The Iran-contra case illustrates the obstacles to any prosecution that unfolds in a polarized political atmosphere.
John W. Keker, who prosecuted Oliver L. North in the Iran-contra case, is representing Mr. Sklyarov free of charge.
That is how Oliver L. North succeeded in getting government charges dropped in his celebrated Iran-contra case several years ago, when one of his lawyers was John Cline.
A grant of Congressional immunity makes a subsequent criminal prosecution almost impossible, as the government learned after the convictions of John M. Poindexter and Oliver L. North were overturned in the Iran-contra case.
In 1989, when President George Bush put forward his name as ambassador to Mexico, it was his involvement in the Iran-contra case for which Mr. Negroponte had to answer.
As no conservatives noted, unlike at the Watergate, no one at the ranch set out to commit a standard-issue crime; unlike in the Iran-Contra case, no one traded arms for hostages, illegally funded foreign guerrillas, or lied to Congress.
Mr. Brosnahan, a well-known San Francisco trial lawyer who helped prosecute the Iran-contra case, said the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, had not replied to two letters Mr. Brosnahan sent last week inquiring about Mr. Walker's situation.
The difference, of course, between the Clinton and Reagan models is that while Vice President George Bush tried to distance himself from Mr. Reagan on the Iran-contra case, he did not have to worry about being connected to anything approaching the embarrassment of Mr. Clinton's personal scandals.
* Twelve years earlier, within a week before the 1992 election, the special prosecutor in the Iran-contra case indicted Caspar W. Weinberger, the former defense secretary, charging him with lying to Congress about the arms-for-hostages deal during the Reagan administration.
Braver covered the Iran-Contra case, including the trials of former National Security Council officials Oliver North and the drug trial of former Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry.
While Congressional grants of immunity do not per se bar criminal prosecutions, we know from sad experience in the Iran-contra cases that they can render prosecution exceptionally difficult and frequently unattainable.
