[ad_1]
WASHINGTON (AP) – The White House is plagued by intrigue and slashing as aides look for among them an anonymous throat (state). A president feels besieged by tormentors – Bob Woodward drives him crazy – so he tends his version of a list of enemies, wondering aloud he should get rid of his attorney general or the special prosecutor or both.
For months, the Trump administration and its scandals have carried waterflakes and made comparisons with the characters and crimes of the Nixon era. But this week, the story did not just rehearse, it came out of the trash and came back into the flesh.
There was still John Dean testifying on the Hill, again warning cancer to the presidency.
Almost every element of Trump's problem has a Watergate parallel.
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is conducting an independent investigation by a burglary at the Democratic National Committee, the same target that opened the Pandora's box at Watergate, but this time the robbery was digital and linked to Moscow and not to the Oval Office.
President Richard Nixon first ordered his Attorney General, and then his deputy, to dismiss the Watergate Special Attorney; they refused and resigned during a weekend of convulsions that gave the story the Saturday night massacre but did not derail the independent investigation or l '39; collapse of Nixon for a long time. Trump, meanwhile, fired the Acting Attorney General and FBI Director James Comey, triggering the Mueller investigation that has been pursuing him for over a year.
The same journalists scorn the president
Some of the same journalists are causing the President's spades.
It was Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who discovered the burglary of Watergate, who found themselves under the skin of the president. "Dem operational," Trump smoked about Woodward. "A fool degenerate," he said about Bernstein, who helped bring back a story related to the CNN Russia probe that Trump claims to be "a major lie".
"Everyone is trying to pick me up," Trump told an assistant, according to Woodward's new book, "Fear." The book describes a tragi-comedy inside the White House, with senior officials who called the idiot president a "fool." In the time of Nixon, Supreme Lieutenant Henry Kissinger called his boss "dumpling spirit" behind his back.
But at that time, the world had neither Twitter nor an American president who publicly expressed his visceral feelings, even if he could.
"This is a president who publicly says things we know from Nixon recordings privately," said Timothy Naftali, a New York University historian who led the Richard Presidential Library and Museum. Nixon. "It's as if Trump was struggling openly with the story of Watergate – it's the president who invites these parallels."
Trump's list of those whom he regards as enemies is evident on his Twitter feed. It includes former political opponents, his own Attorney General, his predecessor and former national security officials, whom he threatened security.
Now, he added a top unnamed official who wrote a New York Times editorial describing the president as being an amoral. The assistant described a "steady state" within the administration that was trying to temper Trump's erratic impulses – a fair picture to a degree of "deep state" that Trump is resisting his policy. Trump said Friday that he thought the Justice Department should investigate the identity of this anonymous official.
At the time of Nixon, on August 16, 1971, a White House note set out ideas about "how we could use the available federal mechanisms to defeat our political enemies." Prosecution, litigation and the suspension of grants and contracts were taken into account and Nixon's followers were invited to contribute to the list.
John Dean returns to warn of the dangers of an "uncontrolled president who is inclined to abuse his powers"
Nixon's enemies list was written by Dean, the attorney-fixer who gave up loyalty to Nixon and helped bring down his presidency. The Democrats have asked Dean to appear at the Supreme Court hearings of the Senate as an expert of the executive branch. He has introduced himself as an older and wiser man.
"There is much to fear from an uncontrolled president who is inclined to abuse his powers," Dean told the senators. "It's a fact that I can attest to from my personal experience."
As an advisor to the president, Dean arranged money for the Watergate burglars who tried to find materials useful for Nixon's re-election in 1972 in the Democratic offices of the Watergate Complex. Dean was heavily involved in covering up Nixon's guilt before breaking with the president and delivering a devastating testimony to the Senate committee on the Watergate. He served four months for obstruction of justice; Nixon resigned from his post under the threat of being deported by indictment.
Dean 's counterpart today: Michael Cohen, who, as Trump' s personal attorney, arranged the money for alleged women to have had deals with Trump.
Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges and declared in federal court that he had violated the campaign finance laws in connection with a trump-led treason operation, an accusation that the president denies.
Or maybe the equivalent of Dean is Don McGahn, the White House lawyer who cooperated with the investigators and sat for hours for interviews. It is not yet clear whether McGahn has waived material damages for the president.
Trump is not charged with any crime and the series of convictions that Mueller obtained against Trump's campaign assistants did not uncover a collusion between Moscow and the campaign. There is no smoking gun.
According to Naftali, the parallels with Watergate are only going so far.
Yet, "Nixon's game manual on maneuvers and abuses of power and political espionage is a useful source of questions for any investigation into an impulsive, erratic and potentially criminal presidency," he said. "We're going to watch, Nixon's presidency makes us smarter as we try to make sure our presidents do not do what Nixon did."
Source link
