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Collusion - it has been done in the past
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Maybe this is common knowledge, but reading a history of the Vietnam War. Which explains how the 1968 Nixon campaign colluded with the South Vietnamese government to influence the election. Humphrey was running on an anti-war campaign, and there were official peace talks scheduled during the campaign. Nixon wanted to deny the Democrats any chance at scoring a peace deal, so he used a secret contact within the South Vietnamese government to urge Saigon to pull out of any peace talks until the Republicans were in power. And the Saigon, indeed, pulled out of the peace talks. Nixon didn't know that his contact was being bugged by the CIA, and the CIA knew what Nixon was doing. And Lyndon Johnson learned about it around 48 hours before election day. But decided to keep the information secret even though he considered it treason, afraid of introducing chaos just before the election.

This is from the book Ellsberg: A Secret History of the Vietnam War

Fascinating stuff. I'm not posting his as a "It was done in the past, so it's OK and normal." Rather Nixon's behavior was awful. Even though we know from history that 1968 peace talks were unlikely to be very fruitful, Nixon was an, at that point, a private citizen interfering with foreign policy in a way that maybe cost American - and Vietnamese - lives for purely political benefit. Nixon believed that even a temporary cessation of hostilities would be politically bad, and that's all he cared about. To me it's worse than his domestic political spying or obstruction. I'm surprised this isn't a more visible part of Nixon's legacy. (or maybe it is, and I've just been ignorant until now). Campaigns shouldn't run unaccountable, shadow State Departments.
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