BREAKING: Witness Ben Barnes confirms Reagan campaign collusion with Tehran to delay hostage release

[Badger]

Jimmy Carter will get to not only outlive the two men who sabotaged his re-election (Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan), he will also get the satisfaction of being totally vindicated in the public eye before his death.

God bless you, Jimmy.

You were too good for us.

Jimmy Carter was a terrible President and a terrible man. Most Americans will never read or hear this account, and if they do they will rightly not believe it.

Terrible man?!? Dude, totally stfu. You have some justification to at least posit the theory he was a terrible president, but a terrible person he is proven not. Probably the best human being to have been elected president since Eisenhower.

Seriously, GTFO with that kind of partisan hackery.

[Badger]

Ben Barnes...the top Kerry donor and Democratic politician? Why would we believe him? His explanation for not revealing it at the time doesn't make sense either.

Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”

How would Barnes have looked like a Benedict Arnold for having revealed Connolly's treachery?

This was also investigated multiple times and found to be bunk .

Yes, and as pointed out Not only was Conley's involvement never investigated, now it has been verified firsthand.

We get it that you are not prone to processing new information that contradicts what you already believe, but you need to take Reagan down from that pedestal that deludes you so badly almost things.

[Badger]

Ben Barnes...the top Kerry donor and Democratic politician? Why would we believe him? His explanation for not revealing it at the time doesn't make sense either.

Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”

How would Barnes have looked like a Benedict Arnold for having revealed Connolly's treachery?

This was also investigated multiple times and found to be bunk .

Previous investigations didn't touch on Connally's involvement:

Suspicions about the Reagan camp’s interactions with Iran circulated quietly for years until Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Mr. Carter, published a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advancing the theory, followed by a book, “October Surprise,” published that November.

The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.

To forestall such a scenario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.

The House and Senate separately authorized investigations and both ultimately rejected the claims. The bipartisan House task force, led by a Democrat, Representative Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, and controlled by Democrats 8 to 5, concluded in a consensus 968-page report that Mr. Casey was not in Madrid at the time and that stories of covert dealings were not backed by credible testimony, documents or intelligence reports.

Still, a White House memo produced in November 1991 by a lawyer for President George H.W. Bush reported the existence of “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” That memo was not turned over to Mr. Hamilton’s task force and was discovered two decades later by Robert Parry, a journalist who helped produce a “Frontline” documentary on the October surprise.

Reached by telephone this past week, Mr. Sick said he never heard of any involvement by Mr. Connally but saw Mr. Barnes’s account as verifying the broad concerns he had raised. “This is really very interesting and it really does add significantly to the base level of information on this,” Mr. Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The story goes “further than anything that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is really new.”

Sure but how do we know this testimony is even credible cause an investigation would have found out any unusual trips that were made . This seems more like just a way to try to give credibility to a a conspiracy theory as the fact is you would need far more than this statement to claim the Reagan camp sabotaged the hostage release .

Nixon was outright cause on tape and LBJ is recorded calling it treason which is why their is evidence of that .

Beep Boop was in Tehran with John Connally and can personally verify there was no discussion about releasing the hostages late!

[Badger]

What a joke. Just because the red avatars so badly want this to be true doesn’t make it so.

What a joke to claim a first person narrative of this from someone involved isn't true. Just because blue avatars went so bad for this not to be the case doesn't mean it isn't.

You mean the hostages being released a few minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president wasn't a totally innocent coincidence?