Casey Michel is a writer living in New York, and his writing has been published in outlets like Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, among others. He can be followed on Twitter at @cjcmichel.

Until the election of Donald Trump, no sitting president had ever requested a foreign government’s help to discredit a political rival. Coupled with Trump’s appeal to Russia during the 2016 campaign that Moscow use its cyber power to uncover Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, not to mention his eldest son’s eagerness to accept anti-Clinton material from Kremlin allies, Trump’s willingness to allow foreign governments to influence American elections is historically unprecedented.

Just how unprecedented becomes clear when you look back at the long history of attempts by foreign powers (almost always Russia) to tip an outcome to their advantage. On multiple occasions since the start of the Cold War, Moscow has proffered money, dirt and manpower to undermine a candidate perceived to be harmful to their interests. But in nearly every instance, the interference never came to pass. And this is the starkest difference between Trump and other presidential candidates—and between Trump and every one of his presidential predecessors. Where Trump has welcomed such assistance—and, in the case of his controversial call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, demanded it—other candidates, to a man, rejected the aid.


What these examples show is that across parties and across decades—whether or not there were laws in place banning the foreign aid—aspirants to the nation’s highest office recognized the impropriety of the offers. Even as they knew how valuable it might be to them, especially as challengers, they understood that accepting the assistance would compromise them and the underpinnings of American democracy, should they win.

“I can’t think of any precedent for this kind of prima facie corrupt action on the part of an American president,” Brad Simpson, an associate history professor at the University of Connecticut with a focus on U.S. foreign policy, said. “I think that [this is] a president whose whole political life has been prone to conspiracy theories, but who now has the apparatus of the executive branch to try and do something about it—and that’s what’s really novel.”

Or as Dov Levin, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and renowned expert on American interference efforts, told me. “For a sitting president to do that, if it’s confirmed, would be something which is new, that’s for sure.”

We have known for decades that when it comes to foreign interference efforts, campaigns are the front-line—the first targeted, and the first to know. And for decades, the campaigns’ refusals have stopped interference efforts in their tracks. As we already know, hostile regimes such as Russia successfully injected themselves into the 2016 election—without asking permission—coaxing armed white supremacists onto the street, stealing internal emails and planting fake news stories, and creating some of the most popular social media feeds during the election. And Russia is almost certainly gaming out how to reprise its efforts in 2020. The difference now is that the interference, after decades, has been sanctioned by the president himself.



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For most of U.S. history, other countries have largely resisted the impulse to meddle in our affairs, both out of indifference and a desire not to get on the wrong side of the other political party. There were a handful of examples in our republic’s early days—in 1796, in 1812—of American officials reaching out to British or French counterparts to try to coax them into interfering in upcoming elections. (The historical record doesn’t make it clear exactly which Americans these were, but none, obviously, were sitting presidents.) But those requests for foreign help went nowhere, and for decades afterward, European governments paid little thought to helping, say, Ulysses S. Grant or Grover Cleveland earn a second term in office.

It wasn’t until after World War II that these interference efforts, driven by foreign capitals, began in earnest. By then, America’s role on the global stage had never been greater. And its primary adversary, led by a paranoid clique sitting in the Kremlin, began probing for weaknesses in America’s electoral defenses, and began looking for American candidates willing to brook foreign interference.

Henry Wallace, commerce secretary under Harry Truman, was the first candidate Moscow targeted for support, back in 1948. Broadly sympathetic to Soviet designs, Wallace set the tone for his pro-Soviet views early. “The first thing we have evidence for is, in Oct. 1945, when he was still the secretary of commerce, Wallace contacted the NKVD [the forerunner to the KGB] station chief in Washington, basically telling him that the people who support him are fighting for Truman’s soul, and that other people in the Truman administration are more anti-Soviet,” Levin said. “He basically asked, ‘Come and help me—I’ll be an agent of influence to make sure there will be better policies.’ He basically believed that [Joseph] Stalin and the Soviets had benign intentions.”

Wallace carried those beliefs into the 1948 election, as the head of the third-party Progressive Party. A clear longshot—think of his run as something closer to Jill Stein, rather than Donald Trump—Wallace made rapprochement with the USSR a key plank. A few months before the election, Wallace thundered in New York’s Madison Square Garden about the need to decrease tensions between Moscow and Washington. And he immediately got a public show of support from the man presiding over the Soviet Union’s efforts at ethnic cleansing, totalitarian designs, and destruction of nascent democracies across Eastern Europe: Stalin.

Stalin wrote a letter, published in newspapers across the U.S., that was straightforward. Wallace’s call for easing tension was the “most important” political platform “of recent times,” the Soviet dictator wrote. “As far as the government of the USSR is concerned, we believe that the program of Wallace could be a good and fruitful foundation for such understanding and for the development of international cooperation.”

The Soviet tyrant’s praise immediately reverberated. “It was a big commotion,” Levin said. “[Stalin’s letter] dominated news for a whole month, with some people hoping it would end the Cold War before it started.” More pertinently, Wallace wasn’t surprised to receive the show of support; thanks to back channels between Wallace’s supporters, members of the U.S. Communist Party, and Soviet partners, “Stalin had let him know ahead of time” that the letter was in the works, Levin added.

The missive didn’t do much for Wallace’s chances; the former commerce secretary’s campaign barely registered during the 1948 election and failed to carry a single state. But to Moscow, that didn’t necessarily matter. The seed of interfering in American elections was planted—a plan that, over the coming decades, would try to take root time and again, but only succeed once Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency.



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In 1960, with the Cold War in full bloom, the Soviet ambassador, Mikhail Menshikov, arranged a sit-down meeting with perennial Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson. According to Stevenson’s recollections, Menshikov got right to the point, pulling a slip of paper from his pocket with a message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

“We are concerned with the future, and that America has the right President,” Menshikov dictated. “All countries are concerned with the American election. It is impossible for us not to be concerned about our future and the American Presidency which is so important to everybody everywhere.” The Soviet ambassador continued, unspooling Khrushchev’s offer:

Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him. And you Ambassador Menshikov must ask him which way we could be of assistance to those forces in the United States which favor friendly relations. We don’t know how we can help to make relations better and help those to succeed in political life who wish for better relations and more confidence. Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How? Should the press praise him, and, if so, for what? Should it criticize him, and, if so, for what? (We can always find many things to criticize Mr. Stevenson for because he has said many harsh and critical things about the Soviet Union and Communism!) Mr. Stevenson will know best what would help him.

Stevenson, according to his notes, blanched. Following Menshikov’s bid, Stevenson offered his thanks for “this expression of Khrushchev’s confidence.” But the red line Menshikov had crossed was undeniable: “[I detailed my] grave misgivings about the propriety or wisdom of any interference, direct or indirect, in the American election,” Stevenson said. “I said to him that even if I was a candidate I could not accept the assistance proffered. I believe I made it clear to him that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”

Rejected by Stevenson, Moscow turned elsewhere. As Christopher Andrew detailed in The Sword and the Shield, his 700-page run-through of documents smuggled from former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, Khrushchev especially feared the election of Republican nominee and Cold War hawk Richard Nixon. (Nixon would leave a trail of ignominy not only for his eventual resignation, but also, in a nod to Trump and Russia in 2016, for his willingness as a candidate to set up back channels with South Vietnamese partners in the run-up to the 1968 election.) The KGB resident in Washington, Alexander Feklisov, received orders from the Kremlin to “propose diplomatic or propaganda initiatives, or any other measures, to facilitate [John F.] Kennedy’s victory.” As Feklisov added in his autobiography, his mission centered on providing ideas “to Moscow that could help secure a Kennedy victory.” The details on Feklisov’s and Moscow’s ideas remain scant—yet another casualty of Moscow’s unwillingness to allow access to archival material—but we do know that, as part of his mission, Feklisov reached out directly to those surrounding Robert Kennedy, JFK’s lead campaign surrogate. But the Kremlin again got nowhere; as Andrew wrote, Feklisov and his team’s offers of help were “politely rebuffed.”

Nixon, of course, lost that 1960 election. But when he stood again eight years later—with Leonid Brezhnev, the man whose policies of stagnation would eventually erode Soviet power, now overseeing the Kremlin—Moscow espied another opportunity. As Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow’s man in Washington, detailed in his 2001 memoir, the Kremlin cooked up an idea to tilt the election once more in the Democrats’ favor.

“Our leadership [in Moscow] was growing seriously concerned that [Nixon] might win the election,” Dobrynin wrote. “As a result, the top Soviet leaders took an extraordinary step, unprecedented in the history of Soviet-American relations, by secretly offering [Democratic candidate Hubert] Humphrey any conceivable help in his election campaign—including financial aid.” Dobrynin led the effort, breakfasting during the campaign with Humphrey himself. As the conversation wound toward the state of Humphrey’s campaign’s finances, the candidate quickly discerned what was on offer—and immediately put a stop to it. “He knew at once what was going on,” Dobrynin wrote. “He told me it was more than enough for him to have Moscow’s good wishes which he highly appreciated. The matter was thus settled to our mutual relief, never to be discussed again.”

But that wouldn’t be the end of the Kremlin’s offers of aid. With Yuri Andropov as premier in 1983—the man whose untimely demise would eventually give rise to Mikhail Gorbachev and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself—KGB leadership directed those overseeing American operations to “begin planning active measures to ensure [Ronald] Reagan’s defeat in the [1984] presidential election,” writes Andrew. Per the smuggled KGB archival documents, KGB agents were directed to “acquire contacts on the staffs of all possible presidential candidates and in both party headquarters.” And it wasn’t just limited to the U.S.; KGB residencies “outside the United States were told to report on the possibility of sending agents to take part in this operation. [KGB leadership] made it clear that any candidate, of either party, would be preferable to Reagan.”

With KGB archives from this period remaining effectively inaccessible, the details of these 1983-84 operations remain murky. (KGB residencies “around the world were ordered to popularize the slogan ‘Reagan Means War!’”, Andrew wrote, highlighting one of the few particulars we know about.) However, there’s no evidence that any campaigns opposing Reagan ever took the bait. If anything, Andrew added, “Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1984 election was striking evidence of the limitations of Soviet active measures within the United States.”

The Soviet Union, weighed down by a crumbling economy and fractured by nationalist movements, didn’t last much longer. But Moscow’s presence in American elections, even during the 1990s, didn’t collapse alongside the Soviet implosion. As The New York Times reported this month, a trio of Republican representatives came to President George H.W. Bush in the lead-up to the 1992 election with an idea: reaching out to the Kremlin directly for dirt on Bill Clinton, nipping his opposition campaign in the bud.

But like Stevenson, Kennedy, and Humphrey before him, Bush and his inner circle balked. “They wanted us to contact the Russians… to seek information on Bill Clinton’s trip to Moscow,” James A. Baker III, Bush’s White House chief of staff, wrote in a memo. “I said we absolutely could not do that.” Baker shut the conversation down, and with it any consideration of reaching out to Russia for help in tilting an American election.

Shortly thereafter, Clinton won, resoundingly. And he brought with him a First Lady who, a quarter-century later, would be on the receiving end of unprecedented interference efforts out of that same Kremlin—and who would face an opponent in Donald Trump who had no problems accepting Moscow’s offers of help, and who would become the first sitting president to toss the floodgates open, with all comers, and all interference, now welcome.