Source: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/28/russia-gate-is-no-watergate-or-iran-contra/
By Robert Parry
By Robert Parry
Russia-gate, the sprawling investigation into whether
Russia meddled in last year’s U.S. election, is often compared to the two big
political scandals of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, Watergate and
Iran-Contra. Sometimes you even hear that Russia-gate is “bigger than
Watergate.”
e
bugged phone from the Watergate office of Democratic Party official Spencer
Oliver. Placed on the phone during a May 1972 break-in, the bug was the only
device that worked. A second break-in on June 17. 1972, led to the capture of
Richard Nixon’s Watergate burglars.
Yet what is perhaps most remarkable about those two
Twentieth Century scandals is how little Official Washington really understands
them – and how these earlier scandals significantly contrast, rather than
compare, with what is unfolding now.
Although the historical record is still incomplete on
Watergate and Iran-Contra, the available evidence indicates that both scandals
originated in schemes by Republicans to draw foreign leaders into plots to
undermine sitting Democratic presidents and thus pave the way for the elections
of Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
As for Russia-gate, even if you accept that the
Russian government hacked into Democratic emails and publicized them via
WikiLeaks, there is still no evidence that Donald Trump or his campaign
colluded with the Kremlin to do so. By contrast, in the origins of Watergate
and Iran-Contra, it appears the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, respectively, were
the instigators of schemes to enlist foreign governments in blocking a Vietnam
peace deal in 1968 and negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran in
1980.
Though Watergate is associated directly with the 1972
campaign – when Nixon’s team of burglars was caught inside the Democratic
National Committee offices in the Watergate building – Nixon’s formation of
that team, known as the Plumbers, was driven by his fear that he could be
exposed for sabotaging
President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 in order to
secure the White House that year.
After Nixon’s narrow victory over Vice President
Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed
Nixon that Johnson had a secret file, complete with wiretapped phone calls,
detailing the Nixon campaign’s backchannel messages to South Vietnamese
officials convincing them to boycott Johnson’s Paris peace talks. Later, Nixon
learned that this incriminating file had disappeared from the White House.
So, in 1971, after the leaking of the Pentagon
Papers, which recounted the lies that had been used to justify the Vietnam War
through 1967, Nixon fretted that the missing file about his peace-talk gambit
in 1968 might surface, too, and would destroy him politically. Thus, he
organized the Plumbers to find the file, even contemplating fire-bombing the
Brookings Institution to enable a search of its safe where some aides thought
the missing file might be found.
In other words, Watergate wasn’t simply a break-in at
the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972, in pursuit of useful political
intelligence and Nixon’s ensuing cover-up; the scandal had
its origins in a far worse scandal, the derailing of peace talks
that could have ended the Vietnam War years earlier and saved the lives of tens
of thousands of U.S. soldiers and possibly more than 1 million Vietnamese.
Iran-Contra Parallels
Similarly, the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986
with revelations that President Reagan had authorized secret arms sales to Iran
with some of the profits going to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, but the
evidence now indicates that the connections between Reagan’s team and Iran’s
revolutionary regime traced back to 1980 when emissaries from Reagan’s campaign
worked to stymie President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American
hostages then held in Iran.
PBS
Frontline’s 1991 documentary, entitled “The Election Held Hostage,” co-written
by Robert Parry
According to multiple witnesses, including former
Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs Nicholas Veliotes, the
pre-election contacts led to the opening of a weapons pipeline to Iran (via
Israel), after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981, which was the precise
moment when Iran finally released the American hostages after 444 days.
Some key players in the 1980 Reagan-Iran contacts
reappeared four years later at the start of direct (again secret) U.S. arms
shipments to Iran in 1985, which also involved Israeli middlemen. These key
players included Iranian CIA operative Cyrus Hashemi, former CIA
clandestine services chief Theodore Shackley, Reagan’s campaign chief and
then-CIA Director William Casey, and former CIA Director and then-Vice
President George H.W. Bush.
In other words, the Iran-Contra weapons shipments of
1985-86 appear to have been an outgrowth of the earlier shipments dating back
to 1980 and continuing under Israeli auspices until the supply line was taken
over more directly by the Reagan administration in 1985-86.
Thus, both the Watergate scandal in 1972 and the
Iran-Contra Affair in 1986 could be viewed as “sequels” to the earlier
machinations driven by Republican hunger to seize the enormous powers of the
U.S. presidency. However, for decades, Official Washington has been hostile to
these underlying explanations of how Watergate and Iran-Contra began.
For instance, The New York Times, the so-called
“newspaper of record,” treated the accumulation of evidence regarding Nixon’s
1968 peace-talk gambit as nothing more than a “rumor” until earlier this year
when a scholar, John
A. Farrell, uncovered cryptic notes taken by Nixon’s aide H.R.
Haldeman, which added another piece to the mosaic and left the Times little
choice but to pronounce the historical reality finally real.
Grasping the Watergate Narrative
Still, the Times and other major news outlets have
failed to factor this belated admission into the larger Watergate narrative. If
you understand that Nixon did sabotage President Johnson’s Vietnam War peace
talks and that Nixon was aware that Johnson’s file on what LBJ called Nixon’s
“treason” had disappeared from the White House, the early “Watergate tapes”
from 1971 suddenly make sense.
President
Richard Nixon with his then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972.
Nixon ordered White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob”
Haldeman and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to locate the missing
file but their search came up empty. Yet, some Nixon aides thought the
file might be hidden at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in
Washington. So, in his desperate pursuit of the file, Nixon called for a
break-in at Brookings, possibly even fire-bombing the building as a cover for
his team of burglars to slip in amid the confusion and rifle the safe.
The old explanation that Nixon simply wanted to find
some file related to Johnson’s 1968 pre-election Vietnam bombing halt never
made sense given the extreme steps that Nixon was prepared to take.
The relevant portions of Nixon’s White House tapes
include an entry on June 17, 1971, coincidentally one year to the day before
the Watergate burglars were caught. Nixon summoned Haldeman and Kissinger to
the Oval Office and pleaded with them again to locate the file.
“Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman. “I’ve asked
for it. You said you didn’t have it.”
Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”
Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”
Nixon: “Well, damn-it, I asked for that because I
need it.”
Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the
damn thing together.”
Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing
our own, but there is a file on it.”
Nixon: “Where?”
Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston
swears to God that there’s a file on it and it’s at Brookings.”
Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan
[for White House-sponsored break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence
operations]? Implement it.”
Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have
classified documents.”
Nixon: “I want it implemented. Goddamn-it, get in and
get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by
now, but this thing, you need to “
Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had
the files.”
Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files
are around. He doesn’t know for sure that we don’t have them around.”
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at
the White House because he had ordered his national security adviser, Walt
Rostow, to remove it in the final days of Johnson’s presidency.
Forming the Burglars
On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about
the need to break into Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon suggested
using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.
“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the
break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files,
and bring them in. Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”
Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe.
I mean, clean it up.”
For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that
the Brookings break-in never took place (nor did the fire-bombing), but
Nixon’s desperation to locate Johnson’s peace-talk file was an important link
in the chain of events that led to the creation of Nixon’s burglary unit under
Hunt’s supervision. Hunt later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and
June of 1972.
While it’s possible that Nixon was still searching
for the file about his Vietnam-peace sabotage when the ill-fated Watergate
break-ins occurred a year later, it’s generally believed that the burglary was
more broadly focused, seeking any information that might have an impact on
Nixon’s re-election, either defensively or offensively.
However, if you think back on 1971 when the Vietnam
War was tearing the country apart and massive antiwar demonstrations were
descending on Washington, Nixon’s desperation to locate the missing file
suddenly doesn’t seem quite so crazy. There would have been hell to pay if the
public learned that Nixon had kept the war going to gain a political advantage
in 1968.
Walt
Rostow’s “‘X’ Envelope”
Through 1972 – and the early days of the Watergate
scandal – former President Johnson had stayed silent about Nixon’s sabotage of
the Paris peace talks. But the ex-President became livid when – after Nixon’s
reelection in 1972 – Nixon’s men sought to pressure Johnson into helping them
shut down the Watergate investigation, in part, by noting that Johnson, too,
had deployed wiretaps against Nixon’s 1968 campaign to obtain evidence about
the peace-talk sabotage.
While it’s not clear whether Johnson would have
finally spoken out, that threat to Nixon ended two days after Nixon’s second
inaugural when on Jan. 22, 1973, Johnson died of a heart attack. However,
unbeknownst to Nixon, Johnson had left the missing file, called “The
X-Envelope,” in the care of Rostow, who – after Johnson’s death – gave the file
to the LBJ presidential library in Austin, Texas, with instructions that it be
kept under wraps for at least 50 years. (Rostow’s instructions were overturned
in the 1990s, and I found the now largely declassified file at the library in
2012.)
So, with the “The X-Envelope” squirreled away for
more than two decades at the LBJ library and with the big newspapers treating
the early sketchy reports of Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage as only “rumors,”
Watergate remained a scandal limited to the 1972 campaign.
Still, Nixon’s cover-up of his campaign’s role in the
Watergate break-in produced enough clear-cut evidence of obstruction of justice
and other offenses that Nixon was forced to resign on Aug. 9, 1974.
A Failed Investigation
The 1979-81 hostage confrontation with Iran was not
nearly as devastating a crisis as the Vietnam War but America’s humiliation
during the 444-day-long ordeal became a focus of the 1980 election, too, with
the first anniversary of Iran’s seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran
coincidentally falling on Election Day 1980.
President
Jimmy Carter signing the Camp David peace agreement with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat
and Israel’s Menachem Begin.
President Carter’s failure to gain freedom for the 52
embassy personnel turned what had been a close race into a landslide for Ronald
Reagan, with Republicans also gaining control of the U.S. Senate and ousting
some of the most influential Democratic senators.
In 1984, Reagan won reelection in another landslide,
but two years later ran afoul of the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan’s secret arms
sales to Iran and diversion of profits to the Contras “broke” in November 1986
but focused only on Reagan’s 1985-1986 arms sales and the diversion. Still, the
scandal’s crimes included violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the
so-called Boland Act’s prohibitions on arming the Contras as well as perjury
and obstruction of justice. So there was the prospect of Reagan’s impeachment.
But – from the start of Iran-Contra – there was a
strong pushback from Republicans who didn’t want to see another GOP president
driven from office. There was also resistance to the scandal from many
mainstream media executives who personally liked Reagan and feared a public
backlash if the press played an aggressive role similar to Watergate.
And, moderate Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton of
Indiana who co-chaired the congressional investigation, sought to tamp down the
Iran-Contra fires and set up firebreaks to prevent the investigation from
spreading to related crimes such as the Reagan administration’s protection of
Contra cocaine traffickers.
“Ask about the cocaine,” pleaded one protester who
was dragged from the Iran-Contra hearing room, as the congressional
investigators averted their eyes from such unseemly matters, focusing instead
on stilted lectures about the Congress’s constitutional prerogatives.
It was not until 1990-91 that it became clear that
secret U.S.-approved arms shipments to Iran did not start in 1985 as the
Iran-Contra narrative claimed but traced back to 1981 with Reagan’s approval of
arms sales to Iran through Israel.
Reagan’s politically risky move of secretly arming
Iran immediately after his inauguration and the hostage release was nearly
exposed when one of the Israeli flights strayed into Soviet airspace on July
18, 1981, and crashed or was shot down.
In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas
Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, said he
looked into the incident by talking to top administration officials.
“It was clear to me after my conversations with
people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to
Iran some American-origin military equipment,” Veliotes said.
In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to
believe that the Reagan camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980
election. “It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to
the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new
players in the national security area in the Reagan administration,” Veliotes
said. “And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”
However, in 1981, Veliotes said, the State Department
issued misleading press guidance to cover the administration’s tracks and the
Washington media failed to follow up. Thus, the U.S.-Israeli arms pipeline to
Iran stayed secret from the American people until November 1986 when — despite
Reagan’s long-running insistence that he would never trade arms with a
terrorist state like Iran — the operation was exposed.
When I re-interviewed Veliotes in 2012, he said he
couldn’t recall who the “people on high” were who had described the informal
clearance of the Israeli shipments of U.S.-manufactured weapons, but he
indicated that “the new players” were the young neoconservatives who were
working on the Reagan campaign, many of whom later joined the administration as
senior political appointees.
Documents that I discovered at the Reagan
presidential library revealed that
Reagan’s neocons at the State Department, particularly Robert
McFarlane and Paul Wolfowitz, initiated a policy review in 1981 to allow Israel
to undertake secret military shipments to Iran.
McFarlane and Wolfowitz also maneuvered to put
McFarlane in charge of U.S. relations toward Iran and to establish a
clandestine U.S. back-channel to the Israeli government outside the
knowledge of even senior U.S. government officials.
Another Failed Investigation
In 1991, faced with the accumulating evidence of a
prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal, Congress grudgingly agreed to take a look
at these so-called “October Surprise” allegations. But Republicans, then led by
President George H.W. Bush and his White House team, mounted an aggressive
cover-up to “spike” the story.
Former
Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana.
And, with the congressional inquiry largely in the
hands again of Rep. Hamilton, the Democrats timidly folded their tent despite a
growing body of evidence that the Reagan team was indeed guilty.
Much of that evidence flowed into the House Task
Force in December 1992 when President George H.W. Bush had already been
defeated for reelection and the Democrats were looking forward to their renewed
control of Washington. So, instead of giving a careful review to the new
evidence, the House Task Force ignored, disparaged or buried it.
The late-arriving material included sworn testimony
on Dec. 18, 1992, from David Andelman, the biographer of French intelligence
chief Alexandre deMarenches, describing how deMarenches had confided that he
had helped arrange the Republican-Iranian contacts. Andelman, an ex-New York
Times and CBS News correspondent, said that while he was working on
deMarenches’s autobiography, the arch-conservative spymaster admitted arranging
meetings between Republicans and Iranians about the hostage issue in the summer
and fall of 1980, with one meeting held in Paris in October.
Andelman said deMarenches ordered that the secret
meetings be kept out of his memoirs because the story could otherwise damage
the reputations of his friends, William Casey and George H.W. Bush. Andelman’s
testimony corroborated longstanding claims from a variety of international
intelligence operatives about a Paris meeting involving Casey and Bush. But the
Task Force report brushed this testimony aside, paradoxically terming it
“credible” but then claiming it was “insufficiently probative.”
The Task Force’s report argued that Andelman could
not “rule out the possibility that deMarenches had told him he was aware of and
involved in the Casey meetings because he, deMarenches, could not risk telling
his biographer he had no knowledge of these allegations.”
In the last weeks of the investigation, the House
investigators also received a letter from former Iranian President Bani-Sadr
detailing his behind-the-scenes struggle with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and
his son Ahmad over their secret dealings with the Reagan campaign. But the
House investigators dismissed Bani-Sadr’s first-hand account as hearsay and
thus also lacking “probative value.”
I later unearthed some of the evidence in unpublished
Task Force files. However, in the meantime, Official Washington had dismissed
the “October Surprise” and other Iran-Contra-connected scandals, like Contra
drug trafficking, as conspiracy theories.
The Russian Report
Ironically, another piece of late-arriving evidence
was a January 1993 report from a national security committee of the Russian
parliament about the Kremlin’s intelligence data confirming that key
Republicans, including George H.W. Bush and William Casey, had met with Iranian
officials in Europe regarding the hostages during the 1980 campaign.
Then-Vice
President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House
on Feb. 11, 1981. (Photo credit: Reagan Library)
Hamilton had requested the Russian assistance before
the U.S. election in 1992, but the report was not sent until there were only
two weeks left in George H.W. Bush’s presidency.
Lawrence Barcella, who served as the Task Force chief
counsel, later told me that so much incriminating evidence arrived late that he
asked Hamilton to extend the inquiry for three months but that Hamilton
said no (although Hamilton told me that he had no recollection of denying
Barcella’s request).
The other fatal flaw of the House investigation was
that it left much of the actual investigating up to President George H.W.
Bush’s White House counsel’s office and the State Department, although Bush was
one of the chief suspects and, in 1991-92, was running for re-election, a
campaign that would have been derailed if the 1980 October Surprise allegations
were confirmed.
The naivete of this decision was underscored years
later when I located a memo at Bush’s presidential library stating that the
State Department had informed the White House counsel’s office that Casey had
traveled to Madrid in 1980, corroborating a key October Surprise allegation.
The confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by
State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House
Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the October
Surprise inquiry was taking shape, according to Beach’s “memorandum for
record” dated Nov. 4, 1991.
Williamson said that among the State Department
“material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a
cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for
purposes unknown,” Beach noted.
Two days later, on Nov. 6, 1991, Beach’s boss, White
House counsel C. Boyden Gray, arranged an inter-agency strategy session
and explained the need to
contain the congressional investigation into the October
Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt
President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.
In 2013, when I interviewed
Hamilton about the Beach memo, he lamented that the Madrid information had not
been shared with his investigation, saying “you have to rely on people” in
authority to comply with information requests.
“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to
Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “We couldn’t show that. The [George H.W. Bush] White
House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that
on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”
Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid
might have changed the Task Force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion,
Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to
the task force’s investigation.
Not Moving the Needle
However, the Madrid trip revelation and other
post-investigation disclosures failed to move the needle on Official
Washington’s disdain for the October Surprise story.
Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir shaking hands with President Ronald Reagan’s
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1982. (U.S. government photo)
The later disclosures included a 1993 interview in
Tel Aviv in which former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said he had read
the 1991 book, October Surprise, by Carter’s former National Security
Council aide Gary Sick, which made the case for believing that the Republicans
had intervened in the 1980 hostage negotiations to disrupt Carter’s
reelection.
With the topic raised, one interviewer asked, “What
do you think? Was there an October Surprise?”
“Of course, it was,” Shamir responded without
hesitation. “It was.”
And, there were other corroborating statements as
well. In 1996, for instance, while former President Carter was meeting with
Palestine Liberation Organization leader Arafat in Gaza City, Arafat tried to
confess his role in the Republican maneuvering to block Carter’s Iran-hostage
negotiations.
“There is something I want to tell you,” Arafat said,
addressing Carter in the presence of historian Douglas Brinkley. “You should
know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO]
if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S.
presidential] election,” Arafat said, according to Brinkley’s article in the
fall 1996 issue of Diplomatic Quarterly.
In 2013, after the movie “Argo” appeared regarding an
early facet of the Iran-hostage crisis, former Iranian President Bani-Sadr elaborated
on his account of Republican overtures to Iran in 1980 and how that secret
initiative prevented release of the hostages.
In a Christian Science Monitor commentary, Bani-Sadr
wrote, “Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine
negotiation which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President
Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election
took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the
election in favor of Reagan.”
Then, Bani-Sadr added a new detail, that “two of my
advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadr-al-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeini’s
regime because they had become aware of this secret relationship between
Khomeini, his son Ahmad, … and the Reagan administration.” [For more
details on the October Surprise case, see Robert Parry’s Trick or Treason
and America’s
Stolen Narrative.]
Compare and Contrast
So how do Watergate and Iran-Contra compare and
contrast with Russia-gate? One key difference is that in Watergate in 1972-73
and Iran-Contra in 1985-86, you had clear-cut crimes (even if you don’t want to
believe the two “prequels” from 1968 and 1980, respectively).
President
Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
In Watergate, five burglars were caught inside the
DNC offices on June 17, 1972, as they sought to plant more bugs on Democratic
phones. (An earlier break-in in May had installed two bugs, but one didn’t
work.) Nixon then proceeded to mount a cover-up of his 1972 campaign’s role in
funding the break-in and other abuses of power.
In Iran-Contra, Reagan secretly authorized weapons
sales to Iran, which was then designated a terrorist state, without informing
Congress, a violation of the Arms Export Control Act. He also kept Congress in
the dark about his belated signing of a related intelligence “finding.” And the
creation of slush funds to finance the Nicaraguan Contras represented an
evasion of the U.S. Constitution.
There was also the attendant Iran-Contra cover-up
mounted both by the Reagan White House and later the George H.W. Bush White
House, which culminated in Bush’s Christmas Eve 1992 pardons of six Iran-Contra
defendants as special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was zeroing in
on possible indictment of Bush for withholding evidence.
By contrast, Russia-gate has been a “scandal” in
search of a specific crime. President Barack Obama’s intelligence chieftains
have alleged – without presenting any clear evidence – that the Russian
government hacked into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and of
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and released those emails via
WikiLeaks and other Internet sites. (The Russians and WikiLeaks have both
denied the accusations.)
The DNC emails revealed that senior Democrats did not
maintain their required independence regarding the primaries by seeking to hurt
Sen. Bernie Sanders and help Clinton. The Podesta emails pulled back the
curtain on Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street banks and on pay-to-play
features of the Clinton Foundation.
Hacking into personal computers is a crime, but the
U.S. government has yet to bring any formal charges against specific
individuals supposedly responsible for the hacking of the Democratic emails.
There also has been no evidence that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with
Russians in the hacking.
Lacking any precise evidence of this cyber-crime or
of a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, Obama’s Justice
Department holdovers and now special prosecutor Robert Mueller have sought to
build “process crimes,” around false statements to investigators and possible
obstruction of justice.
Railroading Flynn
In the case of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn,
Trump’s first national security adviser, acting Attorney General Sally Yates
used the archaic Logan Act of 1799 to create a predicate for the FBI to
interrogate Flynn about a Dec. 29, 2016 conversation with Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak, i.e., after Trump’s election but before the Inauguration.
Green
Party leader Jill Stein and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn attending a
dinner marking the RT network’s 10-year anniversary in Moscow, December 2015,
sitting at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Logan Act, which has never resulted in a
prosecution in 218 years, was enacted during the period of the Alien and
Sedition Acts to bar private citizens from negotiating on their own with
foreign governments. It was never intended to apply to a national security
adviser of an elected President, albeit before he was sworn in.
But it became the predicate for the FBI interrogation
— and the FBI agents were armed with a transcript of the intercepted
Kislyak-Flynn phone call so they could catch Flynn on any gaps in his
recollection, which might have been made even hazier because he was on vacation
in the Dominican Republic when Kislyak called.
Yates also concocted a bizarre argument that the
discrepancies between Flynn’s account of the call and the transcript left him
open to Russian blackmail although how that would work – since the Russians
surely assumed that Kislyak’s calls would be monitored by U.S. intelligence and
thus offered them no leverage with Flynn – was never explained.
Still, Flynn’s failure to recount the phone call
precisely and the controversy stirred up around it became the basis for an
obstruction of justice investigation of Flynn and led to President Trump’s
firing Flynn on Feb. 13.
Trump may have thought that tossing Flynn overboard
to the circling sharks would calm down the sharks but the blood in the water
only excited them more. According to then-FBI Director James Comey, Trump
talked to him one-on-one the next day, Feb. 14, and said, “‘I hope you can see
your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I
hope you can let this go.”
Trump’s “hope” and the fact that he later fired Comey
have reportedly led special prosecutor Mueller to look at a possible
obstruction of justice case against Trump. In other words, Trump could be
accused of obstructing what appears to have been a trumped-up case against
Flynn.
Of course, there remains the possibility that
evidence might surface of Trump or his campaign colluding with the Russians,
but such evidence has so far not been presented. Or Mueller’s investigation
might turn over some rock and reveal some unrelated crime, possibly financial
wrongdoing by Trump or an associate.
(Something similar happened in the Republican
investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack, a largely fruitless
inquiry except that it revealed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent
and received official emails over a private server, which Comey decried during
last year’s campaign as “extremely careless” but not criminal.)
Curb the Enthusiasm
Another contrast between the earlier scandals
(Watergate and Iran-Contra) and Russia-gate is the degree of enthusiasm and
excitement that the U.S. mainstream media and congressional Democrats have
shown today as opposed to 1972 and 1986.
The
Washington Post’s Watergate team, including from left to right, publisher
Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Howard Simons, and executive
editor Ben Bradlee.
Though The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein aggressively pursued the Watergate scandal, there was much less
interest elsewhere in major news outlets until Nixon’s criminality became
obvious in 1973. Many national Democrats, including DNC
Chairman Bob Strauss, were extremely hesitant to pursue the scandal
if not outright against it.
Similarly, although Brian Barger and I at The
Associated Press were pursuing aspects of Iran-Contra since early 1985, the big
newspapers and networks consistently gave the Reagan administration the benefit
of the doubt – at least before the scandal finally burst into view in fall 1986
(when a Contra-supply plane crashed inside Nicaragua and a Lebanese newspaper
revealed U.S. arms shipments to Iran).
For several months, there was a flurry of attention
to the complex Iran-Contra scandal, but the big media still ignored evidence of
a White House cover-up and soon lost interest in the difficult work of
unraveling the convoluted networks for arms smuggling, money laundering and
cocaine trafficking.
Congressional Democrats also shied away from a
constitutional confrontation with the popular Reagan and his well-connected
Vice President George H.W. Bush.
After moving from AP to Newsweek in early 1987, I
learned that the senior executives at Newsweek, then part of The Washington
Post Company, didn’t want “another Watergate”; they felt another such scandal
was not “good for the country” and wanted Iran-Contra to go away as soon as
possible. I was even told not to read the congressional Iran-Contra report when
it was published in October 1987 (although I ignored that order and kept trying
to keep my own investigation going in defiance of the wishes of the Newsweek
brass until those repeated clashes led to my departure in June 1990).
So, perhaps the biggest similarity between
Russia-gate and Watergate is that Richard Nixon and Donald Trump were both
highly unpopular with the Washington establishment and thus had few influential
defenders, while an important contrast with Iran-Contra was that Reagan and
Bush were very well liked, especially among news executives such as Washington
Post publisher Katharine Graham who, by all accounts, did not care for the
uncouth Nixon. Today, the senior executives of The New York Times, The
Washington Post and other major news outlets have made no secret of their
disdain for the buffoonish Trump and their hostility toward Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
In other words, what is driving Russia-gate – for
both the mainstream news media and the Democrats – appears to be a political
agenda, i.e., the desire to remove Trump from office while also ratcheting up a
New Cold War with Russia, a priority for Washington’s neoconservatives and
their liberal-interventionist sidekicks.
If this political drama were playing out in some
other country, we would be talking about a “soft coup” in which the “oligarchy”
or some other “deep state” force was using semi-constitutional means to
engineer a disfavored leader’s removal.
Of course, since the ongoing campaign to remove Trump
is happening in the United States, it must be presented as a principled pursuit
of truth and a righteous application of the rule of law. But the comparisons to
Watergate and Iran-Contra are a stretch.