This document is a report produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on whether elements of the Reagan Administration deliberately withheld documents from congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra Affair. At the time of this report’s release, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and chaired every committee. The Senate Majority Leader and the Chair of the Iran-Contra Committee asked the intelligence committee to investigate this claim after six documents appeared in Oliver North’s criminal trial that the Committee had not been produced with.
The report found that it was not likely that the Reagan Administration had withheld documents from Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair. Considering the large volume of documents that had been handed over, it was somewhat good that only seven had not made it through. Of the seven documents, two concerned information that was not previously known, one described an agreement with the Honduran government (that the president had initialed his approval to) for them to provide material assistance to the Contras in Nicaragua, and a second one concerning an air supply mission in 1985 of guns and ammunition to the Contras. Both of these actions were of questionable legality when considering the Boland Amendments, which prohibited any U.S. support to the Contras up until 1986.
“By letter of April 25, 1989, the Majority Leader, Senator Mitchell, and Senators Inouye and Rudman, the former Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition (the “Iran-Contra Committee” created pursuant to S. Res. 23 (100th Congress), asked the Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), as heir to and custodian of the Iran-Contra Committee files, to ascertain whether certain documents which had been released to the public in the course of the criminal trial of Oliver North had been provided in 1987 to the Iran-Contra Committee during the course of its investigation and, if not, to determine why such a failure had occurred. The letter cited six National Security Council (NSC) documents, four of which appeared never to have been made available to the Iran-Contra Committees and two which appeared to have been furnished in an incomplete or materially-different form. (See Appendix A.)
The Chairman and Vice Chairman responded by letter of April 26, 1989, expressing their intention to begin a review of the matter immediately. (See Appendix B.)”
Source
U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Intelligence. Were Relevant Documents Withheld from Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair? 101st Cong. 1st sess. 1989.