This item is factually incorrect.
The Boland Amendment applied to U.S. intelligence agencies that received appropriations through Congress. The Reagan administration set up the Iran-Contra affair as a National Security Council operation specifically because it was NOT covered under the Boland Amendment. In fact, the Boland Amendment was drafted in the first place because Congress would not approve a total, comprehensive ban on funding the Contras in Nicaragua.
Interestingly, there were serious questions about the constitutionality of the Boland Amendment at the time -- but they were never subject to court challenges because nobody was ever prosecuted for violating it. Congress explicitly made violations of this legislation a civil matter, not a criminal one.
After spending about 10 years off and on in the Reagan Papers to write “Reagan: The American President,” I can say that there was NO evidence whatsoever that Reagan knew about North’s diversion of funds.
North later lied about this. It is a shame so many conservatives still stand by someone who called Reagan a liar on multiple occasions.
Reagan was NOT sufficiently engaged in the oversight of the weapons transfers to Iran; and he WAS engaged in a lot of self-delusion that the exchanges were anything other than “weapons for hostages.” Still, that was not illegal-—it just circumvented his own policy. Reagan got too close to the hostages as individual people, and it ate at him. But he did nothing illegal, at any point. Certainly nothing “impeachable,” despite what that tool Lawrence Walsh-—who pursued Reagan after he left office-—said.
Yeah, when I read the article, I said to myself, "hey wait a minute, there's something wrong here", remembering the point about the Boland Amendment. Explicitly defined by Congress as a civil matter == not a crime or misdemeanor. It was conspiracy to defraud that North was convicted for, and it was reversed on appeal because the objective of the conspiracy wasn't a crime or misdemeanor. At least that's my recollection. So not a good parallel, and furthermore focusing on that now would tend to rehabilitate North and Reagan.