Slow Burn - Season Two

There was a time in our nation not too long ago when things were humming along so well that we wasted months of our lives obsessing over the sexual peccadilloes of our President. In Season Two of Slow Burn, Leon Neyfakh examines the scandal that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. For the first seven of the season’s eight episodes, Neyfakh brings the same attention to detail, deft storytelling, and addictiveness that made his retelling of Watergate so enjoyable, but the season finale turns the entire story on its head by making the case that Clinton was a rapist who got away with it. It is an editorial decision I am sure Neyfakh defends, but it taints the entire product. 

For those old enough to remember the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Neyfakh is quick to remind us that the affair was the culmination of years of Republican attacks on Clinton that predated his election but became louder and more aggressive once he took office. There is, for example, the shameful display of partisan outrage after the tragic suicide of Vince Foster and the naivete of White House lawyers trying to be respectful of the man’s death twisted into something mendacious and secretive. 

Early episodes focus on how the sometimes clumsy handling of things like personnel decisions were perverted into the “-gate” du jour for scandal mongering conservatives whose antipathy for Clinton only rose the longer he was in office. Of course, the Clintons exacerbated the problem by digging in their heels as the investigate state that arose around them kept probing more deeply into their conduct. It was the quintessential “whiff of scandal” that rarely bore fruit but made them look like they had something to hide and followed them all the way to Hillary’s 2016 run for President. 

As the season unfolds, the modern day connections, not just in the “cloud of suspicion” framing the media came to use about everything involving the Clintons, but the more direct links between Clinton-Starr and Trump-Mueller come into sharper focus. Where Trump rails about a prosecutorial witch hunt, Neyfakh shows what one actually looks like, how the disparate threads of a far-flung Arkansas real estate deal, the allegations of a young state employee, and a handful of Arkansas State Troopers lingered long enough so that when Clinton did give his enemies the ammunition they needed to take him down, the foundation had already been laid. When you hear Rudy Giuliani talk about a “perjury trap,” the Paul Jones lawyers actually set one for Clinton. Unbeknownst to him, they had the goods on his affair with Lewinsky and his lawyerly parsing of their definition of “sex,” among other actions, was the seed corn what would ultimately become a bill of particulars for his impeachment. 

There is no question Clinton’s behavior was sleazy and gross but what comes across even stronger is how much Clinton’s foes overreached in trying to convert his awful personal decisions into a vehicle to topple his Presidency. They missed, to borrow from the law, the fact that people saw the allegations against Clinton as what we would call “fruit of the poisonous tree.” That is, having decided that the initial “crime” - consensual sexual conduct - was not worthy of a multi-million-dollar investigation, much less the removal of a popular President from office, voters saw everything that flowed from it as illegitimate. Unlike Watergate, where the phrase “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” was born, here, the cover-up was viewed as an understandable attempt to conceal an affair, not an impeachable offense separate and apart from the underlying conduct. Put differently, as Neyfakh wisely observes, Nixon was brought down because he used the power of the presidency corruptly, whereas Clinton’s failings were ones any person could fall victim to. 

Like its predecessor, Season Two of Slow Burn is a fully-formed eight-episode arc, but also provides stand out, stand alone episodes. The most difficult (and rewarding) of which is the fifth, entitled Tell All. It focuses primarily on Linda Tripp, a name many of us had erased from our memory hoping to never hear from again, but here she is, 20 years later, still as hopping mad at the Clintons as she was then, a Judas who was recognized for what she was at the time back to try and correct the record in the most hypocritical and histrionic of ways (she claims to have feared that the Clintons were going to have her killed, no joke). 

Tripp trots out her well-worn protestation of innocence, of merely trying to act as a sort of protective mother to Monica Lewinsky when every one of her actions at the time suggest precisely the opposite. It is not just the tape recording of their phone calls, it was the willful efforts to get Lewinsky to retrace the entire story in order to create incriminating evidence that could be used against Clinton. Moreover, Tripp’s rumination on Lewinsky as a naive young woman being taken advantage of by Clinton also runs counter to her own behavior - not the least of which was encouraging Lewinsky to preserve the now infamous blue dress knowing Clinton’s semen was on it in order to maintain its evidentiary value and, after each was issued a subpoena by Jones’s lawyers, recording conversations where Lewinsky does not even suspect it was Tripp who got the ball rolling with the Jones team. 

In fact, for those who thought Hillary’s riff on a vast right-wing conspiracy was hyperbolic, Neyfakh essentially exposes it at its creation. Tripp knew Tony Snow, a George HW Bush speechwriter, who put her in touch with a publicist named Lucianne Goldberg (whose son Jonah has made a nice career for himself in the same fever swamps as his mom), and Goldberg’s contacts with some outside attorneys assisting Paula Jones (including Kellyanne Conway’s now-husband and a a then-little known attorney named Ann Coulter) tipped Starr’s team to the whole story. 

All of which culminated in the pornographic work product Starr’s team produced. The Starr Report became a national sensation and a shame walk at the same time. Starr exposed all of Clinton’s dirty laundry in excruciating, prurient detail while readers would be excused if they missed any comment on the supposed scandals - Whitewater, Travelgate, etc. - that spurred the hiring of Starr’s predecessor, Robert Fiske in the first place. In fact, as Neyfakh notes, Whitewater is mentioned just four times in a report that clocks in at nearly 500 pages.

But just when you think you know how the story ends, Neyfakh throws a massive curveball in the season’s final episode. Instead of focusing on what was a preordained outcome - impeachment by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives followed by acquittal in the Republican-controlled Senate (a two-thirds majority was needed for conviction which everyone understood was never going to happen), Neyfakh takes the controversial tack of spending nearly the entire fifty-minute finale on Juanita Broaddrick’s rape allegation against Clinton. It is an unseemly choice for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that Neyfakh buries much of the evidence discounting Broaddrick’s claim under a largely sympathetic framing of her story. 

It is fair to assume that but for the #MeToo movement, it is unlikely Broaddrick’s allegations would have been given this much attention, but while I understand Neyfakh’s inclination to include her claim, in doing so, he throws out a very serious charge - rape - with the same “cloud of suspicion” reporting that suffuses much of what has done with Bill and Hillary Clinton for the past 25 years. Indeed, Peter Baker, one of the reporters Neyfakh interviewed, puts his finger on the issue. He notes that with Bill Clinton, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction, but he fails to take that important observation to its logical conclusion. 

In their zeal to tar Clinton, Republicans blurred the two, and in their zeal to show they were not the “liberal media,” reporters did the same thing. NBC reporter Lisa Myers huffs that her interview with Broaddrick was initially kiboshed, but was it responsible to air such an extreme allegation without much support? Broaddrick’s claim was literally a footnote in the Starr Report and although she was interviewed by the FBI, nothing ever came of it. Even if you agree that victims should be heard (and I do), the contradictions in her story, her association with right-wing activists (not to mention Donald Trump in 2016), and her own attempts to enrich herself cast far more doubt on the validity of her story than, to take a contemporary example, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. 

And in elevating a rape allegation into the centerpiece of that final episode, Neyfakh reorients the entire story away from the consensual affair Clinton and Lewinsky engaged in to one that has a far more sinister tone without the evidence to back it up. Because of this, the story as we understand it becomes secondary, almost illusory. Lewinsky, the only character for whom sympathy is owed, is an after thought even though she became a national joke who spent the next 20 years carrying the burden of shame. 

Not only is Neyfakh’s decision to air Broaddrick’s claims a significant editorial decision, it had the side effect of exposing another shortcoming. Although the second season’s episodes were roughly a third longer than the first season’s, I do not know that the extra time was used judiciously. There was a bigger story to tell, one that began, and was traced well by Matt Bai in his spectacular book All The Truth Is Out about the tabloidization of political reporting that began with Gary Hart in 1988 and reached its apotheosis ten years later during the Lewinsky scandal. The shirking of journalistic standards in service of scoops and the rise of right-wing media outlets willing to air both fact and fiction is as much this story as whether Clinton’s actions, before or during his time in office, warranted his removal therefrom. 

Because of this, what also remains elusive is the true motivation of Clinton’s enemies. It cannot simply be his supposedly “liberal” policies, because Clinton was not a particularly liberal President. He modestly raised taxes on the wealthy, but he was also fiscally prudent and grew the federal government far less than the Republicans’ patron saint, Ronald Reagan. If, in the end, it was as those of us who lived through this time suspect, that the right deemed him morally unfit to hold that office, their blind allegiance to the current occupant is all the more curious.

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy 

Slow Burn

Watergate. The mere name conjures a time in our country’s history when the rule of law was challenged in ways we would hope would never happen again. And yet, its relevance is greater than ever, and thankfully, Leon Neyfakh’s hypnotic, addictive eight-episode podcast Slow Burn not only takes us back to that time when it seemed like our nation teetered on the precipice of collapsing, but forces us to consider what might happen if history repeats itself. 

Neyfakh is not content to simply convert All The President’s Men into podcast form. In fact, his goal, at least in the first few episodes, is to sniff around the lesser-known angles or those simply lost to history. And so we start with the curious case of Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s first Attorney General and the weekend she was essentially kidnapped and held against her will in order to quell any risk that she might go public with what she knew, almost in real time, about the break-in. There is also Congressman Wright Patman, a Democrat who was onto Watergate early on, only to be kneecapped by a coalition of Republicans and some of his fellow Democrats, who put a quick end to his investigation. 

There is value in understanding these stories because it forces us to reconsider the accepted narrative that essentially boils down to two dogged reporters from the Washington Post working sources and breaking front-page news that inevitably led to Nixon’s downfall. And while there is truth to that (although, interestingly, Woodward and Bernstein are barely mentioned in the season’s eight episodes), the effort Neyfakh put in, through interviews, research, and writing, gives the story greater resonance. Whether pulling clips of then-RNC Chairman George H.W. Bush inveighing against Nixon’s antagonists in late 1973 (“let the man do the job”) or Nixon’s maudlin and rambling April 1974 address to the nation as he desperately clung to power, it is clear there is much more to the story than Deep Throat leaks in parking lots and the “missing” seventeen-minute tape. 

Slow Burn operates on two levels - it tells the story of Watergate, but its subtext could not be more clear, the (potential) parallel between Nixon’s downfall and the current investigation into President Trump, his aides, and the 2016 campaign.

For those who think today’s reporters spend too much time fetishizing Trump’s die hard voters, consider the episode True Believers, where we learn that the same thing was being done 45 years ago, when the bar flies and blue collar Democrats of Queens who supported Nixon did so because they feared societal changes reflected in the anti-war, women’s rights, and civil rights movements. They did not much care whether Nixon was guilty of any crimes (a vague whiff of “fake news” permeated their thinking) so long as he pushed back against the cultural changes they hated. Their attitude echoes forward today, where the xenophobia and racism of Trump’s “white working class” voters in the midwest is channeled through Trump’s demands for a border wall, criticism of NFL players, and wink-and-a-nod at white supremacists in Charlottesville. Indeed, stoking these racial prejudices was at the core of Nixon’s political strategy long before Trump appropriated it for his own gain. 

Or take Rabbit Holes, which focuses on the proliferation of conspiracy theories during the Watergate-era. On the one hand, that this happened is unsurprising. As Neyfakh points out, Watergate was a conspiracy, and so, its existence allowed for a cottage industry to sprout where a plane crash that killed one of the Watergate burglar’s wives (Dorothy Hunt) who had $10,000 in cash on her when the plane went down, was believed to be an assassination because she had information that could have harmed the President. Mae Brussell, who is the focus of much of Rabbit Holes was, in her way, the Alex Jones of her day. On her syndicated radio show, she mused about the imminent revocation of the Constitution and the military’s use of dune buggies (don’t ask) as signs of a pending coup d’etat. Her 18,000 word manifesto, which spun out her various theories on shadowy figures controlling our government, was published during the heart of Watergate, and would not be unfamiliar to modern day Americans who think FEMA is herding people into concentration camps or Obama is a secret Muslim. 

Slow Burn picks up speed as the inevitable denouement comes into focus. Saturday Night is a thriller in miniature, detailing the frenetic 36 hours that led to Nixon’s firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignation of Nixon’s Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, who refused to carry out his order. The episode is made better by interviews with the Special Prosecutor’s staff reminiscing about a mad dash back to the office as word broke of their boss’s firing to ensure the evidence they had gathered would not be taken and the excavation of newscasts at the time, reporters at a loss for words and fearing for the future of the country. Listening to Saturday Night you can feel how close we came to a true constitutional crisis, but in pondering that near escape, you inevitably wonder, if something like that happened today, would we survive? 

Of course, the comparisons to the Trump/Russia investigation are inevitable, but the distinctions are, in some ways, as important as the similarities. As Neyfakh discusses, the original Watergate Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was almost a caricature of everything Nixon stood against - an east coast elitist (Harvard Law professor) who had served as Kennedy’s Solicitor General. His staff was full of young liberals who despised Nixon and wanted to see him taken down. Now compare Cox with Robert Mueller III, the man investigating Trump - Mueller, unlike Cox, is a member of the same party as the President, with “law and order” bona fides that stretch back decades. His team is made up of deeply-experienced career Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents, yet Trump is attacking Mueller and his team as rank partisans whose bias is disqualifiying. While Nixon did ultimately fire Cox, he did most of his fighting before that fateful weekend in the courts, not in the court of public opinion. That Nixon did not fully appreciate how badly he misjudged his action may be what is keeping Trump from doing the same. 

It is also important to consider that Nixon did not have what Trump has - a right-wing echo chamber that functions on a daily basis to undermine the investigation. While both men had/have die hard supporters who either refuse to believe the allegations or do not care if they are true, the fracturing of news media today is a benefit Nixon could not take advantage of. And perhaps most importantly, Nixon was faced with a Democratic Congress, which exercised its investigative prerogatives in ways that the Republicans who run Congress today, refuse to do. 

The essential thesis of Slow Burn is that Nixon’s resignation was not foretold and, in real time, the idea Nixon would quit the Presidency at the pain of impeachment and removal, was farfetched. It may be true that if Trump follows a similar path, we will look back the same way. Sitting here today, there seems like a lot of smoke around Trump, but as he chisels away at the credibility of Mueller’s work, a hurried resignation seems like a pipe dream as Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill lay the foundation for dismissing the results of Mueller’s work as partisan and biased. Of course, as Neyfakh shows, this same strategy was being deployed by Nixon, but ultimately, when the proof became incontrovertible, Nixon fell on his sword. I am not as confident Trump will do the same. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy 

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. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy