Republican partisans have been spewing vitriol for so long at Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-Contra affair, that it’s tempting to brush off the current claims that Walsh played a dirty election-eve trick on President George Bush as more right-wing ranting.

But this time Walsh’s critics have a point, though a more modest one than they claim: It was only natural (if ultimately mistaken) for them to suspect a political motivation when Walsh chose the last Friday before the election, Oct. 30, to drop into the public record a nugget of evidence dramatically contradicting President Bush’s claim that he was "out of the loop" on Iran-Contra.

Walsh’s critics also have a point when they complain that the mainstream media have shown a remarkable lack of interest in exploring Walsh’s October surprise, compared with, for example, the saturation coverage of the State Department search of Bill Clinton’s passport files.

It’s not that there was anything wrong per se with Walsh disclosing the evidence that so discomfited Bush-a Jan. 7, 1986, note summarizing an Oval Office meeting that day, in which then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger wrote that the "VP favored" an "Iranian offer to release our 5 hostages in return for sale of 4000 TOWs to Iran by Israel." Indeed, one of the reasons Congress passed the independent-counsel law was to expose executive-branch lies and quasi-lies, like Bush’s efforts to distance himself from the arms-for-hostages dealings.

But Walsh and his aides created a most unfortunate appearance when they made the note public so close to Election Day, as part of their Oct. 30 reindictment of Weinberger on a new charge of lying to Congress. The timing of this revelation artificially magnified its impact; it dominated news coverage during the critical last few days before the election. While this may not have changed many votes, it helped put the president on the defensive on the "trust" issue that he was so desperately seeking to exploit.

Another Walsh mistake was his choice of James Brosnahan of San Francisco’s Morrison & Foerster to take over the preparation of the new indictment and other aspects of the Weinberger prosecution. Brosnahan is a terrific trial lawyer with a reputation for integrity. But he is also a Democratic activist and a Clinton campaign contributor. In choosing someone with such baggage, Walsh shot himself in the foot and presented an irresistible target to those who already suspected his staff of political animus. (While a Republican himself, Walsh has often crossed swords with the Bush administration.)

It might be healthy to have a fuller airing of the questions raised by the Weinberger indictment in a congressional hearing. There is no evidence, however, that anyone in Walsh’s office committed a crime, and thus no legal basis for the request by Senate Republicans that another independent counsel be named to investigate Walsh’s office.

In particular, the overheated Republican suggestions that Brosnahan or some other Walsh aide may have leaked the new indictment in advance to the Clinton-Gore campaign are based on nothing more substantial than the date on a press release.

The Clinton-Gore campaign trumpeted the Weinberger note as proof that "Bush flatly lied about his role in arms-for-hostages," in a press release that was issued the afternoon of Oct. 30, after the indictment was reported on the news wires. The press release was dated Oct. 29. From this, Bush partisans have derived the dubious hypothesis that someone on Walsh’s staff engaged in an egregious and perhaps criminal violation of grand-jury secrecy. More likely, someone on Clinton’s staff lost track of what day it was.

Nor does the evidence come close to proving that either Walsh or Brosnahan acted with an improper political motive. While critics raise legitimate questions about Walsh’s timing, he has some pretty good answers.

The first question is why Brosnahan and Walsh chose to quote from Weinberger’s notes at all in the Oct. 30 indictment, which substituted more than a dozen verbatim quotations summarizing Iran-Contra discussions in 1985 and 1986 for the vague paraphrases used in the original five-count indictment of Weinberger on June 16.

The reason for the change, Walsh aides say, was that Weinberger’s lawyers had complained in court both that the original indictment had paraphrased Weinberger’s notes in an "inflammatory, argumentative and obviously prejudicial” fashion and that it had not demonstrated the relevance of the paraphrased notes to the charge that Weinberger had deliberately concealed them. So while Walsh did not strictly need to quote Weinberger’s notes, he had good reasons for doing so.

The next question is why Walsh waited until Oct. 30-but not until after the Nov. 3 election- to issue the new indictment of Weinberger. Walsh aides plausibly respond that the timing was dictated by the dynamics of the court proceedings.

The new indictment grew out of U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan’s Sept. 29 dismissal of the first count of the original indictment, which charged Weinberger with obstructing a congressional investigation in 1987 by hiding his notes from the Iran-Contra Committee. The judge held that such unilateral misleading of Congress would not violate the obstruction statute even if proven. Walsh’s office then decided to bring a new one-count indictment based on the same facts, while replacing the obstruction charge with a charge of making a false statement to Congress.

In the meantime, Craig Gillen, Walsh’s chief deputy, was forced to withdraw from the case (on Oct. 9) because Judge Hogan had indicated that he would probably rule that Gillen must be available as a witness with respect to a charge in the original indictment that Weinberger made false statements in an untranscribed interview conducted by Gillen in 1990. This left Walsh with no experienced trial advocate on his staff. So on Oct. 15, Walsh hired a respected outsider-Brosnahan-to take over the Weinberger case.

Brosnahan needed some time to learn the case before signing off on the new indictment. But Gillen had assured Judge Hogan that it would be brought by the end of October. And with a Jan. 5 trial date looming, Walsh’s office was under pressure from the judge to keep on schedule. Oct. 30 was the last day on which the new indictment could be brought without violating Gillen’s commitment to the judge.

This background suggests that-improbably coincidental as it may at first appear-the Weinberger indictment would probably have been issued in the same form, and on the same schedule, if there had been no election this year.

Aides also say that Walsh did not anticipate that the Weinberger note would become a campaign issue, because the evidence it provided against Bush was only cumulative: Bush’s support for the arms-for-hostages dealings had already been amply documented by a wide array of evidence, including references to the same Jan. 7, 1986, meeting by former Secretary of State George Shultz, former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, and Weinberger himself.

While this rings true, it also suggests that the 81 -year-old Walsh-sitting at his home in Oklahoma City reading a faxed copy of the proposed indictment and talking with Brosnahan on the phone-was both dangerously out of touch and poorly served by his staff. Cumulative though it was, the Weinberger note was bound to be seen by the Clinton camp and the press, in the frenzied atmosphere of the campaign endgame, as an especially dramatic illustration of Bush’s credibility problem. Somebody should have warned Walsh that the indictment would make a big splash.

It’s far from clear that Walsh would have done anything differently even if he had been so warned. Indeed, it would arguably have been improper to make an affirmative effort to delay the new indictment until after the election, or to ask the court to seal it, in order to help-or to avoid hurting-the Bush campaign.

But Walsh and his staff had other options and were naive, at best, to ignore the potentially distorting-impact of an election-eve revelation. They could and should have avoided this controversy either by issuing the new indictment well in advance of the election or by paraphrasing Weinberger’s notes as in the original indictment.

In short, while Walsh did not apparently intend to arm the Clinton campaign with an October surprise, he did not take enough care to avoid doing so. His mistake is all the more unfortunate because of the additional burden it will put on those seeking to revive some form of independent-counsel law after the current statute expires on Dec. 15.