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Highlights & Quotes Edwin Meese, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, was Ronald Reagan's attorney general and one of his most intimate confidants. As Salon.com puts it, "If Robert Bork was the conservative legal counterrevolution's Marx, its Lenin, its great tactician, was a California lawyer named Edwin Meese, Governor Ronald Reagan's closest advisor." (3)

A principal tactic employed by Meese in his efforts to push through hardline public policies was to stack the judiciary with ideologues. As part of these efforts, Meese and several friends and colleagues--including Robert Bork and future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist--helped establish in 1982 the Federalist Society, which today is one of the most influential institutes in the United States.

Reports Salon, "Meese, Rehnquist and their allies ... wanted their counterrevolution to prevail over the long haul: not just from the top down but at the legal grass roots. They wanted the future, not just the present, and that meant focusing on law schools. ... So in 1982, Meese, Rehnquist and other first-generation legal conservatives reached out to law students and encouraged the founding of a new organization: the Federalist Society. Funded generously by Richard Mellon Scaife and patrons, the Federalist Society became a national networking organization that nurtured young conservatives and swiftly became the crucial channel to Supreme Court clerkships and prestigious jobs in the Reagan administration. In 'Closed Chambers,' former clerk Lazarus outlines how Federalist Society clerks formed a self-described 'cabal against the libs' to push justices in a rightward direction. Conservative donors like Scaife were encouraged to endow professorships and to fund conferences and training institutes to tutor judges in corporate deregulation and other articles of conservative legal faith." (3)

In the mid-1980s, an independent prosecutor was established to investigate Meese's alleged financial improprieties. As part of the investigation, the prosecutor looked into Meese's involvement in a Bechtel pipeline deal in Iraq. One of the dealmakers for the pipeline project was Donald Rumsfeld. According to the New York Times, "[Bechtel has a long history of doing business in Iraq, including an unsuccessful pipeline deal that at one point involved a meeting between Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the secretary of defense, and Saddam Hussein. That project later drew scrutiny from a special prosecutor looking into allegations of impropriety involving Edwin A. Meese III, the former White House counsel and attorney general in the Reagan administration." Meese's involvement in the Bechtel deal revolved around his relationship with E. Robert Wallach, a lawyer close to the attorney general who was hired by Bechtel to help negotiate with the Israeli government. Although he was not prosecuted, Meese ultimately resigned. (4)