Author: Cozmin Gușă
Dick (Richard Warner) Carlson is Tucker’s father, 82 years old and still active after a prodigious career. A journalist at the core, he rose to the position of director of the United States Information Agency, the largest government PR organization in the world in the 20th century, Carlson then leading the legendary Voice of America, in the last six years of the Cold War. It is thus clear that he was well versed, including the ins and outs of politics in the former communist states, something I noticed personally when I first met him in Washington in 2007. It is equally clear that Tucker Carlson inherited from his father not only his passion for radio-tv work, but he also had access, unlike the vast majority of Americans, to data about the (post)communist world, something that allows him today to understand better than others what is happening in our area, respectively in the Ukrainian war.
Today being Saturday, I’m going to break out of the template of commenting on current affairs, and I’m going to tell you an exemplary episode for us, which involves Carlson Senior in his relationship with Romania. Towards the end of the summer of the 2009 electoral year, we had clear signs that Băsescu and his team were preparing the fraud of the presidential elections at the end of the year, where the main counter-candidates were Mircea Geoană and Crin Antonescu (I was Geoană’s campaign strategist, and Antonescu’s campaign was handled by Eduard Hellvig ). I quickly organized a trip to Washington to enlist the support of my anti-fraud strategic partner, Brad Johnson, a good friend of mine and an influential consultant in the Democratic camp, making sure that I would also get an appointment at the White House to discuss the matter. That’s exactly what happened, in addition to meetings with congressmen or heads of organizations involved in election monitoring, I was also received at the White House by President Obama’s advisor for relations with Europe. I will not go into the details of the meeting today, the brief conclusion was that, if we present and send to the USA evidence of the fraud, the White House will intervene publicly and will not recognize Băsescu’s re-election. In parentheses, I also tell you that I then managed to block the meeting of Iulian Fota (Băsescu’s presidential adviser) with the same Obama man, Fota having been sent urgently to try to parasitize my messages to the Americans (the highlight, I met Fota on the street right after the meeting at the White House and jokingly told him that he had better come with us for a drink, that he would no longer be allowed to issue his lies). Brad Johnson, who is a good friend of Dick Carlson, came up with the idea to ask for his support as well, and to organize a trip of Carlson to Romania to monitor the organization of the elections, with a subsequent report to the American administration, as a future base of analysis of potential fraud. Carlson accepted with interest, got all the necessary approvals from their secret services, and a month later he was present in Bucharest. He stayed in Romania for five days, during which he met with the candidates and campaign teams of the parties, less so with Băsescu&Company, from where he received a predictable refusal. Upon his return to the USA, he wrote a report in which he mentioned the danger of fraud in the Romanian elections, given that Băsescu’s people controlled the justice system and the secret services, also pointing out the fact that the campaign teams of the opposing candidates were infiltrated with people controlled by blackmail (including the business with the blackmailing of CCR judges by Coldea was mentioned). In conclusion, Dick Carlson achieved an extremely useful step for Romanian democracy, which would have been useful, if Mircea Geoană and PSD had done their part and had officially complained to the White House about the fraud of the elections. However, this did not happen again, although I had a voluminous file with all the evidence of fraud, but I will tell about that another time. I also remind you today that all the ballots from the Băsescu-Geoană second round were destroyed after three months, in a strange fire, the causes of which were never investigated. We had already entered the era of the domination of the people from Oprea’s living room (Maior, Coldea, Kovesi, etc.), those gathered under the slogan “We are the state!”, who led Romania in a self-willed manner in the following years.
