Fired FBI chief burns Trump, but delivers no smoking gun
Yet another Oval Office conversation was delving into yet another president’s determined wish to shut down yet another FBI investigation that had gotten way too close. But this was 2017, not 1972. And the art of this deal was cutting out middle men entirely. This time, the artful deal-master, President Trump, chose to do all the deal-making himself.
And that is one big difference between the stunning, detailed revelations fired FBI Director James Comey made this week regarding his one-on-one conversations with Trump and the famously named “smoking gun” Oval Office conversation that was the unmaking of the 37th president, Richard M. Nixon.
It was 45 years ago this month that Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, plotted to get the CIA to tell the FBI to halt its investigation of the Watergate break-in and bugging by falsely claiming it would blow the cover on a national security secret. In contrast, Comey contended in a statement released Wednesday and in his Senate Intelligence Committee hearing testimony Thursday, Trump chose to personally convince his thenFBI chief to end his probe of Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. And Trump repeatedly prodded Comey to say publicly that Trump wasn’t an FBI investigation target.
But, of course, there is one other huge difference between Comey’s disclosures and the “smoking gun” revelations. Nixon’s cover-up was recorded for posterity by the president’s own automatic taping system.
On June 23, 1972, midway through a re-election campaign Nixon was leading by a wide margin, Haldeman walked into the Oval Office and broke some bad news. And two years later, we eavesdropped as Haldeman told his boss: “Now, on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back to the ... problem area because the FBI is not under control.”
The FBI had just traced money that was paid to the Cuban-American Watergate burglars, who had been caught in the act. They were paid, in part, with a $25,000 check that had been donated to Nixon’s re-election campaign.
“The way to handle this now,” Haldeman said, “is for us to have [CIA Deputy Director Vernon] Walters call [FBI Director] Pat Gray and just say, ‘Stay the hell out of this ... we don’t want you to go any further on it.’
“Good deal! Play it tough,” Nixon said.
Comey has no audio tapes to play for us — but he prays Trump does. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he said Thursday. (Trump’s White House coyly won’t say if any tapes exist.) So far, we only have Comey’s cringe-worthy accounts of several instances when, he says, Trump tried to co-opt him.
Comey recounts a painfully awkward Jan. 27 dinner, just the two men alone at a table in the White House mansion’s Green Room. Comey said Trump began “an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship.” He wrote that “the president said, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.’ I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence.” (Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz insisted yesterday his client never said that.)
On Feb. 14, after an Oval Office meeting attended by six top officials, Trump asked only Comey to remain. “I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Trump said when they were alone. “‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.’ I replied only that ‘he is a good guy.’ ”
Comey recounted Trump’s repeated efforts to get the FBI to make public the fact that he is not personally under investigation. Comey, in effect, kept passing that buck up to the acting deputy attorney general to decide. No doubt that infuriated Trump.
If Comey’s account proves accurate, Trump’s efforts to get the Flynn investigation halted could possibly be considered an effort to obstruct justice. But since he always couched it in terms of human compassion, and never issued a direct order, that obstruction finding is far from certain.
Nixon was undone by his own smoking gun. Trump must now coexist with Comey’s smoldering (but not smoking) revelations. It promises to be, at the very best, a coexistence as chilly, unsettling and unpresidential as his bizarre dinner in the Green Room.