Ex-Nixon attorney, spy at Rep. Lee’s town hall
Hundreds hear their views on ending Trump’s tenure
Hundreds of Rep. Barbara Lee’s constituents flocked to a town hall meeting Sunday afternoon — not to confront her about health care, pepper her with questions or otherwise put her on the spot.
They came instead to listen to a former Nixon attorney and a former spy warn about President Trump and how to best ensure his demise.
About 750 people filled the auditorium at King Middle School in Berkeley, an area that Lee, D-Oakland, proclaimed to be “the heart and soul of the resistance movement.”
That was evident from the signs on the wall featuring Lee’s name and the hashtag #Resist, the vendors selling anti-Trump buttons outside
the meeting, the loud cheers, the “Barbara Lee speaks for me” signs and the standing ovations inside.
Separate speakers also asked Lee whether she would run for Senate in 2016 or president in 2018. Each time, she smiled but didn’t comment. After the meeting, Lee said she was happy being in Congress and building the resistance to Trump.
“I don’t have any political ambitions,” she said.
The congresswoman spoke only briefly at the beginning and end of the meeting and offered an occasional interjection. She acknowledged that her district “gets it” and pledged to keep fighting in Washington for transparency and accountability as well as for a fair and thorough investigation of the Trump administration’s connections and possible collusion with the Russians.
Lee said she brought President Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel, John Dean, and Malcolm Nance, a retired Navy senior chief petty officer and spy, to Berkeley to help educate her constituents and encourage them to keep fighting.
“I never in my wildest imagination would ever have dreamed I would be bringing a former spy and a Nixon attorney to Berkeley, California, to talk about how we resist and what we do next,” she said.
Dean and Nance, whom Lee mistakenly introduced as “Malcolm X,” told the audience they can’t necessarily count on impeachment or the 25th Amendment, which addresses succession to the presidency, to drive Trump out of office. People need to be ready for a long fight, and Watergate, from beginning to end, took 928 days before Nixon resigned, Dean noted.
Dean described himself as a social liberal and fiscal moderate. He’s written columns and books opposing neoconservatism, but he said he hasn’t really moderated his views since the Nixon era.
“The Republican Party has moved so far to the right,” he said, “that I’m on the left.”
Dean said that Nixon and Trump have similar personalities as authoritarians, but that Nixon usually acted behind closed doors while Trump tends to act out publicly. Impeachment is a simple process, he said, but a difficult one given the Republican dominance of the House and Senate.
Republican leaders, he said, are not likely to turn on the president, or attempt to hold him accountable, because they don’t want to lose power. And Trump’s followers, he said, “are not open to persuasion.”
Nance called the allegations of Russian interference in U.S. elections “Watergate 2.0.” He said the Russians began a major cybertheft campaign against the United States with a goal of electing Trump president and destroying democracy.
While the two seemed an unlikely pair to call for protests, they told the crowd — many of them older Berkeley residents — that they need to get out and protest and make sure the millions of American who stayed home from the polls in 2016 get out and vote.
Earlier, Nance said: “You won’t change things in 2018 unless you bring along the people who didn’t vote in 2016.”
Audience members such as Tania Schwarz, 48, of Berkeley, seemed both disappointed and encouraged by the discussion, and buoyed by the hundreds of people who cared enough to come out on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and carry on the fight.
“Basically I felt proud to be an American today,” she said. ”I think it was disheartening for some people who are so frustrated to hear that impeachment and the 25th Amendment are not likely. But sometimes change takes time.”