WASHINGTON — President Trump has been consulting the Constitution. In a Twitter post on Monday, he recited part of Article II, Section 4, the provision that allows Congress to remove federal officials who commit “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Mr. Trump wrote that he had done none of those things: “There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach.”
The president’s analysis had two shortcomings. It misstated the conclusion of the report issued by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which made no definitive judgment about whether Mr. Trump had violated criminal laws concerning obstruction of justice. And it failed to take account of what the framers meant by “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The following article by Michael Koncewicz, Assistant Research Scholar, New York University, was posted on the Conversation website August 23, 2018:
Atty. Gen. Elliot Richardson administers the oath to William D. Ruckelshaus his deputy attorney general Credit: John Duricka, AP
Republican leaders in 2018 are profoundly different than the ones who dealt with Watergate in the 1970s.
During Watergate, a significant number of GOP members of Congress and the Nixon administration publicly resisted President Richard Nixon’s efforts to undermine the rule of law.
Today’s GOP leaders, with few exceptions, meekly follow President Trump.
President Donald Trump himself is now invoking allusions to the Watergate era as he attacks the ongoing investigation into his ties to Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign — and he is bizarrely only making himself look even more guilty in doing so.
Timothy Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, spoke with host Brooke Baldwin Monday and argued that Trump is now echoing President Richard Nixon’s defenders during the Watergate scandal. They discussed Trump’s recent referral to John Dean, the White House counsel who ended up testifying against the president, as a “rat.”
“I learned when I was director of the Nixon library that there is a core of people in the United States who are Nixon Watergate defenders. For them, John Dean is a villain,” he explained. “So President Trump, who was friends with Roy Cohn, is channeling that kind of hatred of John Dean.”
The following article by Sam Berger and Alex Tausanovitch was posted on the Center for American Progress website July 30, 2018:
Preparing for Post-Trump Reforms
Credit: Getty/AFP, Jim Watson
Many commentators have compared the Trump administration to the ill-fated presidency of Richard Nixon.1 The similarities are striking: a willingness to tap into the darker currents of the American political climate, a disregard for the rule of law, and an overriding concern with settling political scores and damaging perceived enemies. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation continues, along with parallel investigations into other potentially illegal activity by President Donald Trump and his associates, it is already apparent that the Trump presidency will also be marred by scandal.2 Given these parallels, it is instructive to look at the reforms of the post-Watergate era when considering lessons for policymaking in a post-Trump world.
The post-Watergate reforms were far-reaching. They sought to restore faith in the U.S. political system by combating the corrupting influence of money in politics; promoting ethics and transparency in government; protecting people against abuses of government power; and limiting certain extraordinary exercises of presidential authority. Laws passed in that period have transformed, among other things, the federal budget process, government practices for protecting individuals’ personal information, and oversight of the intelligence community. While these reform efforts have not been uniformly successful, they reflect the resolve of the policymakers of that era, who had a broad understanding of the abuses that needed to be addressed and who were willing to take broad actions to address them.
This era of reform demonstrates at least two important lessons that apply to current efforts to prepare the post-Trump policy response. First, the post-Trump moment will likely present opportunities for significant reform across a broad range of policy areas, allowing policymakers to tackle deeply rooted problems that have previously proven difficult to address. Second, it is critical that policymakers begin planning now how to connect the wide-ranging scandals of the Trump administration to appropriate reforms.
The following article by John T. Bennett was posted on the Roll Call website July 24, 2018:
A Republican chuckled at notion. A Democrat sees ‘authoritarian behavior’
Sens. Tim Kaine, D-VA., left, and James Lankford, R-Okla., right, have very different views of a White House proposal to strip several former Obama administration officials of their security clearances. All have criticized President Donald Trump. Also pictured, Sen. Chris Coons, D-DE. Credit: Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call file photo
A Republican lawmaker chuckled. A Democratic senator nodded in emphatic agreement. And a possible 2020 GOP presidential candidate offered nuanced criticism.
How some lawmakers feel about President Donald Trump’s threat to punish political foes who have criticized him — and whether it reminds them of Richard Nixon — depends on how they feel about the president and his unconventional tactics. It makes the issue a microcosm of the Trump presidency.
Trump deployed his top spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on Monday to announce he is “exploring” what appears to be an unprecedented move to strip certain former George W. Bush and Obama administration officials of their security clearances. The list includes John O. Brennan, James B. Comey, James R. Clapper Jr., Michael Hayden, Susan Rice and Andrew McCabe, with Sanders accusing them all of “politicizing” sensitive information and making false accusations about Trump and Russia.
The following article by Douglas M. Charles, Associate Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University, was posted on the Conversation website February 3, 2018:
President Donald Trump’s attacks on the FBI may have reached a climax.
In an apparent attempt to discredit Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, staff of the House Intelligence Committee on behalf of its chair Republican Devin Nunes of California, wrote and on Feb. 2 released a four-page memo based on confidential information made available to them by the FBI. It outlines alleged improprieties in the FBI’s investigation, specifically the monitoring of Trump’s former campaign adviser Carter Page.
The following commentary by Greg Sargent was posted on the Washington Post website January 29, 2018:
Opinion | If President Trump fires the bane of his legal troubles, he could spark a legal and constitutional crisis. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
THE MORNING PLUM:
The Sunday shows confirmed an alarming development: Republicans in Congress do not feel any urgency to protect special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, even though it has now been confirmed that President Trump tried to fire Mueller — and that the possibility of Trump trying to remove Mueller is seen as very real by Trump’s own advisers right now.
This sets up a possible worst-case scenario in the coming confrontation with Mueller that could take us into territory that is beyond anything this country endured during Watergate. To flesh this out, I spoke to Tim Weiner, the veteran journalist and author of a highly regarded, harshly critical history of the FBI that chronicles Richard Nixon’s battles with the agency. Continue reading “Is Trump a greater threat than Nixon? Here’s the big danger ahead.”
The following commentary by Eleanor Clift was posted on the Daily Beast website December 15, 2017:
Things fell apart for Nixon when he dropped below 30 percent approval in his second term. Trump is getting there in his first year.
Credit: Win McNamee/Reuters
Public opinion can take off like a runaway train once it gets going. President Donald Trump, already polling lower than any of his predecessors in his first year, might soon be hearing the hoofbeats of history.
At 32 percent in the most recent Pew and Monmouth polls, he is perilously close to what most historians and political scientists say is a tipping point of 30 percent, below which a president can no longer effectively lead. Continue reading “Trump’s Numbers Near a Tipping Point”
The following article by Kenneth T. Walsh was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website Deember 15, 2017:
President Donald Trump is behaving like the disgraced ex-president.
Cedit: Jae C. Hong/AP
The comparisons between Donald Trump and the disgraced Richard Nixon are getting more salient, and a big reason is that Trump is behaving like Nixon did in fundamental and troubling ways.
Echoing President Nixon’s arguments in the early and mid-1970s, Trump says many of the nation’s leaders and institutions, including prominent Democrats, some establishment Republicans, and major news organizations, are biased against him and are attempting to orchestrate his downfall. This is the same approach that Nixon took, seeing enemies everywhere and creating a fortress mentality at the White House. A lengthy New York Times story last weekend showed the depth of Trump’s preoccupation with what his adversaries say about him and with how he can get back at them using Twitter, his favorite weapon, and the overall power of the presidential bully pulpit. “For other presidents,” the Times reported, “every day is a test of how to lead a country, not just a faction, balancing competing interests. For Mr. Trump, every day is an hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation.” Continue reading “The Ghost of Richard Nixon”
The following article by Chris Sosa was posted on the AlterNet website December 4, 2017:
The president isn’t even trying to mask his authoritarian impulses.
Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein, best known for his journalism during President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian” behavior is more blatant than Nixon’s abuse of power.
“Richard Nixon is a criminal president who abused his authority in secret throughout his presidency and had to leave office because of it,” Bernstein explained. “Donald Trump, by contrast, is a president of the United States who has claimed authoritarian powers for himself and exercised them not in secret but openly, and now because of that it looks like he may well have obstructed justice, among other possibily illegal acts.”
Trump’s behavior is arguably worse than Nixon’s before the former president fired the special prosecutor, an example Trump may choose to follow as the Russia investigation inches further into his inner circle.
“The conduct of Donald Trump in office as we’ve seen it publicly is much more egregious than we publicly saw Nixon’s conduct certainly up to the time that he fired the special prosecutor in the Saturday Night Massacre,” Bernstein said.
President Donald Trump’s attacks on the FBI may have reached a climax.
