It seems like some small marker of cosmic justice that just as former US president Jimmy Carter lies in a hospice awaiting death, the long-alleged but never-proven political crime that sabotaged his reelection just got another, major piece of corroboration.

This is the original “October surprise”: the charge that Ronald Reagan, Carter’s Republican opponent in the 1980 presidential election, made a secret deal with the new, fundamentalist Iranian government to delay releasing the American hostages held in the wake of the revolution that brought it to power. The 444-day-long hostage crisis had become a major black mark on Carter’s presidency, and resolving it before the election would have given him a major, unexpected bump going into voting. Hence the phrase, “October surprise.”

Through it has long been charged that a Reagan campaign with victory in sight went behind the US government’s back to secretly reach out to the Iranians and prevent this bump from happening, this weekend, the New York Times published an explosive piece of evidence that backs it up. Ben Barnes, a former Texas politician, told the paper how he and his mentor — former Democratic Texas governor John Connally, who had run for the GOP nomination in 1980 and had a plum Reagan administration post in his eyes — traveled around the Middle East delivering a message to be relayed to Iranian leadership, that Reagan would give them a better deal when he won the presidency. Connally then briefed Reagan’s campaign chair, William Casey, about the effort upon returning home, according to Barnes.