20 conspiracy theories that turned out true

President Abraham Lincoln was killed as a result of a conspiracy inside his own administration.

Alfred Dreyfus was railroaded in France in 1894.

Sicilians invented a secret society in America in the 1840s that eventually took great power and inducted thousands of members in total secrecy  for generations.

The Chicago White Sox were paid to throw the 1919 World Series.

Major General Smedley Butler was approached by leading figures on Wall Street to overthrow FDR with a mercenary army of WWI vets.

Scientists knew asbestos was toxic in the 1930s, but all evidence was buried. The same could be said for tobacco cigarettes.

General Motors conspired to rip up electric trolley tracks starting in 1938.

Hundreds of Nazi spies and scientists were secretly located to the New World under new identities after WWII. Operation Paperclip, as it was known, was greatly assisted by the Vatican and involved collusion by the Knights of Malta.

Billions in gold and other assets stolen by the Nazis and Japanese were put into funds controlled by the CIA (Black Eagle Trust) so as to avoid restoring it to the rightful owners. It appears the operation was aided by Opus Dei, a society that has assumed great power inside the Vatican.

The government began a mind control program in the 1950s (MK/Ultra) that secretly fed LSD to unsuspecting citizens for years.

The FBI began an illegal dirty tricks program known as Cointelpro in 1956 and continued through to 1971 when it was uncovered.

Many prominent figures in the national media became CIA assets through Project Mockingbird in the 1950s, a propaganda operation that continues today in some form.

JFK turned down a plan by the Pentagon (Operation Northwoods) to blow up an American ship and blame it on Cuba to justify an invasion.

The CIA’s JM/Wave station assassinated JFK with the help of the Chicago outfit and Texas oil barons.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged to justify a war in Vietnam.

Karen Silkwood was murdered after she blew the whistle on her own company.

The CIA-backed Contra army was involved in cocaine distribution to raise funds.

Barry Seal flew cocaine for the CIA into Mena, Arkansas, while Bill Clinton was governor.

A right-wing masonic lodge in Italy (Propaganda Due) plotted terrorist acts to be blamed on leftists.



Exposing the Lincoln assassination cover-up in time for an epic anniversary

 dunhamfixApril 15th, 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and well-known investigator Steven Hager cracked the case wide open with his mind-blowing book Killing Lincoln: The Real Story.
 
New York City, NY (PRWEB) March 20, 2015
Why was President Abraham Lincoln left unguarded when the War Department knew there were serious plots against him? Why was John Wilkes Booth killed when he was discovered locked inside a tobacco barn and surrounded by 25 soldiers? Why were two innocents swiftly hanged by a military tribunal and not allowed to testify in their own defense?
In 1988 Steven Hager wrote a cover story for High Times magazine detailing CIA involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It was an explosive best-selling issue and the article went viral in the early days of the Internet. Judge Jim Garrison, the only prosecutor to investigate the case, cited it as “the best article written on the assassination.”
In February 2014, Hager watched The Conspirator, a film about Mary Surratt’s trial. Realizing the 150th anniversary was upon us, he began researching the murder full-time for 11 months before writing Killing Lincoln: The Real Story.
The book documents dozens of incriminating threads of evidence that have been swept out-of-view, especially the original confession of George Atzerodt, as well as the John Wilkes Booth diary fragments. He pays special attention to the suspicious behavior of some of the major power brokers in Washington DC, and his investigation extends into New York City, a major piece of the puzzle that has been historically ignored as it leads into the heart of Wall Street war profiteering.
Most Americans are not aware Congress held an investigation after it was revealed the original military tribunal that hanged four people had been packed with paid perjuries. There was only one Democrat on the Judiciary Committee placed in charge of the investigation, but rather than rubber stamp a bogus committee whitewash, Representative Andrew Rogers subjected the witnesses to serious cross examination and they wilted. A physician named Dr. Merritt admitted receiving the biggest bribe ($6,000) for his testimony.
Only a handful of scholars have shown any interest in this Congressional investigation, which sheds so much light on the plot, and the Lincoln assassination is clouded by faithful allegiance to the official story.
“The cool turpitude of the whole crew sickened me with shame,” wrote Rogers in his dissenting statement, “and made me sorrow over the fact that such people could claim the name American.”

Warnings Against the Assassination

William Seward was the front-runner for the Presidency and had garnered many more votes than the relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln on the first ballot, but Lincoln ended up becoming the compromise candidate the newly formed Republican party settled on. Yet, after Lincoln won the nomination, he appointed Seward his Secretary of State and the two obviously had tremendous respect for each other, and Seward supported Lincoln’s second term, even though party founder Salmon Chase and his Radical Republican cohorts did not. During the war, Seward managed a vast network of spies throughout Europe to thwart the South’s attempts to draw any foreign powers into the conflict on their side.

John Bigelow was one of Seward’s spies in France and in March he began sending Seward alarming letters involving an assassination plot against Seward, who many in Europe considered the real power in Washington and defacto President. Bigelow had penetrated the pro-slavery Sons of Liberty secret society and discovered a Texan named Johnston had been dispatched from France by steamer on an assassination mission. Seward took the warning letters to the War Department and showed them to Edwin Stanton. Lincoln was in Richmond at the time, which had just fallen, and dangerously walking the streets without protection. Seward wanted Stanton to alert Lincoln of the assassination plot and have him put under constant guard.

However, Seward was seriously injured in a carriage accident that next afternoon, and Stanton never shared the warnings with Lincoln after the President returned from Richmond to check on Seward’s condition. Considering the amount of detail in Bigelow’s three letters, it seems inexplicable Seward and Lincoln were not put under round-the-clock protection. In a few days, Lincoln would be assassinated, and Seward would only survive thanks to a metal brace that had been installed to hold his shattered jaw in place.

The failure of the War Department to act on these very specific warnings is evidence Lincoln’s assassination was an inside job, sanctioned by Stanton, Wade and Stevens, who were resisting Lincoln and Seward’s plans to forgive the South. They wanted to allow the Confederates to retake their seats in Congress, something that would have pushed Wade and Stevens out of their perch of power.

Seeding the Rabbit Holes

Russ Baker wrote a great blog about some famous seeding-the-rabbit-hole incidents. Did you know Lee Harvey Oswald’s wallet was conveniently found dropped right near the spot where police officer J.D. Tippet was found murdered shortly after JFK’s assassination? This wallet was, in fact, the evidence used by police to declare Oswald’s complicity in the JFK assassination.

Simultaneously, a bullet was found on the stretcher used to move JFK, and although virtually undamaged, it became responsible for a half dozen wounds on two people. Naturally, the bullet matched a rifle Oswald had recently mail-ordered.

Next, consider the bundle found on the sidewalk near Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, all of which pointed towards James Earl Ray as the culprit, a bundle that included some of Ray’s laundry as well as the alleged murder weapon and a newspaper clipping giving the name of the motel King was scheduled to be at.

But most amazing of all these tall tales was the appearance of the undamaged visa for alleged hijacker Satam al-Suqami just a few blocks from twin towers after they fell. Those steel towers and aluminum planes had turned to dust in a matter of seconds, but this incriminating scrap of paper that helped break the case wide open floated out of the apocalypse in mint condition.

Most recently, there is Said Kouachi’s ID left in his abandoned stolen vehicle following his attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices. Without that ID, it would have taken weeks to break the case. Why does it seem like the same template is being used in all these cases? Maybe because it works so well.

One of my favorite episodes along these lines was the amazing testimony given by Fox radio host Mark Walsh just seconds after the twin towers fell, seeding the absurd cover story on how steel-framed buildings could suffer a complete collapse from fire for the first time in history, delivered on live national TV. Does it not appear he’s reciting a script?

Mosby’s Rangers

This same technique was used after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, when the finger was instantly pointed towards Col. John Mosby (aka The Grey Ghost). In fact, Mosby had been planning an elaborate presidential kidnapping plot, and Booth was his key agent in that conspiracy. But as the conspiracy grew, it eventually included a number of double agents secretly reporting back to the Union War Department.

We know this because of the original confession given by George Atzerodt. This confession was strangely not admitted into the trial as evidence and ordered destroyed, although 117 years later a photostat was found in the archives of one of the stenographers. Atzerodt had listed over a dozen additional names in the kidnap conspiracy, people who were never charged nor investigated. Soon, however, his story changed considerably. But that only happened after he’d lost his mind wearing a suffocating canvas-and-leather hood 24 hours a day that cut off all sight and sound. This torture device, which he was forced to endure for weeks until hanged, had been invented to keep him from revealing information to anyone while the government fabricated a case with paid perjuries.

The only justification for these machinations is if the War Department was complicit in the crime of killing Lincoln, pretty much the same situation we have now with the lies of the Pentagon regarding 9/11.
According to Atzerodt, Booth had been informed that the “New York crowd” who’d been assisting the kidnap plot had decided to put a hit on Lincoln. Booth accepted their mission, and was obviously paid to carry it out (and reportedly had a large amount of cash on him that disappeared). Booth was told to act fast or someone else might get the glory of killing the tyrant as multiple hit teams were assembling.

It was only afterwards, when every newspaper in the land denounced Booth that he realized he’d been played and wrote in his diary that he desired to return to Washington to “clear his name.”

How could Booth clear his name, unless, of course, he planned to name some traitors inside the War Department who’d aided the mission and left Lincoln unguarded so he could waltz in and do the evil deed with a one-shot derringer.

But Booth never made it back to Washington. Instead, he was found locked inside a tobacco barn, and while inside that barn someone put a bullet in back of his skull at close range and blamed it on the brain-damaged Boston Corbett (who’d self-castrated himself so feeble was his brain from mercury poisoning).

And for 150 years, the country has swallowed this fable that Booth was the mastermind of the assassination, and all the conspirators were caught and punished.

You can read Baker’s blog here: http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/02/01/lost-found-id-oddity-terror-cases-stupid-sinister/

The reason Booth shot Lincoln

Since I didn’t investigate this case until recently, I was surprised at how transparent the Lincoln assassination conspiracy has become over the years. Bill O’Reilly ignored every modern development to write a cover-up fantasy supporting the official story Booth was insane and the War Department had no idea what he was up to. In fact, Booth was surrounded by double agents, a list that included Louis Weichmann, James Donaldson and the beautiful Kate Brown, known as “The French Lady.”

The biggest issue with solving this case is the amount of noise and disinfo that’s been manufactured to hold back realization it was an inside job. There’s a cottage industry of researchers who will attack any suggestion Edwin Stanton was involved, even though the evidence against Stanton is overwhelming.

Periodically, new documents have been produced to bolster one side or another, yet few discuss how many of these are forgeries. Often, when a breakthrough takes place, the scoop is tied to a nasty piece of disinfo, a commonly used counterintelligence booby-trap for discrediting real information. I find this technique in play not just with Lincoln, but with JFK and 9/11.

I often found Roger Norton’s forum a valuable source of research material over the past few months, and there are obviously a number of dedicated researchers contributing to that site. However, I also noticed organized resistance to any inference of an inside job, and that makes me suspicious to say the least.

The single most important document to surface in the last fifty years is the original confession of George Atzerodt. At first, I assumed this to be a forgery like so many other documents involving the case, and I did not study it closely for many months. Today, I accept it as a real document, which means we have the Surratt Society to thank for its exposure, even though the current director is a cheerleader against the inside job theory.

I promise if you look deeply into this case, the cover-up will become obvious, and reading my book Killing Lincoln: The Real Story is a good place to start the adventure. My book is a concise over-view of overlooked details, all of which point to an inside job. Strange how no established press has exposed this information yet.

It’s sad to consider the entire hoodwink could have easily been blown sky-high when Steven Spielberg produced his Lincoln film recently, and you can find clues in that film. But Lincoln’s final hours were glossed over, including his request for additional security that night and his premonitions of the assassination. Both Lincoln and his wife were highly psychic, and the immense powers of the presidency may have lifted those powers even higher.

Since Thaddeus Stevens played a major role in the plot against Lincoln, it’s tragic Spielberg held Stevens up for adoration (while only hinting at his corruption). Stevens believed the ends justify the means, and seeking vengeance against the South was high on his to-do list. In the film, Mary Todd dresses Stevens down, not realizing the plot to assassinate her husband is already in full swing.

The reason John W. Booth accepted the hit was because he knew the “New York crowd” was going to have Lincoln killed and it was only a matter of time. And he also knew this crew had agents embedded deep inside the corridors of power in Washington, people who would aid the assassination. I don’t know what he was offered, or whether he took the hit to avenge the recent hanging of a Confederate spy he knew well, and I don’t know who actually pitched the deal to him, but there can be no doubt he was merely a pawn in their game, and must have realized this toward the end of his life.

Which is why every attempt by Booth to leave a statement about what really happened was destroyed, just like every attempt by Lee H. Oswald to leave a written statement with the FBI and Dallas police was destroyed. So open your eyes and do some research. And when you’re done, spread the news from every mountain top: Lincoln’s murder was an inside job.

The Lincoln assassination honey trap

Sarah, whatcha been up to?
In the world of spooks, great attention should be paid to the 20-something super hotties because they make effective spies, and this did not start with Mata Hari. In my attempts to untangle the plot that assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, Sarah Slater joins Sanford Conover on the dias of most under investigated suspicious people inside the center of the true conspiracy.

Someday a book will appear that focuses only on Slater, and it will be long over-due, and perhaps some documents will also surface that will purport to explain what happened to her and her brothers, although odds are these documents will be forgeries and the book filled with misdirections and disinfo, if the past is any guide to the future. That’s just the way things work when investigating deep political events that threaten to shake the populace’s faith in their primary institutions, which is why Lincoln, JFK and 9/11 have such blatant propaganda protection shields in place.

A few months before Lincoln was killed, a newspaper ad appeared in a Southern newspaper offering to assassinate Lincoln, Seward and Johnson for $1 million, and a post office box given as the return address. Strangely, no investigation was ever conducted concerning funds or messages that may have been sent to that box, even though Secretary of State Seward received a copy of the ad and asked Stanton to look into it.

Let’s suppose $1 million was on the table, supplied by a cartel of wealthy individuals with a stake in Lincoln’s removal. And consider this is much closer to $100 million in today’s money. It would be more than enough to set-up anyone for life in a new identity on a new continent.

Slater went by the name Kate Brown or Kate Thompson and was first identified by George Atzerodt, who indicated Louis Weichmann had further details on her. The picture above may be Slater. Little is known as immediately after the assassination, she dropped off the face of the earth.

I plan to keep researching Sarah, and fold whatever turns up into my book on the Lincoln assassination because she and Conover may be the keys to unveiling the real plot. Both stand accused of being Confederate spies, but I find it much more likely they were double agents working for a corrupt entity in New York City that was getting inside tips from the War Department. Great fortunes were made during the Civil War, and no one made a bigger one than Jay Gould, who seemed to have inside information on the outcome of battles before anyone else on Wall Street. Did you know that the man in charge of the War Department telegraph lines rose to become head of Western Union thanks to his friendship with Gould? These links are worthy of more investigation as well.

Slater should have been easily located for the military tribunal, and some reported she was taken to meet Stanton, but the official record indicates she could never be found and zero information ever located concerning her real identity. This is an obvious lie, but could have been told on the grounds of protecting national security if Slater was a double agent.

I find it fascinating that both her brothers were Confederate soldiers accused of fomenting desertion among the troops, a very serious crime. Yet, they managed to slip away, and like their beautiful sister would disappear off the pages of history forever. If you’re going to set-up a new identity on a new continent, it sure helps to have some family along to keep you company.

I hope I locate a trail to wherever Slater landed, although I’m sure whatever trail exists has already been salted by the machine protecting the Radical Republican cabal that orchestrated Lincoln’s murder and then celebrated it secretly as a “godsend.” Because that machine does exist.

The Lincoln assassination rabbit holes

Rabbit Hole #1: Jefferson Davis did it. Did you know Jefferson Davis was convicted of orchestrating Lincoln’s murder, with Mary Surratt and John W. Booth as his primary agents in that endeavor? That was the finding of the military tribunal that took 5,000 pages of testimony and then hanged four people the next day, indicating not a single officer on the tribunal bothered to read the transcript before rendering a decision. Even today, this theory is periodically trotted out and dusted off. Only problem is less than two years later, a Congressman named Rogers exposed the trial had been a sham and witnesses had been coached and paid for their false testimony. This inconvenient truth was brushed under the rug, but created enough of a public outcry that Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who presided over the trial, went into a phase of “intense personal excitement” as he was worried he was becoming the fall-guy for the sham trial.

Rabbit Hole #2: Andrew Johnson did it. President Andrew Johnson was next in the patsy line. The Radicals began building a case against Johnson the moment he attempted to remove Edwin M. Stanton from his perch running the War Department, the military, the newspapers and the telegraph lines. Johnson survived the impeachment trial by one vote, despite the long list of dirty tricks, bribes and threats brought to play against him. Once the smoke cleared, Johnson knew the tribunal had been a complete sham and regretted allowing Mary Surratt to swing from the gallows and would soon pardon the convicted-but-not-hanged conspirators languishing in jail.

Rabbit Hole #3: The Pope was responsible. In order to shift suspicion off himself and the Radical Republicans who orchestrated the sham trial, Holt wrote a manifesto claiming the Catholics conspired to kill Lincoln based mostly on Mary Surratt being a Catholic, and Catholics at that time were a minority despised by many Protestants. Some really absurd evidence was brought to bear by Holt and this balloon did not fly with the public.

Rabbit Hole #4: The Rothschilds did it. This has become the standard canard for shielding the oligarchy that really runs the banking system. Because some powerful banking families of Jewish heritage happen to control a large percentage of the banking system does not mean they own all the money or even most of it, or that they are pulling evil strings on every event in history. I’d imagine Simon Wolf had a relationship with the Rothschilds, and did meet with Booth that day. However, it seems far more likely a New York element was closely involved, and not a London or European element. The key suspects beyond Booth and his inner circle should be the Radical Republicans working with Jay Gould and/or Fernando Wood as the “New York crowd.”

Rabbit Hole #5: Booth was insane and acting on his own. This is the meme that has come down through history, and ignores Booth’s command of spy craft and his devious methods for concealing operations. Sam Arnold, one of the primary conspirators in the kidnap plot remarked how closed-lipped Booth was on all matters and how Booth shared little information concerning the source of his funding, but Booth did buy a carriage, horses, four pistols, four knives, two rifles and a rowboat for the kidnapping scheme, indicating deep pockets were behind the plot.

The most suspicious thing about the trial, other than the perjuries committed, were the dozen conspirators who aided Booth that were never investigated or brought to testify. George Atzerodt ran down all the key players in his first confession, but that document was destroyed and never admitted into evidence. Why wasn’t the beautiful Kate Brown brought before the tribunal? She was reportedly taken to Stanton’s office and then disappeared forever. But then there were many others, and strong suspicion exists today these conspirators were hidden to protect their identities as double agents. Stanton undoubtedly had many doubles pretending to be loyal Confederate agents. This would have been standard procedure. And if so, the reason these doubles couldn’t be brought forth is because that would have indicated Stanton knew about the plot in advance, and had purposefully left Lincoln unguarded.

The day after Lincoln died, the Radicals met for a crucial strategy session and Thaddeus Stevens remarked on how the assassination had been “a godsend,” as Lincoln had been planning forgiveness for the South. That callous statement is an indication of the Radicals true feelings toward Lincoln, who had just returned from a visit to Richmond, where he’d walked the streets unguarded, and spoken freely with the inhabitants. If the Confederate secret service and Jefferson Davis had wanted Lincoln murdered in revenge for losing the war, he could have been cut down in the streets of  Richmond just a few days before his death in the heart of  Washington DC.

Of course the rabbit holes don’t stop there and every year some new piece of forged documentation will appear to send researchers on a goose egg hunt to nowhere, usually in support of one or more of the fake theories already listed. But it’s incredibly suspicious how so much evidence has emerged over the years to support the thesis of an inside job, and how none of that evidence seems to make it into the media or onto Wikipedia.

I was ambushed by a Dogma Patrol

dunhamfixI’ve been studying spooks for thirty years, but never got around to the Civil War variety until late in life. After I viewed a Robert Redford film called The Conspirator on Netflix, I became a fanatic Lincoln assassination researcher for many months because that movie shredded the official story and made it clear Mary Surratt was railroaded by a kangaroo court in a failed attempt to close the assassination files forever.

It quickly became obvious the pro-war cabal of the Republican Party (as well as a mysterious unknown entity in New York City working with some double agents), fomented the evil deed and Booth merely a pawn in their game. This case is the most investigated murder in history, and most of the primary documents are available free online. The problem is not there is not enough evidence, but there’s too much evidence. And the haystack has been seeded with fake needles.

The Lincoln-Assassination Forum is a wonderful repository of information and includes a wealth of links and insightful commentary. However, I did notice a strong disposition against the inside job theories, so I knew my book was not likely to please those guarding the inner sanctum, but when I saw my book blurb appear and receive jabs from the dogma patrol, I registered and introduced myself, knowing I’d be crossing an open field under fire.

Here’s the problem with the dogma patrol: when those who hold the view of an inside job are immediately ganged up against, abused, ridiculed and treated worse than idiots….just for holding that view…..you’re not creating a healthy environment for real research. Those are the weapons of propagandists, not the legitimate tools of honest researchers.

The Lincoln case is not difficult to crack, and many books will appear soon enough to express my views. The JFK case was far more difficult and took thirty years, but that case is now fully cracked as well. And both were inside jobs, which only makes sense, and the proof is the way they’re so heavily guarded by a priesthood of insiders who refuse to allow a fair hearing of evidence. Anyone who supports an inside job will simply not be welcome at their websites, no matter what evidence they marshal. On the other hand, honest researchers just let the chips fall.

I had a fun time during the few days I was on the forum defending my reputation, while enduring all sorts of hippie bigotry. When asked why I hadn’t arrived earlier for guidance before publishing, I replied my evidence had been posted on my blog for months before the book came out. Of course, that just provoked another attack on the idea of anything worthwhile ever appearing on a blog, as if the perjured testimony from the official trial is more valid.
The trial only tells you what not to believe, and the most important evidence is anything the War Department tried to destroy that slipped through and survived. Unfortunately, Robert Todd Lincoln seems to have played clean-up patrol, and may have even incarcerated his mother after she realized who killed her husband and wouldn’t stop talking about it.
Wake up. Let freedom ring and justice prevail. No matter where the chips may fall.

If you want to chortle over my encounters with the dogma patrol, you can find the thread here:
http://rogerjnorton.com/LincolnDiscussionSymposium/thread-2031.html

Killing Lincoln: the real story

I conducted my own investigation into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln after viewing Robert Redford’s, The Conspirator, a film that documents how a kangaroo military court sent an innocent Mary Surratt to the gallows to cover up the real assassination plot. It’s obvious she was railroaded if you just read the transcripts of the trial, but why?
When I told some people what I was doing, many asked if I’d read Bill O’Reilly’s recent book on the subject. I had no idea he’d written the book, much less that it had become a huge bestseller and launched a franchise of similar historical assassination books.
But after a month of research using mostly original documents from the era, I had to check out Killing Lincoln. It took me about 20 minutes to speed read the book because this is territory I know quite well at this point, so I was skimming major points of evidence, looking for rabbit holes and wanting to see which crucial characters were addressed and which left out entirely.

Unfortunately, O’Reilly pretty much faithfully follows the official cover story Booth was a lunatic operating with a small band of conspirators. His book didn’t cover the trials, so he doesn’t reveal the government’s case was based on proven perjuries.

You can’t analyze the assassination with any degree of success unless you study the role of Sanford Conover (real name Charles Dunham), the double agent and newspaper reporter who groomed the witnesses for the original trial. Another important figure left out of most books is Simon Wolf, of B’nai B’rith, who was close to John Wilkes Booth and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. We know Wolf held a private meeting with Booth the day of the assassination at the National Hotel because many years later, Wolf wrote about this meeting in his memoirs, and seems to have told some lies while doing so, so what was Wolf covering up?

O’Reilly invents a lot of details and pretends to know people’s inner thoughts, but never figured out the alleged assassination attempts on Vice President Johnson, General Grant and Edwin Stanton were all invented for the trial, and there’s not a shred of evidence anyone was supposed to be killed that night except Lincoln and William Seward, which makes total sense since they were the only ones pushing for Southern forgiveness. Lincoln wanted to pardon the South and allow them back into Congress after the war, something that greatly upset the radical Republican cabal that had captured Congress and actually put Lincoln into power. But Lincoln was drifting off the course set by his party leaders, and that’s why he was murdered.

I just published my own book in time for the 150th anniversary: Killing Lincoln: The Real Story, because O’Reilly never gets close to the truth.
The key suspects in this case are Edwin Stanton, Thaddeus Stevens, Salmon Chase and Ben Wade, and I’ve uncovered forensic evidence from the period that links them to the plot. Funny how Stevens and Wade never get a mention in O’Reilly’s book, even though they held a meeting with other leaders of the radicals in Congress the day after the assassination during which Stevens referred to Lincoln’s death as a “godsend.”

The morning after

Look in the shadows around the edges of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and you might find some useful information. I find the meeting at Ben Wade’s the morning after pretty fascinating.

Although Lincoln had been elevated to the Presidency by a shaky alliance of two dozen Republican Congressmen and Cabinet members, and he went along with their War to End Slavery, he refused to follow their tack when it came to treating the South as a banana republic with zero representation and tons of new taxation afterwards, which is why he vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill and was planning a secret peace agreement.

Lincoln had just started his second term when the war drew to a close, which meant he was going to be in control for a long time. And that is why Lincoln had to go.

Thaddeus Stevens is often correctly painted as the Robespierre of the Civil War, but Wade is also a good fit for that role. They both seem completely without scruples when it comes to achieving an agenda. The strange thing about the top abolitionists is a lack of love for fellow man, as they seem driven mostly by hate. Before joining this cabal Stevens had been an anti-mason, yet many in this new circle were certainly masons. Power, wealth and glory seems a more likely motivation driving some of these men, and having ardent anti-slave opinions was the fastest way to rise within this cabal.

George Julian (head of the Agriculture Committee), Zachariah Chandler, and John Covode assembled at Wade’s house when they learned Lincoln was mortally wounded and expected to soon die. Stevens was also in attendance, and would write later of this meeting:

“Their hostility towards Lincoln’s policy of conciliation and contempt for his weakness were undisguised; and the universal feeling among radical men here is that his death is a godsend. It really seems so, for among the last acts of his official life was an invitation to some of the chief rebel conspirators to meet in Richmond and confer with us on the subject of peace.”

And there you have it, the real reason Lincoln had to go, and go quickly….was he was planning a meeting with Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet to work out a peace proposal. All these men would soon praise Lincoln and help elevate him to sainthood, and never say another bad word about him, but in reality they didn’t just celebrate his death, a few undoubtedly helped plot it.