Yes the GOP has a long history of cheating in elections. Reagan also traded arms for hostages in Iran-Contra.
-snip-
It is not an "untold" story. Is it merely coincidence the publisher of the Washington Post, Fred Ryan, is like an adopted son of Reagan and chooses the
executive editor of that newspaper, and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) did such a prompt job acceding to Bush '41`s demand that the October Surprise congressional committee investigation be immediately closed in July, 1992 during Bush's campaign against Clinton, that Bush '43 rewarded Hamilton with both co-chair positions on the 911 Investigation and Jim Baker's Iraq Study Group in 2006.
Notice a pattern? It's always the G.O.P. conducted political Ops, cloaked by MSM reluctance to speak truth to power.
https://www.kaibird.com/news/details/58
https://www.rcfp.org › bird-october-surprise-foia
Oct 29, 2019 — The
complaint calls out the State Department's failure to respond to a records request submitted more than three years ago.
Some 'October surprise' conspiracies turn out to be true
Aug 21, 2018
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As a historian, I am always skeptical of conspiracies. But as McCloy blurted out in 1963, some plots do exist.
And then there was the alleged October surprise of 1980. The Reagan administration and Republicans always denied that they had any back-door negotiations with Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary regime during the Iran hostage crisis. Specifically, they denied that Reagan's campaign manager, William J. Casey, traveled surreptitiously to Madrid in the summer of 1980 to meet with a representative of the ayatollah, and to suggest that it might be in Iran's interest to stall the negotiations over the release of the American hostages. Casey allegedly intimated that a Reagan administration would resume arms sales to the Iranians.
These allegations seemed too outrageous, too outlandish to be believed. Journalists investigated. A House October Surprise Task Force delved into the story. Two good books, Gary Sick's "October Surprise" (1992) and Robert Parry's "Trick or Treason" (1993), made strong circumstantial arguments that something had happened, though neither were able to prove that Casey had flown to Madrid. But just a few years ago, Parry discovered a damning memo in the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library. Dated Nov. 4, 1991, the memo was written by President Bush's deputy counsel, Paul Beach, and it described the State Department's efforts to collect documents in response to congressional subpoenas for "material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations." Beach then specifically mentions "a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown."
So we now know that Casey took time off from his campaign duties sometime in the summer of 1980 to visit Madrid. For "purposes unknown." That's all we know: There is a 1991 White House memo about a State Department cable that was presumably dated in 1980. We do not know if Casey went to Madrid with the knowledge of his candidate. Indeed, from what we know about Casey's love for intrigue and even skullduggery, this former spy and veteran of the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services may have initiated his own back-door channel to the Iranians without any authorization from Reagan. But I think it is now reasonable to conclude that Casey did something. The Iranians dragged out the negotiations over the release of the hostages. President Carter believed these negotiations were nearly successful in late September 1980, but suddenly new demands were made that stalled the talks. Polls showed Carter within single digits of catching Reagan until about 10 days before the election. Carter lost decisively, and the hostages were inexplicably released minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president.
The story does not end there. Months later, Reagan's newly installed CIA director, Casey, gave the green light to Israel to sell weapons to Iran. In retrospect, this was the beginning of the scandal that broke in 1987, when it became known that the Reagan administration had been exchanging weapons for hostages. .. someone in Trump's camp do what Casey did — and make a deal? If so, this will be very hard to unearth.
But historically, Democrats have every reason to be wary."
