Almost Saturday Night

With news breaking in The New York Times that Donald Trump attempted to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller last June, the comparisons between Mueller’s investigation and Watergate became that much greater. It can be said that the nation narrowly missed a second “Saturday Night Massacre” when Trump’s White House Counsel, Don McGahn, threatened to resign instead of carrying out Trump’s order, and while that statement carries a patina of truth, what the superseding months have shown is a political landscape far different than the one Richard Nixon inhabited in October 1973.

As told in Leon Neyfakh’s mesmerizing podcast Slow Burn, the Saturday Night Massacre was directed at a person who almost seemed like a caricature of a Nixon antagonist. Archibald Cox was a member-in-good-standing of Nixon’s despised “east coast liberal elite” - a tweed-coat-and-bow-tie wearing Harvard Law School professor who had worked for Nixon’s 1960 election opponent, John F. Kennedy and gone on to serve in the Kennedy Administration as Solicitor General. Cox’s aides were young and liberal, but with a deeper enmity for Nixon and less respect for institutions than the World War II veteran they served. 

But here’s the thing - in light of Cox’s political leanings, looked at through the lens of our current political culture, that Nixon directing Cox’s firing (because the latter rejected the former’s faux-compromise on turning over tapes of conversations Nixon had surreptitiously made in the Oval Office) would be the tipping point that led to Nixon’s resignation, is surprising. And that is what makes Trump’s actions and those of his allies in Congress far more dangerous.

Nixon’s firing of a liberal prosecutor and former Kennedy aide drew bipartisan outrage and the swift appointment of a replacement, Leon Jaworksi, who would go on to lead the investigation through guilty pleas of many Nixon aides and the President’s resignation itself. Can we say with any confidence that the same would happen today? What is particularly striking is the fact that unlike Cox, whose political leanings could not have been less similar to Nixon’s, Mueller is a Republican, a career Department of Justice official appointed as FBI Director by President George W. Bush and as special prosecutor by another Republican, Rod Rosenstein, who had himself been appointed a U.S. Attorney by Bush, held over by Obama, and then picked as the number two in DOJ by Trump. 

Unlike Cox, Mueller’s team is not made up of wet-behind-the-ears young prosecutors just starting their careers. Rather, his are deeply experienced career DOJ attorneys who have prosecuted everyone from terrorists to Enron executives. And yet, Trump’s aides show no compunction about attacking Mueller and his team as rank partisans on a witch hunt against the President. Indeed, their efforts have been rewarded. While approval of Mueller hovers around 50 percent, it has fallen somewhere between 10 and 15 points (depending on the poll you read) as Trump’s allies have chiseled away at his credibility. 

We may have avoided a Saturday Night Massacre II last June, but the intervening months have allowed Trump and his allies to salt the earth beneath Mueller’s feet. Nixon’s downfall was due in large part to the release of tapes, the “smoking guns” that proved Nixon was actively involved in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in, among other things. Will the same be true of Trump? Will people accept the admissions he made about firing FBI Director James Comey to get rid of the Russia investigation as clear evidence of obstruction of justice? Are there emails and testimony of aides who flip on him that will show collusion or obstruction? And as importantly, will it matter? Or will it all be dismissed as “fake news” by Trump’s allies, whose media echo chamber on Fox News and elsewhere will provide the needed cover to protect him? It is impossible to know, but, like Watergate, it will not end well, regardless. 

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