Watergate Revisited
For all of his shitty qualities, Donald Trump has actually done a lot of good.
*pause for laugh track*
But actually. I’ve never seen this level of knowledge about politics, the American government, governance norms, historical comparisons, and unique angles from the general public.
Ever.
I don’t know the percentage of participation by era, but I think it’s safe to say that in the first 100+ days of the Trump regime there have been more highly-attended political gatherings and grassroots level participation from Joe Public than under any other president.
It is important to note that while participation in the political process is a fantastic thing for a healthy democracy, the impetus for this movement is the fuckery at the top. I’m glad that liberals generally are more involved than in prior eras, but I wish we didn’t have to be involved, if you get my drift. Example time: Betsy DeVos is a horrific monster of a person to head the Department of Education for a lot of reasons and so many people called their senators prior to her confirmation that voicemail boxes were full and people from both sides of the spectrum know the name of the Secretary of Education. We’re more aware of how confirmation hearings work, I kind of get what Budget Reconciliation bills are, and now everyone (even Donald Trump) is painfully aware of how complicated health care is. Progress!
All of that being said, I think we both know why I’m here. It’s May 9th (May the ninth be with you) and James Comey was unceremoniously axed from his position as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I didn’t totally appreciate his numerous contributions to the stability of America over the course of the past couple of years, but I also didn’t necessarily want him to get fired if for no other reason than he served as a leading member of law enforcement under Obama and Bush, two noted Presidents. Like, actual presidents who knew what the hell they were doing. Many people don’t really know what to think about this, but I’m here to tell you that thinking this move is anything other than fishy is wishful thinking at best.
In the wake of the dismissal, Twitter blew up as it is wont to do. I already had a number of ideas in my head as to why firing James “Lordy” Comey was misguided, but the Twitterverse has a population of brilliant, creative, and well-researched individuals and made me do a little digging. The biggest concerns that we should have with respect to this firing can be sorted into the following categories which aren’t in any order:
1) The Russia Investigation
2) Another Reversal by Trump
3) Precedent
Let’s dive in.
The Russia Investigation
We know Trump is under federal investigation into ties . We know that Comey has gone on record as being less than fully supportive of Trump’s claims of wiretapping on himself by then-President Obama. We know that there was plenty of public hand-wringing over Jeff Sessions being Attorney General, meaning he was in charge of investigating his boss ‘ ties to an antagonistic foreign power, followed by his recusal from the investigation, which was widely celebrated. It shouldn’t have needed to come to public outcry, followed (predictably) by People Who Should, In Theory, Know Better (PWSITKB for short!) saying there weren’t ethical concerns with Sessions investigation the campaign he was part of, followed by more public outcry, but hey it worked and that’s all that matters. Since the recusal, the investigation was taken over by Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate as well as individually within intelligence services like the FBI. Given that the Senate and House Committees are charitably described as shit-shows, most people assumed that Comey’s tone and confirmation that an investigation was under way (even if he didn’t confirm it on October 28th when he damn well should have) indicated that serious people were at work doing what they do best: finding bad guys and busting their punk asses.
Here’s the thing: Trump fired Comey at the suggestion of Jeff Sessions, the guy who recused himself from the Russia investigation. It would be inappropriate enough if Sessions had merely mentioned this in passing and let Donald Trump come to his own conclusions. Sessions led the charge to get Comey fired. This, predictably, has to do with Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s email probe.
Writer’s Note: How in the fuck are you going to complain about his handling of the email probe when it got you your job? Seriously, the only way one could feel that way is if you blindly hate Clinton so much that you want to see her in jail regardless of… oh… it’s all coming together now.
So a man who nominally is supposed to have nothing to do with the investigation into whether there was inappropriate contact, meddling, help, collusion, whatever… between Trump 2016 and the Russian Federation recommended the firing of the outspoken and respected head of the agency tasked with doing that. This isn’t even clever or subversive, it’s offensively obvious that Sessions is still trying to meddle with this investigation which should raise some more questions which I’ll get to below. For now, just be furious that Sessions’ letter to Trump included the phrase “ensure the integrity and fairness of federal investigations and prosecutions” to describe how a leader of the Department of Justice should perform their work.
Eat shit, Jeff.
Another Reversal by Trump
For a man whose opinions are as strong as they come, you’d think that Trump would stick to them more often instead of reversing them. You may have seen one of my fellow snarky progressives on Twitter saying something like, “there’s always a tweet” in reference to a policy position or statement by the White House contradictory to something previously said by the now-president. Stuff like this:
Relating to today’s events, I submit for your consideration:
And this:
One more for good measure:
And here is the letter to Comey from Trump (bonus, the AG and Deputy AG letters are also attached below Trump’s letter which he probably didn’t type with his tiny cheeto fingers).
Take a beat and read it. Then look at the tweet. Then look at me.
Look, all politicians contradict themselves eventually, that’s how this works. Usually it’s not about something massive (like cutting Medicaid). I wasn’t going to like Trump either way, but it pisses me off to no end that people defend his new views while those views were why they voted against saner candidates in the fall of 2016. Yes, I know that Clinton had a public and private persona, we all do that, and Trump is no different except for that his statements/tweets (sad!) are never measured and his private persona isn’t much better.
We truly are living in unprecedented times. The President of the United States regularly and spectacularly lies and people believe his words more than those of journalists whose whole job it is to take primary source material and make it understandable to the layman. But you know that Twitterverse I spoke of earlier? A pretty snarky tweet led me to do some research.
Precedent
Mostly just one instance in US history comes to mind when you talk about the President firing someone tasked with investigating them. Buckle up kids, we’re headed to the 70’s.
Richard Nixon (we’re off to a hot start) first ran for president in 1960 against a young pup named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Nixon lost, as you may know, but what you may not is that it was a much closer election than you’d think at first glance. It was, in fact, the closest presidential election since 1916, with a difference in the popular vote between the two icons of just 112,827 votes which amounts to 0.164% of the vote. There were lots of allegations of vote rigging, especially in Illinois and Texas. It really makes one wonder if it changed Nixon fundamentally into thinking (or accepting) that dirty politics was just how you get elected to be president.
Following the assassination of JFK in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president and ran for reelection in the 1964 presidential race. This race is notable because it’s the first time our parties as they currently stand marked their territory, so to speak. Here is the 1960 electoral map:
And here is the 1964 electoral map:
What caused the Democrat-Republican flip in the Bible Belt? The breakoff of southern voters from the Democratic party as a result of the Civil Rights Act. When we get annoyed at people today for being single issue voters, we need to consider how the single (though enormous) issue of racial inequality set the mold on the country’s elections. Such were the feelings of the electorate that Nixon and his great political mind (remember how narrowly he lost to one of the most loved presidents we’ve had) conjured what is known as the Southern Strategy.
I’m not going to mince words, it’s basically appealing to racist undertones because that means you’ll secure the southern vote. There’s a lot of blaming black people without actually saying you’re blaming black people. The lines you hear over and over is “law and order” and “states rights” which, again, don’t sound bad until you realize the rights and laws being advocated for were the rights to enforce Jim Crow laws. Not a great look!
Now, Nixon embraced this strategy, but there was a fly in the ointment: in 1968, a third party candidate, George Wallace, threw his hat in the ring. Wallace REALLY embraced this strategy, and once we get to the electoral map, you’ll see what I mean. To add to the drama, the would-be candidate for the Democratic party, Robert Francis Kennedy was assassinated on June 5th of an election year while campaigning for the Democratic nomination. Hubert Humphrey won the nomination, and in the subsequent general election, Nixon won a narrow victory, largely due to former southern Democratic voters casting their ballots based on racial issues.
The electoral breakdown was 301 for Nixon, 191 for Humphrey, with 46 electoral votes for George Wallace. Quite the beatdown, right? Nixon won the popular vote over Humphrey by a significantly less impressive 512,144 votes, with Wallace garnering 9.9 million votes (13.5% of the vote). Would RFK had won? Who’s to say? What we can deduce is that it took several major strokes of good fortune for Nixon to ascend to the Oval Office.
Once in power, Richard Nixon was generally very well liked. He was charismatic, began to pull the US military out of Vietnam, signed the SALT I treaty (which you can read more about here) and sought a detente with China. By the time the 1972 election rolled around, he portrayed Democratic challenger George McGovern as a radical left-wing extremist and easily won the election, smashing McGovern by a tally of 503 electoral votes and 17,995,488 votes.
But.
There was an initially small story about a break-in at a Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC on June 17th 1972. Five men broke in and were charged and later convicted of burglary and attempted interception of communications (legal-ese for wiretapping). Something like this today would break your TV. Nixon’s initial response was incredulity. I’m not convinced that he ordered the break in, but history has shown that he ordered the cover up. You see, as part of the FBI’s investigation of this break in, the agents stumbled upon some financial records tying the burglars to the Nixon 1972 campaign. Nixon ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the source of the funds, however for some reason I can’t find, it didn’t work. This will be important later, just trust me on this one. The FBI traced the funds from the burglars to the banks from which they drew the money to the originator of those funds: the CRP… Committee to Re-Elect the President of the US.
Nixon was still high and dry in early 1973, though the investigation into the break in did not end with the conviction of the five burglars. Instead, one of the burglars penned a letter to a judge that perjury — that is, withholding information while under oath — had been committed in the Watergate trial. This led to Nixon seeking to cover up the cover up of the break in. He grew distrustful, and began recording all of his conversations. He accused the media of making wild accusations, liberal bias, notably stopping short of calling anything ‘fake news’. Nixon’s re-election staff sought to protect the presidency from this developing issue, and on April 15, 1973 John Dean, the guy who orchestrated the initial cover up met with Richard Nixon.
Can you imagine how fast and how hard his heart must have been beating? To be in the Oval Office, the most powerful room in the world, speaking to the most powerful man in the world, about covering up espionage of political adversaries, its subsequent cover up, and being asked to name specific details must have been the most daunting meeting to attend, maybe in history. John Dean noticed that Nixon kept asking him questions about his recollections of the cover up, a detail he divulged to the Senate Watergate Committee.
And there it was. The thread which unravelled the tapestry that was the Watergate cover up. Eventually the tapes were discovered, and eventually Nixon handed them over, and eventually the public heard what is referred to as the Smoking Gun Tape, in which Nixon discusses ordering the CIA to halt the FBI investigation of the funds behind the burglars. But before this happened, Tricky Dick Nixon tried one last ruse to remain in power.
As I mentioned above, the Senate Watergate Committee was tasked with investigating the break in, the burglars, and the source of the funds by which the ties to Nixon himself were eventually found. This committee was headed by this guy with a fantastic name: Archibald Cox. How did Cox come to be the special prosecutor for the Watergate affair? Because Nixon, attempting to distance himself from associates with details on the matter, accepted the resignations of two collaborators, one of whom was the Attorney General. His replacement appointed Cox, who because he was a special prosecutor did not have to run anything by the White House. Nixon had lost control.
In July of 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee discovered that there was a recording system in the Oval Office of the White House. Obviously this was of importance to any sort of investigation into possible wrongdoing, and so Archie Cox sought to obtain these tapes. Nixon refused. Cox persisted. Cox and Dick came to a head when Archibald issued a subpoena to obtain the tapes to Nixon. Nixon proclaimed executive privilege, and that the tapes were of vital importance to national security and could not become public. He saw that Cox was unrelenting in his role as special prosecutor, and needed desperately for this existential threat to disappear.
In what is one of the most bald-faced abuses of power in American history, Richard Nixon on the night of October 20th, 1973 ordered his recently-appointed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Cox. In what must have taken courage, Richardson refused and handed Nixon his resignation. Who’s next in line after the AG? The Deputy AG. Nixon moved on down the line and asked Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshausto to terminate Archibald Cox as special prosecutor. Ruckelshausto refused and handed Nixon his resignation. Nixon didn’t know what to do.
He was at a crossroads. He sent for Robert Bork, the Solicitor General of the United States, a rarely mentioned post that deals with representing the federal government before the Supreme Court. Bork was brought in by limousine, and sworn in as acting Attorney General. Despite the meteoric rise to power, Bork was still reluctant to fire Archibald Cox. He hemmed and hawed, for he did not want to be “perceived as a man who did the President’s bidding to save my job.”
Bork gave in. He signed the letter and Cox was fired. This episode is referred to, grimly, as the Saturday Night Massacre. It’s the night that heads rolled at Nixon’s hand in his Caligulan attempt to save his power. This attempt to squash dissent was so transparent that he lost virtually all support overnight. Shortly thereafter, he uttered his most enduring sentence, “I am not a crook,” ironically at the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World. You know the rest.
Uneasiness
That brings us to now. Trump, on May 10, 2017, in what may be called by something dumb like Orange Tuesday in the near future, fired James Comey. I think the biggest difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon was much better at politics. He was an asshole to be sure, but he was very, very smart, extremely cunning, and it took something TINY like a janitor noticing a bit of tape coming off a door latch in the Watergate to bring him down. Trump has none of those things. He isn’t charismatic, he is in fact one of the most disliked people on the planet. He isn’t politically brilliant, it took the most polarizing Democrat in history, 2 third party candidates, low turnout, and an FBI letter to get elected. There is no hard evidence of any wrongdoing as it stands right now, but that really doesn’t mean much if there is evidence of any sort of cover up. Nixon showed us that. Go back up and look at that 1972 map… he was going to win whether he spied on McGovern or not. I would posit that if he’d come clean immediately he could have played it off as dirty politics. The cover up changed public opinion.
What evidence exists of a cover up? Well, for starters let’s look at who’s lost their jobs. National Security Advisor Mike Flynn had ties to Russia, and subsequently got axed. AG Jeff Sessions “recused” himself due to being part of the campaign he was supposed to have been investigating. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes stepped aside amid accusations of ethical concerns relating to handling of confidential documents relating to the Russia investigation. House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, who should be looking into potential abuses of power stepped aside.
That leaves a few different outlets of investigation. One is the House Intelligence Committee, but that’s the House and those idiots just passed a bill that will take 24 million off of health insurance. In short, I have no confidence in the House. There’s also the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chair said this earlier:
Finally there is the FBI investigation, which has just had its head removed. This is big for two reasons: the FBI’s investigation is not open and the FBI has significantly more tools by which to conduct its work. I don’t know that there is anyone other than Jesus Christ that Trump could possibly install as head of the FBI that Democrats will trust. I certainly won’t, and I’m a little mad that we now get to politicize not just the courts but the intelligence agencies. The wild card option for which we are hoping is for a special prosecutor to be appointed. A special prosecutor gets to keep their work secret like the FBI, but also has the power to issue subpoenas. In theory Democrats in the Senate and any Republican with an iota of credibility could lock arms and refuse to confirm an FBI director until a special prosecutor is named, but that is just a pipe dream for today.
It has been seven hours. There’s a lot that is unknown right now, but if you remember anything from this rambling piece remember this; if we as a nation want to get to the bottom of this uneasy saga, there is one method and one method only that has consistently worked to uncover wrongdoing and take down those in power from people like Al Capone to Richard Nixon.
