``The president has confidence in Elliott Abrams,'' White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Friday, adding that Abrams is an ``outstanding diplomat'' well-qualified to be senior director of the National Security Council's office for democracy, human rights and international operations.
As for Abrams' role in the Iran-Contra scandal during the 1980s, Fleischer told reporters: ``The president thinks that's a matter of the past and that was dealt with at the time, and that Mr. Abrams is held in high regard by Democrats and Republicans alike and that he will do an outstanding job in this position.''
President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, announced Abrams' appointment _ which does not require Senate confirmation _ on Thursday, three days after he started the job.
Abrams, an assistant secretary of state during the Reagan administration, was a fierce advocate of armed support for Nicaraguan rebels despite Congress' ban on military aid to the so-called Contra rebels.
He pleaded guilty in 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra affair. In court, Abrams admitted that he kept information from two congressional committees in the fall of 1986 when he testified about his knowledge of the secret Contra supply network and about his role in soliciting a $10 million contribution for the Contras from the Sultan of Brunei.
Abrams received a Christmas Eve pardon from President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Abrams' new appointment infuriated some students of U.S policy in Latin America.
``It's a cosmic joke on the part of the administration to appoint to an office on democracy this person who has shown almost unequal contempt for democratic procedures _ both in his own personal behavior as an office holder and in the way he treated societies in Latin America,'' said Larry Birns, director of the liberal, Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
By giving Abrams a job outside Senate oversight, Bush is ``saluting the Democratic Senate with apostolic jeer,'' Birns added.
Abrams has been president of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center since 1996 and served as chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from June 2000 to May 2001.