MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Floats Trump Is ‘Openly Colluding’ With Putin Over Imprisoned WSJ’s Evan Gershkovich
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes spent a segment of his show on Wednesday positing a truly insidious theory: that former President Donald Trump could be “openly colluding” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich hostage until after the 2024 election. And there’s precedent!
Trump released a campaign video on Wednesday in which he claimed that Gershkovich, who has been wrongly imprisoned in Russia on false charges of espionage for over a year, would be released and brought home but only if he was reelected: “Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, will do that for me. And I don’t believe he’ll do it for anyone else.”
Hayes said: “In a move that is truly appalling, even by his degraded standards, Donald Trump appears to be openly colluding with Vladimir Putin in the hostage-taking of Evan Gershkovich. And the price of his release is electing Donald Trump.”
He admitted the thought was “farfetched” and also noted that Trump could merely be lying, which the ex-president is wont to do. But, as Hayes said, it is not farfetched to say that a presidential candidate employed backchannels with foreign powers ahead of an election to sway or delay an ongoing event. Anyone who is familiar with modern political history — or has seen the Netflix series The Octopus Murders — knows this is true:
Back in 1968, Richard Nixon was running against Hubert Humphrey, the sitting vice president under Lyndon Johnson amidst the backdrop of a catastrophic war in Vietnam. Just a few days before the election, it looks like the Johnson Administration was on the cusp of securing a negotiation to end the war. So at the last minute, the Nixon campaign opened up a secret backchannel with the South Vietnamese in order to get them to pull out of the peace talks. …
And it worked. With the peace talks stalled, Nixon won the election. A few days later. He prolonged the war in order to get elected. The delay, and Nixon’s subsequent illegal expansion of the war cost 20,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian lives.
That wasn’t even the only example. Hayes brought up the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980 that took place when former President Jimmy Carter was facing reelection:
More than 50 Americans were being held hostage in Iran. It was a political disaster for Carter. And it was later discovered his opponent, Ronald Reagan, set up a secret back channel of his own. Reagan ally, former Texas Governor John Connally, traveled to a number of Middle Eastern countries in the summer of 1980, where he encouraged the leaders he met there to pass along a message to Iran. As The New York Times put it: “Don’t release the hostages before the election. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.” Again. It worked. Reagan won. And in a final twist of a knife to Carter, the hostages were released just minutes after the new president, Ronald Reagan, was sworn in.
So, is it possible that Trump is “colluding” with Putin? Chris Hayes is just asking questions.
Watch the video above via MSNBC.
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