Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh says Oliver North is trying to turn his trial from a criminal to a political one and should not be allowed to use politics to win a six-month delay. Walsh urged U.S. District Judge Gerhard Gesell on Monday to reject North's motion for a delay until after the presidential election. ``Having failed in several attempts to avoid completely the trial of this case, while proclaiming his innocence in speeches, the defendant Oliver L. North is now grasping at the criminal defendant's maneuver of last resort _ delay,'' Walsh said. ``This trial in particular should not be held hostage to a media which the defendant himself has strenuously sought to inflame,'' Walsh said in a brief filed with U.S. District Judge Gerhard Gesell. Walsh also rebutted North's contention that his actions had been approved. ``The government knows of no presidential decision that North can point to as authorizing his activities,'' Walsh said, adding: ``The government also is not aware of any superior, except North's co-conspirators (Robert C.) McFarlane and (John M.) Poindexter, who knew enough about North's activities to have conveyed even informal or implicit approval.'' Had Walsh found Reagan responsible for authorizing North's activities, the prosecutor would have been unable to charge North in March with defrauding the United States because North would have been acting with the necessary presidential approval. The prosecutor included 15 newspaper clippings reporting North's recent speeches about his case and in support of Republican congressional candidates. He quoted North's own statement after his indictment last March: ``I have now been caught in a bitter dispute between the Congress and the president over the control of foreign policy. ... It is a shame that the new battleground for such a fight will be a courtroom.'' Delaying the trial would give court approval to ``North's transparent attempt to transform this trial from a criminal into a political one,'' Walsh argued. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and former White House aide, North is the first of four defendants scheduled to be tried on charges including a conspiracy to defraud the United States by illegally diverting profits from U.S.-Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Last Wednesday, one of North's attorneys, Barry Simon, told the court that `no fair-minded person could argue that this trial should be started seven weeks prior to the presidential election. The intense publicity generated during the final seven weeks of a presidential campaign would deny (North) a fair trial.'' But Walsh said, ``To the extent that North's trial may become a political issue in the upcoming elections, North bears at least a substantial measure of responsibility, and therefore has little credibility in complaining.'' Walsh said North has made many pretrial speeches and statements ``in which he had claimed that the charges should be evaluated in a political context.'' Walsh said North's trial could begin Sept. 20 as planned with an impartial jury despite the presidential campaign and urged Gesell to reject North's motion for a six-month delay, which Walsh said was filed ``simply as a stalling tactic.'' Walsh said courts in the District of Columbia are well trained by their experience with Watergate and other political scandals to conduct trials in cases which receive a lot of publicity. He said the trial would draw media attention no matter when it occurred and that much of this publicity has been favorable to the defendants. Of the 16 counts against North, Walsh said those involving false statements and obstruction of justice, personal enrichment and tax fraud could easily be tried Sept. 20. To meet that date for the conspiracy, theft of government property and wire fraud charges, Walsh said Gesell would have to modify a July 6 order granting North access to additional classified documents. Walsh enclosed a letter from CIA general counsel Russell J. Bruemmer to support such a modification. Bruemmer said some of the documents already had been provided, others including excepts from the President's Daily Brief on intelligence matters, and summaries by the Central American Joint Intelligence Task Force could be ready in four weeks, but others are not readily available and would require several months to gather. Walsh noted that Gesell ordered the documents on the basis of a meeting with defense lawyers from which prosecutors were excluded. Walsh said no defense argument he could envision would make the documents relevant to the case. He indicated that most of them refer to other government covert actions abroad and said no other covert action had ever involved the transfer of funds from one operation to another. Walsh asked Gesell to require North to come up with more specific reasons for seeing items before they are ordered turned over to him. Gesell did not rule on the motion immediately.
