Remember when?
PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the — let it hang out, so to speak?
DEAN: Well, it's, it isn't really that —
HALDEMAN: It's a limited hang out.
DEAN: It's a limited hang out.
EHRLICHMAN: It's a modified limited hang out.
PRESIDENT: Well, it's only the questions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.
Devin Nunes, in his stupendously bumbling fashion, is helping the White House Gang to rip a page from Watergate: the modified limited hangout. Nunes misleads; the Gang corroborates the misleading information by voluntarily meeting with the Select Committee (not under oath); Trump declares the matter settled. Just like Watergate:
...the discussion captures Nixon outlining to Dean the content of a report that Dean would create, laying out a misleading view of the role of the White House staff in events surrounding the Watergate burglary. In Ehrlichman's words: "And the report says, 'Nobody was involved,'". The document would then be shared with the United States Senate Watergate Committee investigating the affair. The report would serve the administration's goals by protecting the President, providing documentary support for his false statements should information come to light that contradicted his stated position. Further, the group discusses having information on the report leaked by those on the Committee sympathetic to the President, to put exculpatory information into the public sphere.
Nixon’s Gang actually was fairly effective in employing the strategy. Without the White House tapes, they even might have pulled it off. These guys? I don’t think so. For starters, Devin Nunes is no John Dean, and Dean is still around to point it out. Then, Trump is no Nixon — he hasn’t the attention span, let alone the political skills, to hangout. Finally, Haldeman, Erlichmann, Mitchell and Dean were all on the same page. I suspect the only thing Kushner and Bannon have in common is Don J Trump. If Nunes ends up talking to the FBI — and with today’s news, I think that’s even odds — things will get very interesting, and very quickly.