The Mueller Three Versus the Watergate Seven
Trump is in much deeper trouble today than Nixon was in September 1972.
By Leon Neyfakh
The specter of Watergate haunts the Trump presidency. On a personal level, Donald Trump shares Richard Nixon’s penchant for egregious deceit, petty revenge, and debilitating paranoia. When it comes to governing, he has demonstrated a Nixonian willingness to fire people who refuse to promise him their loyalty. Trump has also taken a page from his predecessor’s playbook in his response to the allegations being made against him. In the same way Nixon and his apologists accused the Democrats of political sabotage and illegal campaign spending after the Watergate break-in, Trump has lately been insisting that Hillary Clinton and the DNC colluded with the Russians.
The charges brought Monday against three Trump associates—including his former campaign manager—marked another stop on the Watergate nostalgia tour: the first indictments.
In the Trump version of this story, Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates got charged with money laundering and tax fraud, and campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements about his contacts with the Russian government. In the Nixon version, the five burglars who’d broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters, got indicted along with the two former White House aides who had organized the break-in, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.
The parallels between the two sets of indictments are not straightforward at this point, and it’s not clear how much insight we can glean into our current political moment based on these similarities. The ways in which the indictments differ, however, tell us quite a bit about the situation Trump and his people are in.
At the time of the Watergate break-in, Nixon was running for re-election. When a grand jury handed down a set of indictments on Sept. 15, 1972, that didn’t touch the president or his inner circle, it was cause for celebration in the West Wing. Not only did it mean that the important members of Nixon’s team were safe from prosecution—“We have absolutely no evidence to indicate that any others should be charged,” a Justice Department spokesman had told the press—it also allowed the Nixon administration to blame Watergate on two individuals, Liddy and Hunt, who could be convincingly portrayed as marginal players in Nixon’s operation.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/trump_is_in_much_deeper_trouble_than_nixon_was_after_the_first_watergate.html