Here’s what Rush Had to Say Yesterday About Elliot Abrams’ Lies About Newt

Rush Limbaugh has now exposed former top-level State Department official Elliot Abrams as a liar and a fraud for his dishonest accusation against Newt Gingrich in National Review that Newt was somehow disloyal to Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.

Rush cites a great piece in the AMERICAN SPECTATOR by a former official in Reagan’s White House Office of Political Affairs Jeffrey Lord that documents and dissects Abram’s lies about Newt point by point.

As Lord points out, Abrams selectively strings together snippets of quotes from Newt’s March 21, 1986 “special order” speech on the House floor to make it look like Newt was attacking Reagan, when Newt’s speech was actually all about how the State Department was undermining Reagan.

The meaning of Newt’s one-hour speech was exactly the opposite of what Abrams tried to portray as the meaning.

Here’s one passage from Newt’s speech:

Let me be clear: I have the greatest respect for President Reagan. I think he personally understands the threat of communism. He personally understands the history of Lenin’s adaptation of czarist secret police oppression to the new purposes of a Soviet governing dictatorship.President Reagan personally knows there is a Soviet empire and it is a global transnational threat to America and to freedom. President Reagan personally appreciates the threat to Israel in a more powerful Soviet empire, the threat to civilization in a more powerful Soviet-encouraged network of terrorism, the threat to African freedom in the Soviet use of the Cuban colonial army to impose Communist dictatorships, the threat to freedom in the Western Hemisphere through the Soviet empire’s Cuban and Nicaraguan colonies, and finally that the long-term persistence, the massive dedication of resources, and the serious professionalism of the Soviet empire combined with its development of a transnational strategy makes it a mortal threat to the survival of America. President Reagan knows all this. He ranks with Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy,and Nixon in trying to focus attention on the Soviet empire and in trying to protect freedom.

Does this sound to you like Newt was attacking Reagan?

Newt’s criticism was of the State Department, not Reagan, and was a critique from the right.

You can read Newt’s entire one-hour 1986 speech here (in context) >>>

Elliot Abrams told the same lie about me that he told about Newt . . .  this one 26 years ago, on exactly the same subject!

I had my own experience with Elliot Abrams when I was working for the Heritage Foundation back in 1986. I was in my 20s back then. I had written a paper for Heritage in January of that year titled: “RHETORIC vs REALITY: How the State Department Betrays the Reagan Vision.”

This was the paper that provided the ammunition for what Newt was saying in his speech on March 21, 1986 about how Reagan’s appointees at the State Department were undermining and sabotaging Reagan’s stated policy of wanting to arm and supply anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world — including the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua, and Jonas Savimbi in Angloa.

Newt sent a copy of my paper to all of his colleagues in Congress.

This paper received a lot of media coverage at the time and was cited by many conservative leaders and commentators (including George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Newt, and others) who were concerned that Reagan’s appointees at the State Department were not carrying out Reagan’s objectives — who were, in fact, undermining the Reagan Doctrine.

The Reagan Doctrine, in summary, was to arm, supply, and encourage anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world [much the way we should be doing now in Iran]. The Reagan Doctrine was to try to avoid direct military conflicts with the Soviet Union, but to make it as expensive as possible for the Soviet Empire to keep and expand its empire. It worked.

The problem was the State Department didn’t agree with the Reagan Doctrine, didn’t much like Reagan, saw Reagan as a problem who would someday be gone so that the State Department could resume business as usual. The State Department saw its job as to have good relations with the Soviets, not get them angry, and hope they would abandon their plans for world conquest.

Arming and supplying the anti-Soviet resistance movements in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and elsewhere was thought to be provocative, according to State Department think. So was moving ahead with Star Wars anti-missile technology — all of which were part of the Reagan Doctrine. The State Department opposed all of this. The State Department wanted business as usual. The State Department wanted the status quo.

Reagan wanted to roll back and defeat the Soviet Empire. The State Department wanted to contain and accommodate the Soviet Empire. The State Department was aghast over Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech and did not like it one bit when Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Elliot Abrams was serving at that time as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

Abrams was furious about my paper — the paper Newt relied on for the speech so egregiously and purposefully misquoted by Abrams in National Review.

Abrams put in a phone call to my boss, Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner (I’m told at 7 a.m.) to try unsuccessfully to get me fired and to have Heritage withdraw my paper on how the State Department was doing exactly the opposite of what Reagan wanted.

Abrams told Feulner that the thesis of my paper was false.

Abrams had a reputation as a solid anti-Communist. He was generally thought to be a Heritage Foundation friend. So Feulner was inclined to listen.

Feulner asked me to document every word in my paper. I definitely was on the hot seat at Heritage for about 24 hours.

Abrams along with the #2 man at State back then, John Whitehead, apparently were also putting heat on some members of the Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees to have the paper withdrawn and me fired. That’s the word I was hearing at that time.

This is what happens to you when you go against what the Establishment wants.  It happened to me back then. It’s happening to Newt now.

Fortunately, Feulner and the foreign policy scholars at the Heritage Foundation were satisfied that my paper was 100% accurate. I had crossed ever “T”, dotted every “i”, documented every syllable.

In the midst of this flap, Feulner (as a show of support for my work) had me deliver a presentation on the paper to Heritage’s Board of Trustees (mostly made up of billionaires and hundred-millionaires). They loved it. I received a standing ovation from these billionaires and hundred-millionaires. Phew! My job was safe.

So Abrams’ campaign against me ended up backfiring against Abrams and the State Department.

Heritage, in response, sent out tens of thousands of copies of my paper to the media, members of Congress, their staff, and to Heritage Foundation donors.

This paper might well be the most famous paper Heritage ever published. It received extensive coverage in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and certainly created a lot of waves over at the State Department.

Abrams Pleads Guilty to Two Counts of  Witholding Information from Congress — In Other Words, More Deception

I don’t know whether Abrams himself, as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, was over there also undermining Reagan’s foreign policy and sabotaging the Reagan Doctrine.  He’s a pretty well-regarded neoconservative and anti-communist.

I assume he was doing what he could to support Reagan at the State Department, quietly. He was one of the few conservatives over there (well, actually, neoconservatives, who are not quite the same as real conservatives). He’s probably one of those types of neoconservatives who think it’s best not to let anyone know what he’s doing. He did get caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal and ended up pleading guilty to some misdemeanors for withholding information from Congress.

Without the plea deal, he might well have been convicted of felony perjury. So that was yet another example of Abrams using deception to achieve what he wants, this time deceiving Congress.  He doesn’t even let the law stop him from doing whatever he wants to do — the classic Machiavellian “ends justify the means” mentality. That’s Elliot Abrams for you.

It seems Abrams’ main  job at the State Department in the 1980s was to tamp down conservative criticism of the State Department. He certainly did not want people, like me and Newt, pointing out how the State Department was mostly doing the opposite of what Reagan wanted.

So now Abrams has decided he’s for Mitt over Newt. He seems to have a habit of lying about, and trying to destroy, all who get in the way of what Elliot Abrams wants. I was a target of Elliot in the 1980s. Now Newt is a target of Elliot over the very same issue.

Isn’t it funny how the same battles keep being fought over and over again, decade after decade?

The problem for Elliot Abrams is that what he’s saying is a provable lie . . . by a proven liar who was even convicted of, well, lying (that is, convicted of unlawfully withholding important information from Congress). So this guy has zero credibility. Why any publication would give any credence to anything Abrams writes, even publish it without checking it, is a mystery.

Unfortunately, he has wounded Newt with this attack a few days before the Florida primary. Elliot’s false claims have been bull-horned in huge banner headlines across the Drudge Report and have been repeated by every news outlet.

Many Republican primary voters in Florida will be confused, will wonder if Newt was really anti-Reagan in the 1980s — a charge that could not be more false — a charge Elliot Abrams knows is false, a charge that National Review should have known was false before they published Abrams’ article.

In fact, National Review was expressing the very same concerns at that time about the State Department undermining Reagan’s anti-Soviet foreign policy that Newt was articulating in his 1986 “special order” speech. Don’t the current editors at National Review read their own magazine?

It will be tough for Newt to get the truth out there in the next 48 hours to every Republican primary voter in Florida.  That will cost a lot of money.  It also distracts Newt from what he wants to talk about.

Newt is being bombarded with millions of dollars of negative, untrue ads by the Romney campaign. Newt doesn’t not really have the money or the organization to fight back against these smears.

What a shame it will be if Elliot Abrams’ purposeful lie ends up deciding the Presidency of the United States.

Mark Levin Had Jeffrey Lord on his Show to Talk About Elliot Abrams’ Lies and Dishonest Attack on Newt

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