By CALVIN WOODWARD
June 17, 2022 GMT
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-ivanka-trump-congress-donald-government-and-politics-570444a76bacec6bcfaa507cae7ea452
WASHINGTON (AP) – The remains of Watergate and January 6 are half a century apart, but rooted in the same ancient thirst for power at all costs.
Two presidents, cunning and obscene, tried to end democracy.
The mysteries of both scandals continue until the House of Representatives’ investigation into the Capitol Uprising of January 6, 2021, intersects with Watergate’s 50th anniversary this week.
Is there a smoking gun in Donald Trump’s scams? Or we’ve already seen him when he summoned angry supporters of the “wild” times in Washington, called them “to fight like hell” and wondered if maybe his vice president – one of the few “no” men in his pliable bondage – should to be hanged, as the rebels demanded?
Trump lost the election and tried to cling to power. But Nixon? A key question may be why he bothered to become a fraud at all.
Nixon was on a convenient path to re-election when embarrassing thieves linked to his campaign committee broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate office building 50 years ago and were caught.
Head-to-head revelations of his cover-up and efforts to obstruct justice ousted him nearly two years later when he left instead of facing a possible impeachment sentence. Three Republican congressional leaders went to the White House and helped convince him he was doomed.
In contrast, Trump was desperate after convincingly losing the 2020 election when he sent his own idiots – lawyers, aides, hangers-on – as well as the violent Capitol mob in a bid to change the results and keep him in office. Few in his party have publicly called for him to accept defeat.
Watergate is the American presidential scandal that measures everyone else. Take down the president. And yet it was January 6 that shed blood.
Watergate had a powerful aftermath that led to the expulsion of dozens of Republicans from Congress in 1974. This time, there is almost unanimity that the party will make a profit.
Michael Dobbs, author of “King Richard: Nixon and Watergate – American Tragedy” in 2021, said the system works in Watergate because Congress, the courts and the press have done their job to establish a chain of criminal activities that has led to Nixon to resign.
“The system was under stress then,” he said, “but today it is under much more stress.”
When the Senate Watergate Committee held its remarkable hearings beginning in May 1973, inflation was heading for 9% by the end of the year, roughly where it is now. The stock market collapsed. Then, as now, people had urgent distractions.
But Americans were riveted by the president’s spectacle, which is slowly sinking into disfavor. More than 70 percent said in a Gallup poll that they had watched the televised hearings, which had been circulating for almost three months this summer.
The hearings on January 6 so far are less for investigators to discover new facts than to show and tell what they have already discovered in months of methodical work.
For Dobbs, evidence of Trump’s direct involvement in planning or inciting a revolt with the intention of canceling the election would be Nixon’s smoking gun.
The challenge for the Jan. 6 investigation and any prosecution that may follow is “the ambiguous nature of Trump’s statements from a legal point of view,” he said. “Fear like hell” can be interpreted in different ways.
In publishing previously recorded testimonies from close Trump aides, the commission revealed the extent to which Trump’s circle knew that his case of stolen elections was fake. Even his daughter Ivanka Trump did not buy it.
Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, said the president’s arguments were “out of touch” if he really believed them.
Heavy words, but what effect?
Denial of Trump’s election runs through the campaigns of far-right Republicans in the mid-20 election season, with some prevailing in their primary elections. The hearings will by no means be the last word on Trump’s lies.
“Trump is constitutionally unable to miss criticism,” said Cal Gilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. “So expect a growing wave of accusations, an extension of the list of enemies and a retaliatory program that stretches into the future.
“Other Republican leaders will consider the damage this could do to the party,” he added, “but Howard Bakers is not yet on the horizon.”
Baker embodied then-Congress politics, partisan but not poisonous. He was MP Liz Cheney of the day, but on his way to the Republican Party, not an exile from it like the threatened Wyoming congresswoman who is fierce in her contempt for Trump and fellow Republicans who will not cross him.
At first, Baker expressed his instinctive loyalty to Nixon, “I’m your friend,” he recalled saying face to face when the hearings began. But as a leading Republican in the Watergate panel, he listened, questioned, rummaged through hundreds of hours of hearings, and saw corruption.
His famous question, “What did the president know and when did he find out?”
“I believed that this was a political ploy by the Democrats, that nothing would happen,” Baker told the Associated Press in 1992. But a few weeks later, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought. than I liked. ”
The tenacity and seriousness of his interrogation made the soft Tennessee senator an incredible heartthrob. Love letters were pouring into his office. A women’s magazine called it “cold.”
The Watergate Commission of four Democrats and three Republicans was formed by a unanimous vote in the Senate, unheard of today on almost every issue on the merits. He was accused of investigating the Watergate affair and “any other illegal, improper or unethical conduct” in the 1972 campaign.
In contrast, the House of Representatives committee was formed on January 6th with 222 votes to 190. The only two Republicans to vote for the commission, Cheney and retired Republican Adam Kinsinger of Illinois, were included.
Where Trump loudly announced his complaints and provocations, Nixon sounded private or what he considered personal. It was the White House recording system that Nixon had installed for posterity that cursed him when the Supreme Court forced him to hand over the tapes.
In an interview on June 23, 1972, six days after the theft, Nixon’s chief of staff, HP Haldeman, was heard advising Nixon to tell the FBI to stop investigating the burglary before the bureau could trace the crime to White home or Nixon himself.
“There’s some work here that we don’t want you to go on,” Haldeman suggested to the FBI chief.
“Mmmm,” Nixon said. “Mm-hmm.”
All right, all right, Nixon concluded. “It’s hard to play. That’s the way they play it, and that’s how we’re going to play it. “
It was a smoking gun, a bullet flying to obstruct justice.
A day after the burglary, the AP reported that one of the thieves was a paid security officer for Nixon’s campaign, the first test connection with the president and one that surprised police and prosecutors.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein later confirmed the report to The Washington Post before continuing to hit everyone else with their exclusive Watergate hits, which cover the cover directly on the president.
Watergate’s characters, Bernstein now says, were not primarily journalists who exposed Nixon’s atrocities or Democrats who took charge, but “Republicans who had the courage to say it was not ideology, it was illegality.” .
All these years later, it remains unknown who ordered the break-in. There is no evidence that Nixon did this directly, although there is no uncertainty about the fact that he installed a cover and otherwise played dirty.
Nixon created the “paranoid culture” that gave rise to Watergate, Dobbs said. “The conspiracy is living its own life, pushed forward by crazy cameramen like Gordon Lydie, anticipating the president’s wishes.
Fifty years from now, what will Americans say about January 6?
Historian Michael Beschlos said in a Twitter comment on the hearings that the answer depended on whether America was a democracy or an autocracy until then. “If the latter, the nation’s authoritarian leaders can celebrate January 6 as one of the great days in US history,” as Trump now describes it.
He also asked a question that can never be answered definitively.
“What would have happened to our country if the January 6 coup had been successful?”
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