written from memory, so please excuse any slight inaccuracies.
This is not the first time that the results of an election might have been changed had the administration in power disclosed to the American people what it knew about the activities of one of the candidates to succeed it.
In 1968 Lyndon Johnson knew of the efforts by people involved with Nixon to undermine piece efforts in Vietnam. He had clear evidence, and in an election as close as that was disclosing it might well have tipped the election from Nixon to Humphrey. Moreover, it is not hard to believe that had Humphrey become President instead of Milhous, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, including perhaps 80% or more of the Americans who died in that war. The region would have been stabilized much sooner. American’s faith in their government might not have been so undercut. And quite conceivably some of the divides that tore at this country for half a century might at least have been lessened.
In 1980, there seems to be fairly clear evidence that those close to the Reagan campaign were obsessed with the notion of an October Surprise, that Carter might actually get the hostages held by Iran back. There is lots of evidence in the public venue of back channel communications to persuade the Iranians not to release the hostages and to hold out for a better deal with Reagan. Of course the culminating insult is that the Iranians released the hostages only after Reagan had been inaugurated. Clearly the Carter administration knew what was going on. Unlike 1968, however, it was involved in trying to get reelected. Whether or not that prevented them from disclosing the evidence of what the Reaganauts were doing, or whether it was just the fundamentally decentness of Jimmy Carter who did not believe intelligence should be used for political purposes regardless of the circumstances, it is not hard to imagine that a deal reached mid-October would have guaranteed Carter’s re-election. Exposure of the traitorous dealings to prevent the hostages release for political purposes might even have been more explosive to the election results.
And now we have 2016. It is very hard to imagine that the bits and pieces of what have come out since the election were not known to the Obama administration, whether it was Michael Flynn’s illegal internet connection, Don Jr. and other Trumpistas’ ongoing contacts with Russians, the full scope of what the Russians were doing including putting into the context of what they had done with Brexit and in other European elections. What if in the run-up to November 8 we were discussing not emails or the Clinton foundation, but instead both Russian efforts to manipulate our elections and the clear evidence of connections if not complicity with people around Trump including his family.
Yes, we had people associated with intelligence from previous positions rightly describing Trump as a useful idiot for Russian efforts, but the media gave short shrift to what that represented.
Let me be clear. I am well aware as a student of history how often the US has intervened in the electoral processes of other nations. Our hands are certainly not clean, and this used to be a key part of how we opposed the USSR during the Cold War. We often used other means to overturn elections we did not like, sometimes with long-term tragic consequences — think of Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA helping overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran for example.
And to be sure, sometimes to conclusively demonstrate to the media and thus to the American people how we know what we know about things like the Russian attempts to manipulate our election might require disclosing sources and methods that could expose them. It is also possible that we know what we know by using means that are specifically prohibit by law.
Despite all that, I thought it worth noting that while this might right now seem the most egregious example we can cite in our own electoral history, because it involves the active interference by a foreign government for its own ends, it is not something totally without precedent in the sense of the willingness of one party to collude with interests outside the US for its own political benefit.