FLASHBACK: Massive Russia-collusion election plot by DEMOCRATS

President Donald J. Trump participates in a press conference at the 50th Annual World Economic Forum meeting Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020, at the Davos Congress Centre in Davos, Switzerland. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

President Trump once again is being accused without evidence of colluding with the Russians to win an election while a shocking, documented effort by Democrats to solicit the help of the communist Soviet Union to defeat a Republican opponent has drawn little attention.

During President Reagan's first term as president, the "lion of the Senate," Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., made secret overtures to the Soviet Union to thwart Reagan's re-election, according to a KGB document.

In 2017, Paul Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College, explained to WND that the May 1983 letter from KGB head Victor Chebrikov to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov details a request from Kennedy to help the Russians prior to the 1984 election.

Kennedy's aim was to prevent Reagan's re-election.

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"It's an actual official Soviet document," Kengor told WND's David Kupelian, "one that was housed in the Central Committee archives until it was discovered after the Cold War in 1992."

Kengor first published the document in full in his 2006 book on Ronald Reagan, "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism."

See the original Soviet document memorializing Sen. Edward Kennedy's collusion with Russia, first in Russian and then translated into English.

Media, however, ignored the attempt by a Democratic senator to subvert the reelection of a sitting U.S. president by "colluding with the Russians."

"That entire time, Ted Kennedy was alive and could have been questioned about this," Kengor noted. "But the fact is that the Democrats and the liberals in the media didn't give a damn. Why? Because Ted Kennedy was one of their darlings."

Now, in the Trump era, he said, "the Democrats and liberals are suddenly Russia hawks."

Kupelian also sought perspective from Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc defector to the West during the Cold War.

Pacepa said Russia has been attempting to influence America for more than half a century.

"The leaders of our Democratic Party have known at least for seven decades that Russia was trying to influence the U.S. policies and her elections process – it was an open secret," he said.

Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, who wrote the introduction to Pacepa's book "Disinformation," concurred.

Russia has been trying to influence America's political and electoral direction "since at least the 1940s, and possibly going back into the 30s," he said in a 2016 interview.