Thread: Ted Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections

Ted Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections


MARCH 10, 2015 By Sean Davis

Earlier this week, 47 Republican senators published an open letter informing the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal with the United States that failed to be approved by the Senate would likely expire in 2017, once President Barack Obama’s term ended. You can read the full letter here.

The letter enraged progressives, who immediately began accusing the senators of treason for having the audacity to publish basic constitutional facts about how treaties work. Here is but a small sampling of the response from the outrage brigade:

Adam McKay
✔@GhostPanther
Has anyone ever seen anything like that letter from Senate Repubs to Iran? How is that not treason? I'm really asking.
12:53 AM - 10 Mar 2015

Bloomberg Politics
✔@bpolitics
Did 47 Republican Senators just commit treason with Iran letter? (by @writerknowles) http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-09/did-47-u-s-senators-just-commit-treason-by-attempting-to-sabotage-iran-deal- …
4:15 PM - 9 Mar 2015

David Axelrod
✔@davidaxelrod
To Cotton-sticking Senate GOP: If Ds had done under a Republican POTUS what you did today, you would have been the first to cry "treason!"
6:00 PM - 9 Mar 2015

• 823823 Retweets
• 613613 likes

John Podhoretz
✔@jpodhoretz

For many liberals this morning, the word treason is defined as not giving Obama his way
6:38 AM - 10 Mar 2015

• 175175 Retweets
• 122122 likes

If these progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages to the Soviets in the midst of the cold war, he also begged them to intervene in a U.S. presidential election in order to unseat President Ronald Reagan. That’s no exaggeration.

According to Soviet documents unearthed in the early 1990’s, Kennedy literally asked the Soviets, avowed enemies of the U.S., to intervene on behalf of the Democratic party in the 1984 elections. Kennedy’s communist communique was so secret that it was not discovered until 1991, eight years after Kennedy had initiated his Soviet gambit:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.

You can read the full KGB memo detailing Kennedy’s secret letter and request for electoral intervention here.

Sean Davis is the co-founder of The Federalist.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/10/...984-elections/

Peter Robinson
8/28/2009 @ 12:01AM

Ted Kennedy's Soviet Gambit


Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”
Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.

Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people,” the memorandum explained, “[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy’s motives.

“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”

Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov–the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–at least in part to advance his own political prospects.

In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.”

“The document,” Kengor continues, “has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I’ve ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy’s office did not deny it.”

Why bring all this up now? No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum–within eight months, the Soviet leader would be dead–and now that Kennedy himself has died even many of the former senator’s opponents find themselves grieving. Yet precisely because Kennedy represented such a commanding figure–perhaps the most compelling liberal of our day–we need to consider his record in full.

Doing so, it turns out, requires pondering a document in the archives of the politburo.

When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.

Peter Robinson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former White House speechwriter, writes a weekly column for Forbes.

https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/te...-robinson.html

5 Times Democrats Tried To Work With The Russians To Swing Elections

The Democrats don't have the moral high ground here.

Photo by Mikki Ansin/Getty Images

ByAaron Bandler
July 12, 2017

The Left has been screaming for Donald Trump Jr.'s head after it became known that he met with a Russian government attorney with the intent of obtaining opposition research on Hillary Clinton. While this was wrong (but not illegal), the Democrats aren't really in a position to lecture about Russia collusion since their party has a history of attempting to work with the Russians to swing elections.

Here are five times Democrats attempted to work with Russia to influence elections.
1. Former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) twice reached out to the Soviet Union for election help. According to Michael Reagan, Sen. John Tunney (D-CA), at the behest of his friend Ted Kennedy, lobbied the Soviet Union "to sabotage [Jimmy] Carter's foreign policy efforts," as this was during Kennedy's primary challenge against Carter in 1980.
"One 1980 document stated that Kennedy offered to condemn President Carter’s policy toward the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in exchange for KGB help," wrote Reagan. "News accounts of that period prove that Kennedy did, in fact, openly criticize Carter's Afghanistan policy."
Additionally, in 1983 Kennedy reached out to the Soviet Union in an attempt to undermine Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and weaken his re-election prospects in 1984, even going as far as offering to set up television interviews in America in order to make the Soviets come across as more "peaceful."
2. In 2012, Barack Obama said to Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president at the time: "After my election I have more flexibility." This now-infamous quote was from a hot mic; Obama was telling Medvedev that at that time he just needed Vladimir Putin, who had won Russia's presidential election earlier that month, "to give me space" on Russia-related issues until after his election. Medvedev told Obama, "I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you."
During one of the 2012 presidential debates, Obama snarkily said to Mitt Romney, "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War's been over for 20 years." Obama won re-election, and Putin proceeded to take advantage of Obama's "flexibility" with his invasion of Crimea and calling the shots in Syria.
3. Jimmy Carter tried to work with the Soviets during the 1980 election to improve his chances against Ronald Reagan. Michael Reagan also noted in his column that Carter, through his political ally Armand Hammer, lobbied for the Soviet Union to let "Jewish 'refuseniks' emigrate to Israel" to strengthen Carter's standing in important states, but the Soviets rebuffed Carter.
Interestingly, Reagan biographer Craig Shirley wrote in one of his books that during the 1976 election, the Soviet Union "had made overtures to the Carter campaign," even going as far as suggesting "that they could possibly pursue policies that could affect the outcome of the election so as to favor Carter."
4. Bill Clinton pledged to support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996 if Yeltsin agreed "to clear up 'negative' issues." The Washington Times unearthed a confidential memo in 1996 that revealed the following:

President Clinton, in a private meeting at the recent anti-terrorism summit, promised Boris Yeltsin he would back the Russian president's re-election bid with "positive" U.S. policies toward Russia.
In exchange, Mr. Clinton asked for Mr. Yeltsin's help in clearing up "negative" issues such as the poultry dispute between the two countries, according to a classified State Department record of the meeting obtained by The Washington Times.
Mr. Clinton told Mr. Yeltsin that "this is a big issue, especially since about 40 percent of U.S. poultry is produced in Arkansas. An effort should be made to keep such things from getting out of hand," the memo said.

Bill Gertz, who reported on the memo and is now an editor for the Washington Free Beacon and a columnist for The Washington Times, explained that the memo "exposed the Bill Clinton style of leadership — going to bat for his political donors and other vested interests in his home state of Arkansas."
5. When Tip O'Neill was Speaker of the House, he wanted the Soviets on the Democrats' side during the 1984 election. According to Michael Reagan, O'Neill told the Soviet Union's ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, "that it was in everyone’s best interests if the Soviets would help the Democrats keep 'that demagogue Reagan' from being re-elected."
"O'Neill warned Dobrynin that the 'primitive instincts' of this 'dangerous man' would plunge the world into war," wrote Reagan.
Each of these examples, with the possible exception of the Clinton-Yeltsin one, were easily worse than Trump Jr. agreeing to a meeting with a Russian government lawyer for dirt on Hillary Clinton. Again, this does not excuse Trump Jr's sleazy behavior, but it does show that the Democrats are more than happy to do the same thing when it helps their side.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/18519/...-aaron-bandler