President Donald Trump’s astonishing firing of FBI director
James Comey raised throughout Washington the inevitable
question: Is this Watergate?
While Watergate was sui generis and is
likely to remain so, Trump’s metastasizing crisis, and Washington’s reaction to
it, make for a discomfiting reminder of that period, reported Politico Magazine. And suddenly it seems
increasingly possible it could end the same way.
As it did during Watergate, in the spreading Trump scandal,
all of Washington fixates on the latest development, virtually to the exclusion
of what had preoccupied five minutes earlier.
Thus the firing of Comey, for the
moment at least, displaced the city’s and the national media’s obsession since
as long as the day before with the question of it took so long for Trump to
fire Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, after the acting
attorney general at the time, Sally Yates, informed the White House counsel
that Flynn had been compromised by Russia.
As the stunning news of Comey’s firing spread through
Washington on Tuesday evening, the reactions were similar to those when a
previous president fired his chief investigator: astonishment, a kind of
ghoulish humor, plus deep unease at a president behaving so far outside of
traditional norms. The fear that permeated the Washington atmosphere during
Watergate hasn’t quite developed, but some of the elements of the story—in
particular, a vindictive president seeming out of control—are in place for that
to happen as well.
Like Richard Nixon, Trump has a propensity for ridding
himself of those who presented a threat to him. Nixon’s elimination of special
prosecutor Archibald Cox, even if he had to fire a couple of attorneys general
until he got to a Justice Department official, Robert Bork, who would carry out
the deed, was the point at which the word “impeachment” began to be on people’s
lips. Until then the idea was too outsized and even alarming to consider.
No
president had ever been removed from office by the constitutionally designated
congressional act of impeaching (the House) and convicting (the Senate) a
president. Cox was demanding that Nixon turn over the
tape recordings of his Oval Office conversations, which Nixon was – understandingly,
as it turned out – of no mind to do. Comey was seeking information possibly at
least as damning, and perhaps worse. We can get too used to a question until it
returns in full force: What if the president, or his close associates, colluded
with a hostile foreign power to win the office?
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