Recently I penned a DIARY that touched on the similarity of the Trump White House to the Nixon White House on the subject of leaks. Both administrations were beset by high level leaks, but the big difference was that Nixon didn’t start to suffer serious effects with it until his second term, Trump is being outed in his first three weeks. The events of the last 24 hours have taken us into a whole different realm.
Look, Trump has nobody to blame but himself. The number one condition for employment in the White House is undying loyalty to the President, and a feeling of everyone working for a common purpose, and a common goal. But when you purposefully surround yourself with people of different ideologies, each with their own agenda, and turn them loose on each other to keep them from plotting against you, then this is what you get. Leaks from every side as they try to consolidate their own turf, and get rid of competition.
Mark my words, history is once again repeating itself. There are multiple similarities between the two White Houses. Nixon and Trump both believed that their Presidency was ultimate, that they and their decisions were above the law. Nixon’s paranoia led him to mic the Oval Office, taping every conversation with the possibility of “having something” on someone who later disagreed with him. Trump wants to monitor every White House e-mail, and freely uses non disclosure agreements to try to enforce silence. Trump has a shadow world of cash and foreign connections through his vast business, of which he refuses to divest himself. Nixon had a group with the charming acronym CREEP (Committee to Reelect the President). It too was thought to be both above and too slick for the law. To quote Wikipedia;
The Committee for the Re-Election of the President (also known as the Committee to Re-elect the President), abbreviated CRP, but often mocked by the acronym CREEP,[1] was a fundraising organization of United States President Richard Nixon's administration. Planning began in late 1970 and an office opened in the spring of 1971. Besides its re-election activities, CRP employed money laundering and slush funds and was directly and actively involved in the Watergate scandal.[2]
The CRP used $500,000 in funds raised to re-elect President Nixon to pay legal expenses for the five Watergate burglars after their indictment in September 1972, in exchange for their silence and perjury.[citation needed] This act helped turn the burglary into an explosive political scandal. The burglars, as well as G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, John N. Mitchell, and other Nixon administration figures, were imprisoned over the break-in and their efforts to cover it up.
The whole thing started to unravel for Nixon when one of the burglars trying to raid the DNC headquarters at the Watergate kept the picked door unlocked by placing a piece of tape across the striker of the door. This is effective, but you need to run the tape up and down the door, so that the tape is hidden when the door is closed. This moron ran it across the door, where a passing guard saw it, investigated, and blew the whole thing out of the water.
Michael Flynn held a series of phone conversations with the Russian Ambassador before Trump was sworn in. If in fact the content of the conversations was benign, there is nothing overtly illegal about this. But where Flynn “put the tape across the door” was in somehow or other being either too arrogant or too ignorant to realize that US intelligence services would have the Ambassadors phone tapped, and would have records.
With all of the similarities, there is one big difference between the two. Nixon was surrounded by a group of loyal, well experienced political operatives, almost all willing to fall on their swords to save the President. Trump is surrounded, by his own choice, with rank outsiders, with little or no political experience or expertise at the practical level, and he has done little to inspire trust or loyalty in them. If the screws are put to them, I just don’t see very many of them being willing to take the fall for the rich guy.
Now that we know that Trump himself was officially warned of this by the FBI two+ weeks ago, including the fact that Flynn had lied about the content of the calls, the heat will be on. Flynn was one of Trump’s earliest supporters, and a senior advisor. Was he in contact with the Russians in any way during the campaign itself, and if so, what was discussed? Who else was aware of the contacts. There is ample reason to speculate that there was contact, just see Rudy Giuliani sounding the alarm days before that there was a major bombshell coming just before the Wikileaks dump of Russian hacked DNC and Podesta e-mails.
Every successful scandal needs a snitch. In the case of Watergate, it turned out to be White House Counsel John Dean, who spilled the beans on Nixon in exchange for a reduced sentence for his own charges. Who will play the part of John Dean if Russiagate comes tumbling down around Trump’s ears.
I have my own favorite choice for a potential snitch if the wheels come off of this thing, which I’ll keep to myself for the moment. But, having lived through the national shame of Watergate 40+ years ago, I can tell you that this is exactly how it started, by a stupid mistake in an arrogant overreach of power that was totally unnecessary. We’ll see how it progresses, but with the bipartisan political animus against Russia, I just don’t see a way that Ryan and McConnell can keep a full and thorough investigation from being held. All of the gears are in place.