Richard Thornburgh

Richard Lewis Thornburgh was born July 16, 1932, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned a B.S. in engineering from Yale University in 1954 and an LL.B. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1957. He served as United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania from 1969 to 1975, appointed by President Nixon, and as Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division under President Ford from 1975 to 1977. He was elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 1978, serving two successive terms from January 16, 1979 to January 20, 1987 -- the first Republican to serve consecutive terms as Pennsylvania governor -- managing the March 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear incident during his first term. Richard Thornburgh died December 31, 2020, in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, at age 88.¹

Attorney General

On August 12, 1988, Thornburgh was sworn in as Attorney General of the United States under President Ronald Reagan, succeeding Edwin Meese, who resigned following an independent counsel report that found substantial evidence Meese had violated federal law. Thornburgh continued as Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush through 1991, serving as the 76th Attorney General in total. He resigned in August 1991 to run for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, losing to Democrat Harris Wofford in November 1991.¹

Role in the INSLAW/PROMIS Affair

The House Judiciary Committee's September 1992 investigation (House Report 102-857) named both Meese and Thornburgh as the two Attorneys General who had "blocked or restricted congressional inquiries into the matter, ignored the findings of two courts and refused to ask for the appointment of an independent counsel" in connection with the alleged theft of INSLAW's PROMIS software.²

The two court findings at issue were Bankruptcy Judge George Francis Bason Jr.'s 1987 ruling that the Department of Justice had stolen PROMIS from INSLAW "tainted by fraud, deceit and overreaching," and the District Court's 1988 affirmance of that ruling on appeal.

Thornburgh declined to reverse Meese's May 1988 denial of Bill Hamilton and INSLAW's petition for appointment of an independent counsel under the Ethics in Government Act. Elliott Richardson, INSLAW's attorney and himself a former Attorney General, wrote Thornburgh directly requesting the appointment; Thornburgh did not respond. When the House Judiciary Committee requested Thornburgh's personal testimony on the matter, he declined to appear. When the committee issued subpoenas for hundreds of DOJ internal documents -- including documents from the files of DOJ counsel Sandra Spooner that the committee alleged had been "mysteriously disappeared" -- Thornburgh's DOJ failed to produce all subpoenaed documents, asserting some had been mislaid or accidentally destroyed and claiming the remainder were protected by litigation privilege as part of DOJ's ongoing civil dispute with INSLAW.²³

The BNL Indictment

A memorandum of February 6, 1990, by a lawyer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York records that "a trip to Istanbul was put off at the request of Attorney General Thornburgh" in the investigation of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro's loans to Iraq, and that criticism of the BCCI case had "motivated the Attorney General to have the BNL matter reviewed by main Justice." His legislative aide Lee Rawls advised him: "Our best attempt to thwart any further congressional inquiry by the House Banking Committee into this case is to have you contact Chairman Gonzalez directly." Representative Henry B. Gonzalez declined the call. Thornburgh wrote to him on September 26, 1990, of his "profound disappointment in your decision to ignore the strong objections of this Department. As you should be aware, this is a sensitive case with national security concerns."⁴

The department's draft press releases described first a 316-count indictment of twelve defendants and then a 423-count indictment of eleven. On February 28, 1991, the day after the Gulf War ceasefire, Thornburgh announced 347 counts against ten. A press aide handed them out as "the Mother of all Indictments." The Central Bank of Iraq and the Jordanian trader Wafai Dajani were no longer among the accused. Thornburgh did not name the principal defendant, Christopher Drogoul, leaving that to Robert Mueller. Asked what the CIA had known, he said: "Our business is to prosecute criminal cases, and that's as far as I can go."⁴

Later Career

After leaving the Senate race, Thornburgh was appointed UN Under-Secretary General for Administration and Management by President Bush in 1992, serving through 1993. He returned to private practice at K&L Gates in Pittsburgh. In 2002, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York appointed him examiner in the WorldCom bankruptcy; his report included findings on the conduct of Arthur Andersen and Citigroup. In 2004, he co-chaired the independent panel investigating CBS News's 60 Minutes Wednesday report on President George W. Bush's National Guard service.¹