations and new trials well into the 1990s during George H. W. Bush's presidency. They revealed that many of the National Security Council members who testified before the congressional committees had committed perjury by lying and making false statements in their testimony, attempting to cover up what had really happened. I mean, damn, you just, you can't trust anybody. So, in fact, some previously hidden notes revealed that Bush himself was involved in the scheme as vice president.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Shocking.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  He, of course, was Reagan's vice president, but in one of his last acts as president, George H. W. Bush pardoned everyone involved before further trials could reveal anything more incriminating.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Well, probably nothing to look into there.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, nothing you can do. Accountability, not, not, just not, not a thing.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  No, and I don't think that was the purpose of presidential pardons when they started being a thing, but that certainly seems to be where we've, what we've zeroed in on is the best reason to have presidential pardons is to like, keep your cronies from getting in trouble.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Amen. Now, it's, it's really interesting. I haven't dug into this, this aspect enough, but there are a lot of people who still to this day think Ali North was a hero and that some of these things that they were undertaking were, were for the best reasons. And that they were effectively, obviously, they were breaking the law and they were violating congressional mandates and so forth, but they were doing so with the right motives and the right intentions and that really all of their law breaking could be categorized as just cutting through the red tape to get something done.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  I was raised to believe that.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was very much how my, my family taught me about it.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Like, when I first heard about Iran-Contra, it was described to me as like unfortunate and some people botched some stuff, some aspects of it, but it was the only option available to them and like, you know, when you're the president, you have to make tough decisions like illegally trading missiles to a country we're not supposed to trade missiles to, you know, but I, it was very much. Like Oliver North was a hero in my house as a kid, right? Like that was, that was exactly how I was raised to think about this.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Of course. It's so fascinating, really. It really is just kind of depends on where you're standing, the way,

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  the way that we look at these things. That is the tangled knot of the Iran-Contra affair. Any larger takeaways, Robert Evans?

• 35:16Speaker 00

  I mean, I think my takeaway from Iran-Contra is my same, honestly, very similar to my takeaway with Watergate and to a number of like presidential scandals that we've had over the last 50 or so years, which is that when you like repeatedly make it clear that there aren't consequences for law breaking at this level in American politics, that if the president says it or does it, it can't be a crime. And if the president orders people to do it, or if people are working towards the, you know, what the president told them he wanted and they commit crimes, then that's okay. And that there's accepted ways to smooth over that and ensure that people don't face punishment for what they did. That's why we're where we are today. Like, all this just begets greater and greater levels of corruption and greater senses of

• 36:00Speaker 00

  impunity by these actors who already just kind of by default, by the fact that they're working in the West Wing, they're working for the president, have a degree of legal immunity, right? That, that is conferred to them just by the fact that like, that's how, you know, we do things in, in our system of government. And when you take away any chance at any level of law breaking, getting them in trouble, it leads inevitably to further reaches and to further crimes and to worse crimes. And I think if we learn any lesson from this, and if we learn any lesson from the last eight years, 12 years, fuck, almost, by 2028, it'll have been 12 years, right?

• 36:42Speaker 00

  The lesson that we ought to learn is that you can't just let people get away with crimes and corruption because they got elected. That's like a really bad way to run a country. I think that's my stance as a, as a, as a, as a left wing radical.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and there has to be a sort of an understanding or a commitment to the idea that these laws are oftentimes inconvenient and annoying and frustrating for those in power, but we need to follow them anyway, because it will gradually keep, keep eroding. And we've, we're, I think we're there, we're in a deeply eroded place, obviously, now. I mean, Iran-Contra would, would never be considered a scandal in this moment, right? We're in a moment where, you know, Trump is taking these sweeping foreign policy actions, both economically and militarily, without so much as a nod to Congress. And, and really, like, I think Iran-Contra can be boiled down to a sort of Congress versus executive branch

• 37:45Speaker 01

  standoff. That's really the, the sort of core of that. And what made it sort of, what made it a scandal at the time is that Congress did set limits and Congress was actually saying, "You can't do these things."

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is too far.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  And there was an expectation that the executive branch had to follow the law. We're not there anymore. We're like, we're, we're so far past that, and we're in a place where, like you said, because this president has been elected, he should be able to do whatever the heck he wants. And Congress, I'm so amazed, you know, at this Congress right now, who has completely abdicated their oversight, and their, especially with regards to war powers in Iran, because it, even if you agree with Trump, even if you love all of these decisions he's making, if you're Mike Johnson, you're, you still need to assert

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Congress's role in this process. And he just refuses to do so. It's like he's literally just smiling and saying, "Yeah, keep, keep kicking me in the face. I love it. I love it."

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we could go all day trying to like psychoanalyze like what's going on with Mike Johnson. But I think, I think more than anything, it's this sense, and you know, the imperial presidency, people trace back the history of that. And certainly Reagan has his role in the evolution of this, like, understanding of the presidency as a much stronger executive than previous generations would have like necessarily understood it to have been. But when you, when you get in this situation where the president is the voice of the party, and also the voice of the American people, because he was elected. And if he was elected, that means that like, he's got a blank check to do whatever. It

• 39:36Speaker 00

  provides an out to guys like Johnson, where they're like, well, I'm not going to go against the American people. And I think that there's, I think that there's tremendous cowardice and at the highest levels of power in this country. But I also just think that like, it's in nobody's best interest at that level of power to actually like, fight for a separation of powers, to fight for a reduction in the power of the imperial presidency, and to fight for like, what's best for American citizens. Because very much what's best for American citizens is not what's best for the people who are like, close to the White House. And hasn't been for a long time.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Well said. Well said. Robert Evans, thank you so much for jumping into this snafu with me. It has been an absolute delight. And I just love to hear how your brain works and breaks this stuff down. So thank you so much.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  It was lovely to talk with you, Ed. Thank you so much. And yeah, happy to come on anytime. And we'll have you back on Bastards in the future.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  All right. Sounds good. Take care. Oh, hey, one more quick thing this week. The UK paperback edition of my book Snafu is now on sale. You can find it at any UK book retailer. And I think that qualifies as jolly good.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Right, right then. I'm sorry, that was not necessary. I do not have a good British accent. It's not, maybe, it maybe is like a touch better than Dick Van Dyke, but barely. I mean, it's not, sorry, let's move on. If you're in the United States, you can still pick up a copy of the hardcover of my book, and listen, it makes a great Father's Day gift, if I do say so myself. In fact, it just makes a great gift anytime. If you want to say like, "Hey, I like you, I think you're cool," or, "Hey, I think you're really smart," and you could probably dig some of these really smart stories, or, "Hey, you're a big Ed Helms fan, maybe you would like this book that he wrote." Anyway, whatever

• 41:36Speaker 01

  the reason, there's so many great reasons to give people gifts, and just tell them, show them that you care about them, and this book is perfect for that. So, I'll drop some links in the show notes for easy purchasing, and thank you so much. Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Bazner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith, technical direction

• 42:20Speaker 01

  and engineering from Nick Dooley, additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available now from any book retailer, just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.

• 43:41Speaker 07

  Halloween's almost here, and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share. And I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.