Remember when Ted Kennedy asked the Soviets for help defeating Reagan?

By Thomas Lifson @ American Thinker

The Democrats are desperately diverting attention away from their rigging the nomination fight by charging that Russia is interfering in our election. But there was a time when going to Moscow to help defeat the other party didn’t seem to disturb Democrats. In fact, with the help of friendly media, the entire incident has been sent to the memory hole. Once upon a time it was revealed, but nobody outside of the conservative ghetto remembers.

But Betsy Newmark of Betsy’s Page remembers: (hat tip: Instapundit):

As the Democrats struggle to turn the story of the DNC hacks into an attack on Trump by arguing that the Russians are behind the hack and that Putin is trying to help Trump get elected, let's remember when a prominent Democrat actually went to the Soviets for help in defeating Reagan. In 1984 Ted Kennedy approached the Soviets who were then led by the former KGB head, Yuri Andropov, and tried to negotiate help in opposing Reagan. We found out about Kennedy's efforts when Yeltsin opened up the Soviet archives in 1991. Sean Davis links to the story as reported in Forbes.

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

This is open, self-initiated collaboration with a rival power, and there’s a name for that sort of thing, “treason.” But that word is not associated with any Kennedy (at least not since Joe was Ambassador to the UK) because of the studious ignoring of the story coming from the Soviet archives.

Compared this reliable evidence, the case against Trump is made of air. We don’t know who did the hacking, and the bits of code that supposedly incriminate the Russians could well be a false flag operation, as argued by intelligence expert Michael Ledeen. There is no evidence at all of any Trump business in Russia, and he has denied having any investments there. There is, in other words, nothing to connect Trump to the leaks, much less to Russia.

The amount of attention paid to the non-evidence of Trump versus the studied avoidance of the conclusive evidence of Ted Kennedy soliciting enemy collaboration against a domestic political rival is t