https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/resurrecting-rosenbergs-lloyd-billingsley/
Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons, the Washington Post reported on August 11, were among the items the FBI sought in its search of Donald Trump’s Florida residence. That same day came a tweet proclaiming, “Rosenbergs were convicted for giving U.S. nuclear secrets to Moscow, and were executed June 1953.”
That sounds like something from the drunk at the end of the bar, but the tweeter was Michael Beschloss, “the nation’s leading presidential historian,” author of nine books on American presidents, NBC News presidential historian, and a contributor to the PBS news hour. In response to Beschloss, former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden tweeted: “Sounds about right.”
Charged with giving American nuclear secrets to Stalin’s USSR, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953. For the American left, it was an article of faith that the Rosenbergs were innocent, and that their execution was part of a “Red Scare.” As the left had it, there was little if any Communist espionage or influence going on in America. Author Ron Radosh set out to prove the Rosenbergs’ innocence but wound up convinced of their guilt, as he explained in The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, co-authored with Joyce Milton.
“The Rosenberg’s were actual and dangerous Soviet spies,” Radosh notes. “It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.” On the other hand, it is debatable whether the pair should have been executed, particularly Ethel. Beschloss and Hayden failed to note that nuance, which could prove inconvenient to another back story.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton cast Donald Trump as a colluder with Russia, headed by former KGB man Vladimir Putin. The FBI launched covert operations MidYear Exam and Crossfire Hurricane against candidate and President Trump. Establishment media served up “bombshell” charges that Trump was a Russian asset. Leaked stories became grounds for FISA warrants to spy on Trump associates.
In 2017, former Trump associate George Papadopolous was given $10,000 by mysterious persons he believed were working with the CIA or FBI. Papadopoulos gave the money to his attorney in Greece “and upon coming back to the United States I had about seven or eight FBI agents rummaging through my luggage looking for money.”
Former Trump associate Carter Page served as an asset for the CIA but FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith falsified a document to say Page, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, was not a CIA asset. That criminal action enabled a FISA warrant against Page, another victim of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane operation, made up out of whole cloth and originating with Hillary Clinton.