Latest troubles won’t soon disappear
WASHINGTON—It’s beginning to feel like Watergate around here. A more and more polluted atmosphere with the smell and texture of potential political scandal of historic proportions; a special prosecutor; nervousness growing among Republicans on Capitol Hill; a president who maintains his enemies have trumped it all up (pun intended) and can’t keep his mouth shut; stories and explanations that change rapidly in the wake of new leaks; tapes of conversations that may or may not exist or hold the key to the crises following the Saturday Night Massacre-like exit of FBI director James Comey.
Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who ran twice for president, came right out and made the comparison the other day after one of the revelations about the real reason Comey was pink-slipped—the Russia investigation. It’s still too early to say, but the “what if” questions are hanging over the Oval Office more prominently, and the dreaded “I” word is being uttered increasingly aloud up and down Pennsylvania avenue.
If The Donald in the first act of his play had wanted to wind the clock backward with Archibald Cox precision, he couldn’t have done a better job of it. Suicide by cop comes to mind as he now faces the toughest scrutiny available in the form of Robert Mueller, Comey’s “Untouchable” predecessor—a man whose congressional sanction once was defined by all 100 salons answering “yeah” in the vote over his extension in the FBI job. No one gets that approval rating, or at least not in my long-term memory. They didn’t have to confirm Elliott Ness.
During the summer of 1972, Watergate seemed to be more an illusion than reality as the country dealt with the election. Of course, the smart money was betting that the lull was just that and after November the breakin or the “second-rate burglary” as Nixonians were fond of saying, would move to first burner again. It did. That’s the very nature of these things in the fermentation process. But in the current case, the history could be fast-forwarded by the mouth and tweeting fingers of Trump himself, who took time to call it a witch hunt.
An old friend of mine, the late Brian Gettings, who wrote the Rico Act for Congress and later was a U.S. Attorney before moving into private practice to represent accused spies and others (including Mark Felt, the second man in the FBI who claimed to be “deep throat” in the Watergate saga) would always first advise the accused to “stuff a sock in your mouth.”
Brian was a Republican but would have been appalled at his party’s representative in the White House, who appears to either not get that kind of sage counseling or is incapable of following it. Perhaps because he spends so much time in Florida, he doesn’t wear socks. He should borrow a pair. But I confess that is a bit too flippant in a very serious matter.
The decision to hire retired Gen. Michael Flynn as his national security advisor despite knowing he was under investigation for his dealings with Turkey was a mistake in judgment that is almost frightening in its implications, simply because it shows a callous disregard for an appearance of impropriety and for his office. Why, one should wonder, would a chief executive hire such a person with full knowledge of what he was facing? Does Flynn have pictures? Trump now denies he asked Comey to end the investigation into Flynn’s dealings with Turkey and Russia.
Before he left for an international trip, Trump laid out an approach to the press, aimed clearly at trying to get his young administration back on track by centering on the issues of the campaign—immigration, healthcare, tax reform. But he could not resist taking a shot at Comey, contending Comey was unpopular and that it was the former director’s testimony before Congress recently that led to his dismissal.
But if credibility is a meaningful factor in all this, and of course it is, Trump has a problem, saying one thing one minute and another the next. Comey is not without his faults in the entire affair, having stepped over the line in what appeared to be an inept, but influential interference with the presidential election in the Hillary Clinton matter.
If history is a barometer, this will get much stormier and play out over quite a while … another valid comparison to Watergate.