Justified Secret Russia Contacts

Nixon Did It, Too! How a Trump Aide Justified Secret Russia Contacts

K.T. McFarland cited one of Nixon’s worst acts to defend Michael Flynn and the Trump team.

DAN FRIEDMAN

In September 2017, a former White House aide offered a novel defense for the Trump team’s secret contacts with the Russian government: Richard Nixon did it, too.

That’s what K.T. McFarland told the FBI when asked about Michael Flynn’s efforts during the presidential transition period to meddle in US foreign policy by negotiating with the Russian ambassador behind the Obama administration’s back. According to McFarland, the actions taken by Flynn—who Trump had tapped to become national security adviser—were not unusual because other former presidents, including Nixon, also interfered in foreign policy before taking office.

McFarland, who briefly served as deputy national security adviser, cited Nixon’s “involvement in Vietnam War peace talks” in 1968—along with Ronald Reagan’s alleged pre-election interference in 1980 in talks aimed at freeing US hostages in Iran—as “precedent for proactive foreign policy engagements by an incoming administration,” according to an FBI summary of investigators’ 2017 interview with McFarland, published last week by Buzzfeed.

McFarland’s assertion hasn’t drawn much notice, but it should. Flynn admitted to secret transition-period contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which he sought to temper Russia’s response to sanctions imposed by the Obama administration to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 election. In his guilty plea, Flynn admitted that he also called Kislyak and officials from other countries to lobby against a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank after news reports indicated that the Obama administration would not oppose the measure. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s April 2019 report says Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, oversaw the latter effort. These contacts may have violated the Logan Act, a 1799 law that bars private US citizens from acting to “influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government” in a dispute with the United States or “to defeat the measures of the United States.” Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to FBI about this activity. He is scheduled to be sentenced later this month.

To summarize: To justify potentially illegal secret contacts between the Trump team and Russia, McFarland, who herself worked on Nixon’s National Security Council, cited perhaps the most notorious example in US history of a White House candidate undermining the diplomacy of a siting president. (McFarland’s comparison is also flawed because Nixon’s interference, and the Reagan team’s alleged actions, occurred prior to Election Day, not during the transition.)

While allegations that Reagan aides meddled in hostage negotiations in Iran remain disputed, Nixon’s secret disruption of Vietnam peace talks is well-documented. Recently revealed notes show that in October 1968, Nixon asked H.R. Haldeman, who became his chief of staff, to “monkey wrench” talks between the United States, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam and to instruct an emissary, Anna Chennault—a prominent Republican and socialite in touch with South Vietnamese negotiators—to urge them to “hold on” and refuse to agree to a deal in hopes of getting better terms under Nixon. Nixon feared that progress in talks would help his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who surged late in the race as he amped up his criticism of the war.

Nixon’s skullduggery worked for Nixon. Encouraged by him, the South Vietnamese stalled the talks, and Nixon narrowly beat Humphrey. But the consequences were bad for everyone else. Nixon had suggested he had a plan for exiting Vietnam. Instead he expanded the war. Roughly 22,000 more Americans, along with far more Vietnamese, would die before the US finally withdrew from the country at the start of Nixon’s second term in 1973. Nixon’s initially secret bombing of sites in Cambodia in 1969 may have helped spur the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who went on to kill an estimated 2 million Cambodians.