A Democrat offers a conspiracy theory -- with a basis in history

In light of the fact that Donald Trump's great friend and supporter is Roger Stone, the king of the dirty tricksters...

In light of the fact that Roger Stone, in previous campaigns, has made a habit of planting moles in the opposite camp...

In light of the fact that the Trumpers have given strong hints that they have a secret plan which would compensate for their incompetence at traditional campaigning (such as TV ads and ground game)...

In light of the fact that, until yesterday, the entire "Hillary is sick" propaganda campaign seemed unfathomable and weird...

In light of the fact that every Republican mouthpiece continued to pursue this seemingly absurd meme, almost as if they knew Hillary would develop a real-world health issue...

In light of the fact that pneumonia is a bacterial infection, which means that it should have been unpredictable...

In light of the fact that a bout of pneumonia would not have endangered Hillary's candidacy had the Republicans not prepped the public to view the event in a certain way...

In light of the fact that the Trump team has, in effect, predicted the inherently unpredictable...

In light of all of those facts, I would like to ask one simple question:

How difficult would it be for a Stone/Trump operative to expose Hillary Clinton to pneumonia?

And if you think that question is paranoid, consider this: What if Hillary was exposed to something more serious -- to a pathogen that manifests itself with pneumonia-like symptoms, yet which cannot be easily bested with antibiotics?

In the 1950s, the US Navy exposed mass populations to Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii, which were "markers" intended to simulate the spreading pattern of a serious bacterial warfare agent -- yet even these seemingly harmless bacteria caused a significant increase in pneumonia. That was 60 years ago; one can only guess as to what sort of exotic agents might be available now.

A historical parallel. As you know, Nixon ran against McGovern in 1972. McGovern was the opponent Nixon wanted; the Democrat they feared most was Edmund Muskie. During the primaries, the Muskie candidacy ended after he was hit by a rather silly brouhaha over something called the "Canuck letter" (a long story, well-told here), and after Muskie made a bizarre public appearance in which he became overly emotional in public.

Excellent evidence suggests that Nixon's operatives (many of them "borrowed" from CIA) had slipped a psychoactive agent into something that Muskie ate or drank. See here:

It was long rumored among CIA operatives that the public meltdown of the normally composed Sen. Edmund Muskie--the strongest of the Democratic contenders who doomed his candidacy by bursting into whimpering tears at a New Hampshire podium--was the result of LSD poisoning. Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, writes in "The Real Spy World" that the CIA was asked (presumably by Republican operatives) "for an LSD-type drug that could be slipped into the lemonade of Democratic orators, thus causing them to say sillier things than they would anyhow. To this day, some of my friends at the agency are convinced that Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy [slipped such a drug] into Senator Muskie's lemonade before he played that famous weeping scene."

It is not uncommon for a serving intelligence officer like Copeland to proffer a "hypothetical" which is actually a confession or a boast.

For a more detailed view of that event, let us turn to the December 1977 issue of Mother Jones:

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a former chemical researcher for the CIA's Project MK Ultra, recently told a Senate subcomittee that foreign government agents somehow managed to drug members of President Nixon's traveling party during a Presidential visit abroad six years ago.

According to Gottlieb, the drug cause the American official to whom it was administered to be confused and to cry and inappropriate times.

It's interesting to note that Gottlieb's report is very similar to an allegation made four years ago by another former CIA official, Miles Copeland.

Copeland stated back in 1973 that high CIA officials were privately convinced that Senator Edmund Muski of Maine had been secretly drugged shortly before he broke down and cried during a critical speech in the New Hampshire primary election campaign.

Copeland suggested that Muskie had been the victim of a "dirty trick" by E. Howard Hunt or one of Hunt's White House lieutenants. Copeland revealed that the CIA and the Army had developed an LSD-like chemical that would cause people to act irrationally and to cry.

We can, in fact, draw a direct line between what happened to Muskie and the current Trump campaign.

A line in Stone.

I refer you once again to this all-important series on Roger Stone, whom I consider the true eminence grise and supèrieur inconnu of the Trump effort. (I've added a few paragraph breaks to increase readability.)

Black protesters suddenly showed up in front of the hotel room of democratic candidate Edmund Muskie, calling him racist for having said that a Democratic ticket with a black running mate couldn’t get elected. An ad suddenly appeared in a Miami Beach Jewish newspaper: “Muskie, Why Won’t You Consider a Jew as a Vice President?” Muskie hadn’t excluded the possibility. Flyers appeared in Jewish neighborhoods: “Remember the Warsaw Ghetto…Vote Right on March 14.” Muskie was of Polish descent.

A letter was sent to a New Hampshire paper, filled with outrage at what happened when Muskie had been asked how he could understand the problems of minorities given the lack of minorities in Maine, Muskie’s home state. A Muskie aide had supposedly replied that they did have minorities in Maine, the very same minority that was there in New Hampshire: “Not blacks, but we have Canucks.” Muskie had supposedly laughed.

The next day, Muskie’s wife was indicted in an editorial in the same paper of telling dirty jokes to reporters, and having two cocktails before dinner.

Something in all this broke Muskie, and when the candidate defended his wife in front of television cameras, he began to weep. Muskie’s tears destroyed his candidacy.

Muskie was a target, but all the Democratic candidates were targets. Two hundred dollars was donated to Pete McCloskey by the Young Socialist Alliance, the receipt for the donation helpfully sent to a right-wing news editor. A mole, code named Sedan Chair II, was hired to go inside the Herbert Humphrey campaign and relay strategic information.

It would eventually be established with certainty that the man who’d written the “Canucks” letter, the man who’d hired the black protesters in front of Muskie’s hotel room, was Donald Segretti, who handled a secret, separate black ops campaign team for CREEP. The man who’d actually sent the letter to McCloskey, who’d hired the Sedan Chair II mole, was a nineteen year old operative named Roger Stone. It was because of this that he makes a brief appearance in the Watergate testimony.

Am I proposing a conspiracy theory? Of course.

I make no apology for doing so, even though Hillary's supporters are intent on framing the 2016 race as a contest between Rational Dems and Irrational Fearmongering Republicans. Here's the difference between what I'm saying and the kind of nonsense we associate with Alex Jones: AJ makes millions spewing baseless and outrageous hooey to a growing audience of reactionary fear-junkies -- while I cannot hope to make a single dollar by arguing in favor of this scenario, which is based on unquestioned history.

Watergate was a real conspiracy. No-one disputes this. Whenever historians are pressed to cite an example of a proven conspiracy, the first word they mutter usually begins with the letter W. (The hipper historians may also mention MKULTRA.)

Roger Stone became consummate dirty trickster during Watergate. Even then, Roger Stone knew how to plant moles. Moreover, Stone was demonstrably part of the effort to knock Muskie out of the race. As we've seen, the idea that Muskie was drugged was endorsed by no less a personage than the CIA's Miles Copeland, who was certainly in a position to know such things.

All I am suggesting is this: If such things could happen in 1972, why couldn't they happen today?

What stops a man like Stone from getting up to his old tricks? Is the idea presented here really so very unthinkable?

How candidates stay amped. Roger Stone wrote an autobiography which was never formally published, although a copy was placed on the internet. One passage offers insight into the way moles are used in political campaigns -- and into the ways a candidate can keep himself energized.

As you read about Humphrey in the passage, you may want to ponder the riddle of Donald Trump, a pudge-ball who seemingly lives on fast food. You may also want to think about Trump's doctor, who strikes many people as a very unusual character.

Nota bene: Sedan Chair II was the code-name of another Nixon mole in the Democratic camp.

Sedan Chair II infiltrated first the McGovern campaign until the geniuses around Nixon decided that McGovern wouldn't win the nomination and moved Sedan Chair II over to the Humphrey camp where he was hired as Humphrey's driver.

Little of political interest came back from Sedan Chair II's verbal reports as, of course, Porter had directed me that noting was to be put in writing. Much titillation though. Humphrey was campaigning 18-hour days and traveling with a physician who was injecting him with amphetamines. Hubert liked a roll in the hay with a pair of call girls, usually African Americans, arranged like clockwork by his lead advance man.

(Emphasis added.) The pseudonymous author of the above-linked series on Roger Stone offers this commentary on the above passage:

Sedan Chair II was Michael W. McMinoway, and he would testify before the Watergate Committee that he worked as a campaign spy between February until July 1972 within three Democratic campaigns, Muskie in Wisconsin, Humphrey in Pennsylvania and California, and McGovern at the Democratic National Convention. He would be contacted by a man named Jason Rainier, who said he represented a group of concerned citizens, and he would pay him $1,500 a month for undercover work. Jason Rainier would turn out to be Roger Stone – incidentally, there is a twitter handle Jason Rainier (jrainier88), most of whose tweets are re-tweets of Stone’s.

In another passage from his autobiography, Stone relates how he personally brought a bag of money to Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty (a disgusting individual), whose task was to enter the presidential race in New Hampshire for the sole purpose of siphoning votes from Muskie, thereby boosting McGovern's chances.

That part is interesting. But the part about Humphrey's crooked doctor -- and the amphetamines -- is even more interesting. Stone is not our only source for that allegation, by the by: See here and here. Amphetamine abuse was far more common in that generation than many now realize: Director Victor Fleming popped so many pills while filming Gone With the Wind that he had to do a stint in rehab.

Perhaps happy days are here again?

We've foolishly allowed the Republicans to corner the market on paranoia during the campaign season. I beg my readers to spread word of this post, and to reproduce it elsewhere. As long as we proceed with caution, I believe that -- in this year of fear -- we can benefit from investigating a thoughtful, historically-grounded pro-Democratic conspiracy theory.