Treasonous Republicans

As a nation we expect our leaders to be patriots. Many Republican elected officials make a big deal of wearing flag pins on their lapels as if that alone makes them patriots. It’s unfortunate that Republican presidents and vice-presidents over the last 50 years haven’t lived up to our expectations.

In the final weeks leading up to the 1968 presidential election President Lyndon Johnson was working to end the war in Vietnam. During negotiations Republican candidate Richard Nixon contacted the leadership of South Vietnam in an effort to delay a peace treaty in order to gain political advantage in the United States. Nixon offered the South Vietnamese leaders a better deal than Johnson if they would boycott the talks. Nixon violated the Logan Act which prohibits private citizens from trying to “defeat the measures of the United States” or otherwise meddle in its diplomacy. The war dragged on for another five years at a cost of thousands more American lives. It has taken nearly 50 years for the proof to be made public due to Nixon’s efforts to keep his files and those of his top staff secret. This act of treason is proven in great detail by the notes that long time Nixon aide and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman took at the time and which were stored in Nixon’s presidential library.

In 1979 Iranian revolutionaries took 52 American hostages from the American embassy in Tehran. Carter ran for re-election in 1980 and worked hard to negotiate the release of the hostages. As the campaign heated up Republican candidate Ronald Reagan became concerned that Carter might manage to get the hostages out in time for it to affect the outcome of the election. The Reagan campaign created a private network of military and intelligence contacts to monitor Carter administration efforts and feed that information to Reagan's people. The Reagan team also began their own secret negotiations with an Iranian faction led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. At the time Iraq had invaded Iran and they desperately needed weapons. Reagan’s team offered American weapons and spare parts as well as the release of billions of Iranian government monetary assets held in US banks if only they would hold onto the hostages until after the American presidential election. The hostages were released minutes after Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981.

George W Bush took office in 2001 and later that year hijackers from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda brought down New York’s Twin Towers and crashed into the Pentagon taking the lives of nearly 3000 people. It wasn’t enough to invade Afghanistan which was harboring bin Laden, Bush also felt the need to invade Iraq. In order to sell the war his team claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in particular that they were building nuclear weapons. As evidence they claimed that Iraq was importing uranium ore from Niger. The CIA asked the former ambassador to Gabon, Joe Wilson, to go to Niger and use his local contacts to investigate the claims. When Wilson filed his report it caused a firestorm and in an effort to discredit him Vice President Dick Cheney outed Wilson’s wife as a covert CIA operative. It was Cheney aide Scooter Libby who took the fall but it’s clear Cheney committed treason.

With Trump the apple didn’t fall far from the Republican tree as there is growing evidence he too negotiated with hostile foreign powers to affect the outcome of our election. Now Trump appears to monetizing his treachery using the trade war he started to wrangle a $500 million loan from China.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 25, 2018