DON WAY WORSE THAN NIXON
Schiff: Watergate wasn’t as bad as elex mess
Democratic leader Adam Schiff believes Russian interference in the 2016 election, along with President Trump’s alleged efforts to end the special counsel’s investigation, is more outrageous than the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation 45 years ago.
“The obstruction of justice in particular in this case is far worse than anything that Richard Nixon did,” Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC’s “This Week.” “The break-in by the Russians of the democratic institutions, a foreign adversary, is far more significant than … breaking into the Democratic headquarters. So yes, I would say in every way this is more significant than Watergate.”
In June 1972, five men linked to the committee to reelect Nixon were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, which led to an investigation pointing to the president’s alleged involvement in covering up the crime.
Nixon resigned two years later to avoid impeachment.
“The fact that a candidate for president and now president of the United States would not only not stand up and resist Russian interference in our election, but would welcome it, goes well beyond anything Nixon did,” Schiff added.
When pressed by “This Week” host Martha Raddatz on the issue of impeaching Trump — something Democrats including 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has called for — Schiff was noncommittal.
“I think Liz Warren makes an important point, and that is that the level of evidence in [special counsel Robert Mueller’s] report is serious and damning and in a normal circumstance would be, I think, without question within the realm of impeachable offenses,” he said.
However, Schiff conceded that with the support the president has from Senate Republicans, “an impeachment is likely to be unsuccessful.”
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway also appeared on “This Week,” where she was asked if the Mueller report “totally exonerates” her boss despite stating it does not “conclude that the president committed a crime[and] it also does not exonerate him” in its text.
“Yes,” she answered unflinchingly.
According to Conway, “the central premise here was collusion [between
rump an e uss an govn ernment], and there isn’t any.”
Schiff called Conway’s assessment “another display of alternate facts” and blasted her unwillingness to acknowledge that Russian operatives helped Trump get elected and that he welcomed their assistance.
“Alternative facts” is the murky term Conway infamously introduced to explain conflicting information from the White House during a 2017 visit to “Meet the Press.”
Schiff insisted there “is ample evidence of collusion in plain sight,” despite Mueller’s conclusion that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
That report into election er erence an o s ruc on of justice, which was two years in the making, concluded it was tough to decide whether Trump technically obstructed investigators because his efforts “were mostly unsuccessful … largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
Mueller’s findings suggest that one such effort was the president’s alleged attempt to get White House lawyer Don McGahn to push for Mueller’s firing. According to the report, McGahn told White House officials Trump had asked him to “do crazy s—t” and he declined.
Trump has argued that statements made about him in the report are “total bulls—t,” and if he wanted to stop the investigation he would have fired Mueller directly.