Will Trump End Up in Prison?

When Trump 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort was passing secret polling information about swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to Konstantin Kilimnik, as is laid out in the Mueller Report, it was part of a very specific and successful effort on the part of Russian Intelligence to help put Trump in office. 

This was the data they would have used to have troll accounts and ads target individuals in those states via social media, particularly Facebook, to both suppress the vote for Clinton and encourage voters to show up for Trump and other down-ticket Republicans. 

This is not the first time a Republican candidate for president has committed treason to get into the White House. In fact, it's been the norm since 1968, and therefore it's time to seriously discuss a 60-year problem we've had with treasonous and illegitimate Republican presidents. 

America must stop giving criminal Republican presidents a pass. Every GOP president since Dwight Eisenhower used treason or deception to come to office (or inherited office from one who did), and it needs to end. It's a truly astonishing and horrifying story. 

It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam War. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for president in the election that year against a "reinvented" Richard Nixon. 

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they'd both sign that fall. 

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill Humphrey's chances of winning the 1968 election. So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris. 

Nixon promised South Vietnam's corrupt politicians that he'd give them a richer deal when he was president than LBJ could give them then. 

The FBI had been wiretapping Nixon's people and told LBJ about his effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here): 

President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he'll hold out 'til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand. I don't want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn't to be doin' this, Everett. This is treason. 

Sen. Dirksen: I know. 

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that's Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason. 

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon's plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls. 

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn't sleep. 

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ's efforts were "in shambles." 

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon's deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. 

An additional 22,000 American soldiers, and over an additional million Vietnamese, died because of Nixon's 1968 treason, and he left it to Gerald Ford to end the war and evacuate the American soldiers. 

Nixon was never held to account for it, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation it was barely noticed by the American press. 

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been president had it not been for Richard Nixon's treason. He pardoned Nixon.

Next up was Ronald Reagan. 

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the 52 hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran. 

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for president on the popular position of releasing the hostages: 

I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.  . . .I won the election with over 76% of the vote.  . . .Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96% of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking]. 

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979. 

But behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran's radical faction -- Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini -- to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.

This was the second act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president. 

The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini—the so-called "October Surprise"— sabotaged President Carter's and Iranian President Bani-Sadr's attempts to free the hostages. As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013: 

"After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism. 

"Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the 'October Surprise,' 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." 

And Reagan's treason -- just like Nixon's treason -- worked perfectly. 

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office -- to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran's acknowledging the deal -- the American hostages in Iran were released. 

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981 and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran-Contra" scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office. 

After Reagan -- Bush senior was elected -- but like Jerry Ford -- Bush was really only president because he served as vice president under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped keep him in office. 

The criminal investigation into Iran-Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George H.W. Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North, and others. Bush's attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation, which Bush did. The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: 

THE PARDONS; BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS 'COVER-UP.' 

And if the October Surprise hadn't hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four illegitimate Republican presidents. 

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court. 

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount -- and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency -- Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion: 

The counting of votes. . .does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media. 

And apparently it wasn't important that Scalia's son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal). 

Just like it wasn't important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush transition team -- before the Supreme Court shut down the count in Florida -- and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida. . .which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.) 

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida -- manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year -- and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000. 

As the November 12, 2001 article in The New York Times read: 

If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won. 

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis. 

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state's voter rolls just before the election. 

So, for the third time in four decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.* 

Most recently, in 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican secretaries of state across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters -- most people of color -- from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton-Trump election. 

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs or the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller's investigation. 

One can only wonder how much better off America would be if six Republican presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House and used it to put right-wing cranks on the Supreme Court and other federal benches. 

And on top of that, we learned today that Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

Donald Trump still lost the national vote by nearly three million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America. 

One can only wonder how much better off America would be if six Republican presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House and used it to put right-wing cranks on the Supreme Court and other federal benches. 

Now, finally, there may be an opportunity for some accountability for another criminal Republican president.  

The depth and breadth of Trump's involvement in the January 6 attempt to destroy our form of government and replace it with single-party strongman rule is becoming more and more obvious. As a result, the pressure is building to hold him and many of those in his administration to account. 

America has ignored GOP crimes to seize and hold the White House long enough. It's time, at long last, to put this one in prison. 

This piece initially appeared on The Hartmann Report.

(Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.) Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.