“I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others,” Barr told historians from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center in 2001.

Then-Defense Secretary Weinberger and the “five others” for whom Barr successfully secured pardons — Abrams; then-CIA bigwigs Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clair George; and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane — had intentionally subverted laws specifically designed to stop Reagan’s no-holds-barred approach to proxy wars against communist governments in Latin America. Abrams cut a deal with Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor who handled the affair until the pardons Barr helped engineer cut his work off at the knees, and was allowed to plead guilty to having lied to Congress in lieu of facing more serious charges.

Barr went on to detail his role in President George H. W. Bush’s decision to officially scrub out the criminal convictions of the men who engineered the illegal arms-for-cocaine scheme that circumvented federal laws intended to stop the Reagan-Bush administration from continuing to fund anti-communist guerillas who sought to depose the Nicaragua’s revolutionary government.

Barr, who was also attorney general when the pardons ended Walsh’s investigation, said, “I certainly did not oppose any of them. I favored the broadest—There were some people arguing just for Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound.’”

“Elliott Abrams was one I felt had been very unjustly treated,” he added.

The pardons Barr engineered not only killed Walsh’s investigation but obscured the moral realities of what the Iran-Contra gang had done — thus opening the door for the reputational rehab evident in the think-tank set’s defensiveness during Wednesday’s hearing.