William Bradford Reynolds

William Bradford "Brad" Reynolds was born in 1942. He received a B.A. from Yale University (1964) and an LL.B. from Vanderbilt University Law School (1967), where he was Order of the Coif and editor-in-chief of the Vanderbilt Law Review. After graduation he joined Sullivan & Cromwell in New York as an associate attorney (1967-1970), then served as an assistant to Solicitor General Erwin Griswold at the Department of Justice (1970-1973), and returned to private practice as a litigation partner at Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge in Washington (1973-1981). After leaving government, Reynolds became senior counsel in the antitrust and competition practice at Baker Botts LLP in Washington and argued 19 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He died September 14, 2019.⁵

In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Reynolds as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, a position he held through December 1988. From 1985 to 1988 he simultaneously served as Counselor to Attorney General Edwin Meese.⁵

Civil Rights Division

Reynolds's tenure as head of the Civil Rights Division was the most contested the office had seen. He led the Reagan administration's legal campaign against affirmative action, opposing race - and sex-conscious hiring and promotion remedies in employment discrimination settlements, seeking to reopen court-mandated busing consent decrees, and working to limit the reach of the Voting Rights Act. He argued that remedies in discrimination cases must be limited strictly to identified victims rather than class-wide relief.⁴

When Reagan nominated Reynolds for Associate Attorney General in 1985, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 10-8 on June 27, 1985 to reject the nomination - a rare defeat for a presidential nominee at committee. Two Republicans, Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania) and Charles McC. Mathias Jr. (Maryland), joined the Democratic majority. The committee's stated grounds: Reynolds had been lax in enforcing civil rights laws and had "repeatedly misled the committee in sworn testimony" about specific cases. Simultaneously, he was appointed Counselor to Attorney General Meese, an unsalaried post not requiring Senate confirmation that allowed him to retain policy influence at the department's highest level.⁴

The May 16, 1985 Document

A letter dated May 16, 1985, signed by Reynolds and addressed to William F. Weld, then U.S. Attorney in Boston, Massachusetts, was obtained by Bill Hamilton, founder of INSLAW, in late 2004 from a U.S. intelligence source. Hamilton stated the source told him the copy provided was the only one not shredded.¹

The letter's language, as reported in connection with the broader PROMIS distribution allegations, states:

"As agreed, Messrs. Manucher Ghorbanifar, Adnan Khashoggi, and Richard Armitage will broker the transaction of the PROMISE software to Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz for resale and general distribution as gifts in his region."

The letter further specified that the software "must be equipped with the special retrieval unit" - understood in the INSLAW context as a reference to the surveillance back door alleged to have been installed in Enhanced PROMIS -- and that financial aspects of the transactions should be "walked through Credit Suisse and National Commercial Bank." It directed that PROMIS be delivered without "paperwork, customs, or delay."¹

At the time the letter was signed, Ghorbanifar was an Iranian exile arms dealer and former SAVAK officer whom the CIA had formally branded a "fabricator" in a 1984 burn notice; he would become the primary Iranian middleman in the 1985-1986 Iran-Contra Affair arms deals within months. Adnan Khashoggi was a Saudi billionaire arms dealer connected to multiple covert arms networks. Richard Armitage was then serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz was head of Saudi Arabia's National Commercial Bank and a major figure in the BCCI financial network.

Reynolds's Authentication

In 2005, attorney Donald Carr showed the letter to Reynolds. Reynolds authenticated it. Reynolds stated that D. Lowell Jensen's secretary had brought the letter to him for signature because Jensen was unavailable and the letter needed to go out that day, signed by someone in Meese's inner circle. He recalled signing it but said he had not drafted it. Reynolds also had an independent recollection that Meese had recused himself from all PROMIS-related matters when he became Attorney General in February 1985, leaving Jensen to handle PROMIS policy. He independently remembered Richard Armitage, Adnan Khashoggi, and Manucher Ghorbanifar working together in connection with PROMIS.¹

House Judiciary Committee and Bua Report

The House Judiciary Committee's September 1992 investigative report on the INSLAW affair - produced before INSLAW obtained the May 1985 letter -- found "strong evidence" that the Department of Justice had "taken, converted and stolen" INSLAW's Enhanced PROMIS through "trickery, fraud and deceit" under the direction of high-level DOJ officials, and recommended appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate further.² Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, appointed in 1993, issued a March 1994 report finding "no credible basis" for the INSLAW theft claims, placing the executive and legislative branches in direct conflict on the underlying allegation.³

Reynolds died September 14, 2019, without ever being subjected to formal questioning about the letter in a legal proceeding.