RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editors’ note: In light of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with the Russian government during the 2016 US presidential election, which now involves Trump Jr. daring to talk to a Russian woman, Frontpage has deemed it important to bring attention to a forgotten story of verifiable scheming with the Kremlin — by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy against President Ronald Reagan. We are reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s 2008 interview with Dr. Paul Kengor, who unearthed documentation detailing Kennedy’s outreach to the KGB and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov during the height of the Cold War, in which the Democratic Senator offered to collude with the Soviets to undermine President Reagan.

Ted Kennedy and the KGB.
Frontpage Magazine, May 15, 2008.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Paul Kengor, the author of the New York Times extended-list bestseller God and Ronald Reagan as well as God and George W. Bush and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. He is also the author of the first spiritual biography of the former first lady, God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life. He is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.

FP: Paul Kengor, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

Kengor: Always great to be back, Jamie.

FP: We’re here today to revisit Ted Kennedy’s reaching out to the KGB during the Reagan period. Refresh our readers’ memories a bit.

Kengor: The episode is based on a document produced 25 years ago this week. I discussed it with you in our earlier interview back in November 2006. In my book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, I presented a rather eye-opening May 14, 1983 KGB document on Ted Kennedy. The entire document, unedited, unabridged, is printed in the book, as well as all the documentation affirming its authenticity. Even with that, today, almost 25 years later, it seems to have largely remained a secret.

FP: Tell us about this document.

Kengor: It was a May 14, 1983 letter from the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to the head of the USSR, the odious Yuri Andropov, with the highest level of classification. Chebrikov relayed to Andropov an offer from Senator Ted Kennedy, presented by Kennedy’s old friend and law-school buddy, John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California, to reach out to the Soviet leadership at the height of a very hot time in the Cold War. According to Chebrikov, Kennedy was deeply troubled by the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he believed was bringing us perilously close to nuclear confrontation. Kennedy, according to Chebrikov, blamed this situation not on the Soviet leadership but on the American president—Ronald Reagan. Not only was the USSR not to blame, but, said Chebrikov, Kennedy was, quite the contrary, “very impressed” with Andropov.

The thrust of the letter is that Reagan had to be stopped, meaning his alleged aggressive defense policies, which then ranged from the Pershing IIs to the MX to SDI, and even his re-election bid, needed to be stopped. It was Ronald Reagan who was the hindrance to peace. That view of Reagan is consistent with things that Kennedy said and wrote at the time, including articles in sources like Rolling Stone (March 1984) and in a speeches like his March 24, 1983 remarks on the Senate floor the day after Reagan’s SDI speech, which he lambasted as “misleading Red-Scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”

Even more interesting than Kennedy’s diagnosis was the prescription: According to Chebrikov, Kennedy suggested a number of PR moves to help the Soviets in terms of their public image with the American public. He reportedly believed that the Soviet problem was a communication problem, resulting from an inability to counter Reagan’s (not the USSR’s) “propaganda.” If only Americans could get through Reagan’s smokescreen and hear the Soviets’ peaceful intentions.

So, there was a plan, or at least a suggested plan, to hook up Andropov and other senior apparatchiks with the American media, where they could better present their message and make their case. Specifically, the names of Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters are mentioned in the document. Also, Kennedy himself would travel to Moscow to meet with the dictator.

Time was of the essence, since Reagan, as the document privately acknowledged, was flying high en route to easy re-election in 1984.

FP: Did you have the document vetted?

Kengor: Of course. It comes from the Central Committee archives of the former USSR. Once Boris Yeltsin took over Russia in 1991, he immediately began opening the Soviet archives, which led to a rush on the archives by Western researchers. One of them, Tim Sebastian of the London Times and BBC, found the Kennedy document and reported it in the February 2, 1992 edition of the Times, in an article titled, “Teddy, the KGB and the top secret file.”

But this electrifying revelation stopped there; it went no further. Never made it across the Atlantic. Not a single American news organization, from what I can tell, picked up the story. Apparently, it just wasn’t interesting enough, nor newsworthy.

Western scholars, however, had more integrity, and responded: they went to the archives to procure their own copy. So, several copies have circulated for a decade and a half.

I got my copy when a reader of Frontpage Magazine, named Marko Suprun, whose father survived Stalin’s 1930s genocide in the Ukraine, alerted me to the document. He apparently had spent years trying to get the American media to take a look at the document, but, again, our journalists simply weren’t intrigued. He knew I was researching Reagan and the Cold War. He sent me a copy. I first authenticated it through Herb Romerstein, the Venona researcher and widely respected expert who knows more about the Communist Party and archival research beyond the former Iron Curtain than anyone. I also had a number of scholars read the original and the translation, including Harvard’s Richard Pipes.

Donald Trump Jr. fought back yesterday against the increasingly desperate shrieking from the tinfoil-hat Left by publishing online the emails that led to his innocuous campaign-season meeting a year ago with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

By releasing the chain of emails leading to the much ballyhooed but brief get-together at the Trump Tower in Manhattan, Donald Jr. is hoping to dispel any notion that the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government to affect the outcome of the November 2016 election. (I wrote about the Trump Jr. meeting story yesterday here at FrontPage before the emails became available.)

The emails do not indicate any knowledge of Russian government wrongdoing, such as hacking, or Trump campaign involvement in such activities. Yet the mainstream media is going berserk, hyping the overheated ravings of leftist idiots like Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) whose disastrous performance in the vice presidential debate against Republican Mike Pence may have helped to sink the Democrat ticket last year.

Kaine accused Donald Trump Jr. of committing treason by agreeing to meet with Veselnitskaya. “We are now beyond obstruction of justice,” Kaine said Tuesday. “This is moving into perjury, false statements and even potentially treason.”

Of course, Kaine is no stranger to treason. He himself may have engaged in seditious activity in late January when he said Democrats would have to “fight in the streets” against the Trump administration.

And how quickly the Left forgets that the Ukrainian government took action to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign with nary a peep from left-wingers. As one media outlet reported:

The actions taken by government officials included disseminating “documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”

Meanwhile, the Left is trying to stigmatize and de-normalize everything Trump’s father does as president, pretending opposition research is something new and shady when it has been part of the electoral process ever since elections began. Nor is it illegal, immoral, or somehow unethical to “collude,” by which the Left means, communicate, with foreign nationals in conducting opposition research in connection with an election. The U.S. does have the First Amendment, after all. But all of this nonsense and misdirection is part of the Left’s campaign to delegitimize the Trump administration.

But honest left-wing law professor Jonathan Turley trashed an ethics lawyer for claiming that the Trump Jr.-Veselnitskaya meeting “borders on treason.”

“There is not a clear criminal act in such a meeting based on the information that we have,” Turley writes. “Moreover, it is not necessarily unprecedented.”

The president’s oldest son said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show yesterday that he didn’t bother his busy father with the particulars of what turned out to be a pointless meeting with Veselnitskaya.

Today, we released our OpenTheBooks investigation of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities.

With editorial coverage at the Wall Street Journal, we ask whether or not nonprofits have a right to public funding no matter how strong their balance sheet?

In 2016, nonprofit and higher education organizations across America received grants of $183 million. Recipients of $20.5 million included 71 financially rich entities – each with assets exceeding $1 billion. Those entities were awarded $120 million in taxpayer funds since 2009.

In the arts community, there is a stark contrast between the haves and have-nots. There were the “starving artist” organizations – 1,027 organizations with assets under $1 million – that received just $41 million in federal grants (FY2016).

This report raises several questions:

Why are taxpayers funding nonprofits that have assets of at least $1 billion? Do charities have a right to public funding no matter how strong their balance sheet?
If the public purpose is to fund the starving artist, then why are small organizations (less than $1 million in assets) receiving just $1 of every $4 in NFA-H nonprofit grant-making?
Should prestigious universities receive arts and humanities funding despite their billion-dollar endowments?
Who can explain the public purpose in forcing working-class taxpayers to fund arts organizations that obviously don’t need the money?

Read our investigation of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities.

Join the Transparency Revolution! Join Us.

After all, it’s your money.

President Trump has accused former FBI director James Comey of illegality in leaking memos that may have contained classified information. If it is true that the leaked Comey memos – laundered through a law professor in an effort to pressure Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein into appointing a special counsel – contained classified information, who will investigate Comey? Surely the Special Counsel, Comey’s friend who he helped get appointed, could not conduct a credible investigation. Nor could Rod Rosenstein, who made the appointment. Will yet another special counsel have to be appointed to conduct an investigation of Comey’s leaking?

Then-Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, May 3, 2017, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)

On the basis of what we now know, it does not appear that Comey committed a crime. What he did, if the allegation turns out to be true, is remarkably similar to what he investigated with regard to Hillary Clinton’s improper use of a private email server. Both Clinton and Comey were sloppy in their handling of classified material and both deserve to be criticized for their negligence. But neither crossed the line into willful criminality. Of course, Hillary’s enemies argue that she did cross the line. And Comey’s enemies will argue the same as to his conduct. But judged by a uniform standard, neither should be prosecuted for what appear to be honest mistakes.

We don’t know at this point whether the Comey memos actually contained information that is classified, and even if so, was it so designated before or after Comey disclosed it? We also don’t know the level of classification, if any. What we do know is that Comey’s claim that he was entitled to leak the memos because he was a “private citizen” is bogus. The memos contained information he obtained as a government employees and the memos were the property of the government. If they contained classified information, he was not entitled to leak them without prior approval.

President Trump was quick to Tweet that Comey’s actions were “so illegal.” That is, of course, what Trump’s critics are saying about his actions, and those of his family, his campaign aids and his transition team members. Both sides are rushing to judgment when it comes to criminalizing the political acts of their opponents. Both sides seem to believe that if something done by their opponents is wrong, it should be criminal. But that’s not how our system of justice works. For something to be criminal, it must be explicitly prohibited by an existing criminal statute. There must be a criminal act, accompanied by a criminal intent. Moreover, the law must be clear and unambiguous. These salutary rules are designed to protect Democrats and Republicans alike. But they are being abused by Republicans and Democrats alike in the short term interest of partisan advantage.

Perhaps the most extreme example of stretching the law to target an individual for a political sin is the recent statement by Richard Painter directed against Donald Trump’s son, who attended a meeting with a Russian lawyer who suggested that she might provide him with negative information about Hillary Clinton. This is what Painter said: “This was an effort to get opposition research on an opponent in an American political campaign from the Russians, who were known to be engaged in spying inside the United States.” He suggested that Trump’s son might be guilty of treason and should be in custody. But the Constitution specifically defines treason, providing that its definition is exclusive and limited. Here is what it says: “Treason against the United States shall consist only levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” (Emphasis added) This definition clearly does not cover “an effort to get opposition research” from the Russians. But the Constitution doesn’t seem to matter to those who are convinced that any wrongful action must also be criminal.

Linda Sarsour knows how to attract attention. She may be the most visible Islamist activist in the United States today, and her use of the word “jihad” during a speech to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) July 1 generated a predictable response from opponents, followed by an even more predictable wave of sympathetic media coverage.

The Huffington Post and Time magazine published op-eds defending Sarsour, who until recently directed the Arab American Association of New York, and accepting that she did not use to word to incite violence. The Washington Post went further, giving Sarsour her own op-ed to cast herself as “a target of the Islamophobia industry.”

It might be easier to give her the benefit of the doubt if she didn’t have such a deep history of hatred and extremism, especially against everyone who supports Israel’s right to exist. It also might help if she didn’t make a point of lauding radical Islamists and at least one terrorist.

In addition to mentioning jihad, Sarsour used her ISNA remarks to praise Imam Siraj Wahhaj as “my favorite person in this room,” calling him “a mentor, a motivator an encourager of mine. Someone who has taught me to speak truth to power and not worry about the consequences.”

Muslims shouldn’t become politically active because it is “the American thing to do,” Wahhaj said in 1991. Muslims who do get involved should “be very careful [to remember] that your leader is for Allah … You get involved in politics because politics can be a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.”

In 1995, Wahhaj also described America as “a garbage can … filthy and sick.”

Does Sarsour agree with her mentor? She should say so publicly and with the same conviction that she uses to attack her critics.

Wahhaj was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the first World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. He defended Abdel-Rahman as a “respected scholar,” and a “bold, as a strong preacher of Islam.”

Years later, Wahhaj spoke at a fundraiser for Aafia Siddiqui, known as “Lady al-Qaida,” following her conviction on terrorism charges. “I studied the case a little bit,” he said in 2011. “I think that she innocent. And I think at least there is grounds, there’s reasonable doubt. And by law, if there’s reasonable doubt, you have to acquit.”