Saturday Night Massacre in Slow Motion
By the time President Trump ousted Andrew McCabe in March of 2018, it was something of an ongoing joke: that seemingly every month or so, yet another cabinet member or bureaucratic official found him or herself on the wrong side of President Donald J. Trump’s fury. The aforementioned president has a penchant for pulling the trigger on his employees when things go awry, something we’ve all known since the days of Sean Spicer and Michael Flynn.
And in hindsight, we should have seen the conception of a dangerous pattern from the very first victim of the Trump administration, Sally Yates: Obama-appointed deputy AG, who became acting AG when Mr. Trump took office. But after only 11 days of working in the administration, she was fired for refusing to uphold the travel ban on Muslim-majority nations. It was cause for outrage among Obama and Democrat loyalists for a week, maybe two. Then, we forgot.
99 days later, President Trump fired former FBI director James Comey, stating the cause of the termination was due to Mr. Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal. A president had fired only one other FBI director since the inception of the agency in 1935. It was cause for outrage among pundits and politicians and private citizens alike. Then, we forgot.
Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was given the ax: or, instead, asked to ax himself. His letter of resignation was abrupt but expected to occur after the midterms, once the Democrats secured the House.
Some background: In March of 2017, AG Sessions recused himself from “any investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign,” giving his Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI director James Comey full reign over the investigation(s). When Comey was fired, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to lead the Russian probe/investigation (sorry, “Witch Hunt!”). The Mueller probe is an investigation into any potential wrongdoing from Trump’s 2016 campaign: US intelligence has confirmed that the Russian government did attempt to influence the 2016 election; additionally, there is substantial evidence that associates of Trump and workers on his campaign knew of these efforts, and even obtained information from Russian officials about Trump’s opponent, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibits “a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.” Legal scholars have stated that damaging intel on an opponent could count as a “thing of value,” meaning the Trump campaign would have violated federal campaign law. So one can understand why President Trump was a bit upset when Jeff Sessions, a vocal supporter and Trump loyalist, recused himself of the investigation and allowed Mueller to conduct this probe.
Essentially, what’s been happening over the past 18 months is a Saturday Night Massacre in slow motion — the pressured resignations and the scandals and the firings of key figures in an investigation looming over the president’s head like a dark cloud — it’s all been an attempt to avoid potential consequences of the Mueller investigation.
For those who don’t know, the Saturday Night Massacre took place on October 20, 1973, under the leadership of Former President Richard Nixon. Facing the impending ire of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating the Watergate scandal, President Nixon ordered AG Elliot Richarson to fire Cox. Elliot refused and resigned. Nixon then turned to Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; but like Richardson, Ruckelshaus refused and resigned. Luckily for Nixon, the third time was the charm and Solicitor General Robert Bork, now acting as head of the Justice Department, did Nixon’s bidding and fired Cox. Nixon essentially forced resignations from the top two officials at the DOJ because they wouldn’t do something they feared violated the Constitution and the balance of power.
President Trump fired James Comey (formerly in charge of the investigation of the Russia investigation) because he wouldn’t stop looking into the potential crimes of Michael Flynn and, more broadly, the administration and president as a whole. With Comey gone, Trump was likely expecting Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to put an end to the probe, laying to rest any allegations of a “stolen election.” Instead, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller (a former FBI director) to lead an independent counsel. Had Sessions been fully involved in the workings of the Justice Department, he could have ended the investigation when Comey’s career ended, and these witch trials would be a thing of the past.
Trump fired Comey. Trump fired Sessions. And now, he’s given Rosenstein the run-around and appointed Matthew Whitaker, former chief of staff for Sessions, to take over as Attorney General. Rosenstein has been forced to handoff the supervision of the Mueller probe to Whitaker, who has been an outspoken critic of the probe. In 2017, Whitaker wrote a CNN piece and stated:
“It is time for Rosenstein, who is the acting attorney general for the purposes of this investigation, to order Mueller to limit the scope of his investigation to the four corners of the order appointing him special counsel.”
It didn’t happen in one night, and it’s taken months to unravel the whole story, but we’ve been in the midst of a Saturday Night Massacre. The Department of Justice and the FBI are supposed to operate in the name of justice, not partisanship: those who work for these institutions are supposed to be loyal to public service and American ideals, not their president. It’s taken some time, but if he’s lucky, President Trump may have dismantled the inner-workings of the DOJ just enough to put an end to the investigation that’s been plaguing him since he first sat down at that desk in the Oval Office. There’s no congressional plan to protect Mueller and his work — he’s been left vulnerable, despite history repeating itself right before our eyes.
Richardson. Ruckelshaus. Bork. Comey. Sessions. Whitaker. It’s the same story with different names, different players in the same game. If we aren’t careful and critical, the truth (regardless of what it is) won’t come to light. Whether the Trump campaign is guilty of treason or improper use of funds is beside the point: the point is that if Mueller is blocked from doing everything he can to bring this inquiry to a close, we are not a nation that values justice and truth. If Mueller is fired, President Trump and his administration will have sent the message that power trumps truth and corruption trumps justice. If Mueller is fired and the investigation is never completed, we are a nation that lets its leader burn the rulebook and turns the other cheek. And it always seemed to me that we were never that nation: when it happened in 1973, there was a unified dissatisfaction from America as a whole. Even ardent Nixon supporters had to admit that the Saturday Night Massacre was virtually unprecedented.
Today’s America is so divisive and so dogmatic that it doesn’t matter if what the president is doing is morally and legally reprehensible, it only matters that he’s winning, that his power is expanding. We’ve gone from a country that reviles corruption and unconstitutionality to one that applauds a Machiavellian leader who will spit on the ideals we stand for before he lets himself be defeated.
And this time, we can’t claim that what’s happening is unprecedented or that we didn’t see the consequences. In ’73, they could say it was outrageous; in ’18, it’s normal — so normal that we couldn’t even tell that history was repeating itself, this time as a slow-burn horror film: If Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre was Texas Chainsaw, Trump’s methodical dismemberment of constitutional checks and balances is Hereditary.
So before we throw up our arms in outrage in a few days/weeks/months when Mueller is fired under the watchful leadership of Acting AG Matthew Whitaker, remember that’s we’ve been watching this silent horror film for months with our eyes wide open, and instead of unplugging the TV we’ve been shoving our mouths full of popcorn.
Richardson. Ruckelshaus. Bork.
Comey. Sessions. Whitaker.
Third time’s the charm.
