Once, not so long ago, congressional Republicans were impeachment’s constitutional stalwarts.
They stood up for the House of Representatives’ “sole power of impeachment,” a power granted in the Constitution, including the right to subpoena witnesses and evidence. Even when the president under investigation was a Republican. Even when the Republican political base threatened to turn against them.
But that was when the president was Richard Nixon, not Donald Trump. Continue reading.
Testimony by Gordon D. Sondland gave Democrats the crisp, accusatory lines they sought. But Republicans elicited an account of one conversation that they hope will help exonerate President Trump.WASHINGTON — Gordon D. Sondland had not even finished his testimony on Wednesday before it was being called the “John Dean moment” of the President Trump impeachment drama. With the presidency on the line, a once-trusted lieutenant pointed the finger at Mr. Trump in a proceeding that could lead to Watergate-style charges of high crimes and misdemeanors.
For the first time, Mr. Trump’s critics got the sort of viral moments they have craved, crisp accusatory cancer-on-the-presidency lines uttered on camera that can now be played over and over again on social media and cable television, making clear just who was in charge of the campaign to pressure a foreign power to help bring down the president’s domestic political rivals.
“We followed the president’s orders.”
View the complete November 20 article by Peter Baker on The New York Times website here.
The trio of witnesses called to testify next week in the first public impeachment hearings are some of the biggest names and most significant players in the Democrats’ sprawling six-week probe into allegations President Trump pressured a foreign power to investigate his political rivals.
House Democrats know that millions of Americans will be tuning in to watch the impeachment inquiry for the first time now that weeks of closed-door depositions are giving way to televised Watergate-style hearings that are set for next Wednesday and Friday.
The hearings could be held in one of the Capitol complex’s larger rooms, such as the cavern
View the complete November 6 article by Scott Wong on The Hill website here.
In March 1974 — when the Watergate scandal was getting worse and worse for President Richard Nixon — conservative Republican Slade Gorton called for Nixon’s resignation. Five months later, Gorton (who was serving as attorney general for Washington State at the time) got his wish: Nixon resigned in August 1974, and Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as president of the United States. Gorton is now 91, and he is once again in favor of an impeachment inquiry against a Republican president — only this time, it’s President Donald Trump.
Gorton discussed the House impeachment inquiry against Trump during an interview with the Seattle Times. Many Republicans in Congress are insisting that Trump did nothing wrong on July 25, when he tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. But Gorton (who represented Washington State in the U.S. Senate in the 1980s and 1990s) strongly disagrees, joining House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in asserting that Trump seriously crossed the line by encouraging a foreign leader to investigate a political rival.
“I reached the conclusion that there are a dozen actions on this president’s part that warrant a vote of impeachment in the House,” Gorton told the Seattle Times’ Jim Brunner.
View the complete October 31 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
The star witness of Watergate took a turn as the star witness for House Democrats’ inquiries into President Trump on Monday. And in doing so, he laid out a compelling series of parallels between the two situations.
Former White House counsel John Dean acknowledged at the start of Monday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he wasn’t there as a “fact witness.” Instead, he noted in his opening statement several ways in which he sees the report of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III echoing Watergate.
Dean didn’t run through each of those verbally during his testimony, but his written statement lays his case out in detail.
View the complete June 10 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.
John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel who eventually turned against his boss in the Watergate scandal, has a unique perspective on investigations of presidents.
After President Donald Trump announced the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday, to be replaced by a person who had been publicly critical of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016, Dean called in to CNN to give his opinion.
Dean said the firing of Sessions was “planned like a murder. I say that given that the president was asked a question at the press conference this morning, he brushed it off, said ‘We’ll deal with it later.’ And he’s clearly been thinking about it — and ‘later’ meant he’s not necessarily going to fire Mueller, he’s going to undercut him by the people around him.”
View the complete November 7 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet.org website here.
WASHINGTON — A question has loomed over Washington: What will the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, do when he wraps up his investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia and whether President Trump obstructed justice?
The leading theory is that Mr. Mueller will write a report for his supervisor at the Justice Department. That could lead to a new fight: Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has suggested that the White House may then invoke executive privilege and order the Justice Department to keep portions of such a report confidential from Congress.
But there is historical precedent for another model. Echoing a move by the Watergate prosecutor in March 1974, the grand jury with which Mr. Mueller has been working could try to send a report about the evidence it has gathered directly to the House Judiciary Committee. And on Friday, seeking to draw more attention to that option, three prominent legal analysts asked a court to lift a veil of secrecy that has long kept that Watergate-era report hidden.
View the complete September 14 article by Charlie Savage on the New York Times website here.
The following article by Michael Koncewicz, Assistant Research Scholar, New York University, was posted on the Conversation website August 23, 2018:
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.
The following article by Cody Fenwick was posted on the AlterNet.org website August 20, 2018:
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:
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.
