Trump presidency makes it look like it’s 1973 again
Coverup, special prosecutors, secret tapes evoke Watergate, writes Diane Francis.
In the page-turner called the Trump presidency, few weeks have matched the most recent one. First there was a book describing Trump’s personality disorders, and then there was the release of a revealing Senate Judiciary Committee transcript about Russian connections that Republicans were suppressing.
Both point to the fact that it’s looking like 1973 again: A burglary, a coverup, special prosecutor, unsavory characters, and the possible existence of tapes that could sink a president.
The newly released transcript contains the testimony of Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and co-founder of Washington’s “intelligence gathering” research company called Fusion GPS.
In 2016, his firm was hired to gather information about Donald Trump, and Simpson farmed out the “Russian” research to former British MI5 Russian expert Christopher Steele. Steele sent a series of memos to Fusion and Simpson said he concluded that “something bigger was going on.”
Steele told Simpson he was concerned that Trump had been “compromised” and could be “blackmailed” as a result of video tapes of certain activities in Russian hotel rooms.
Steele met the FBI in mid-September and was told that they had another informant, “an internal Trump campaign source”, helping them.
The Steele dossier was finally published after the election, in January 2017, creating a firestorm. Four months later, Trump fired James Comey, and the furor in Congress led to the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Ever since he has continued the probe into Trump and the Russians that Fusion GPS, Steele, and the FBI had started many months before.
It’s obvious why the Republicans on the committee wanted the testimony to remain confidential. Simpson argued that Republicans were trying to obscure what happened in 2016.
“It was obvious in September 2016 there was a crime in progress,” Simpson told the senators. “They (the Russians) were hacking into the DNC and think tanks . ... There were further indications of extensive conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.”
But the difference between 1973 and now is that the burglars, possibly Russian hackers, will never be caught. And the tapes, if they exist, remain likely under lock and key.
The story’s not over. Richard Nixon ended up firing his attorney general, and deputy attorney general for refusing to fire their special prosecutor, but got his solicitor general to do the deed. Months later, he was charged with obstruction of justice, and Nixon had to resign nine months after the firings.
So the pages will keep turning.