Two separate warnings this morning, from former US attorney Preet Bharara on NPR (doing a book promotion) and Georgetown Law professor and former OLC staffer Martin Lederman in Washington Post (cited in Raw Story): Mueller's report, to the extent there is one, is not going to contain a nicely wrapped case for the indictment of Donald Trump for crimes committed in the collaboration with Russian agents in the 2016 election.
For more than one reason, but the main thing is that it isn't in their remit to do such a thing, given the Justice Department ruling that a sitting president isn't supposed to be indicted, as Lederman concludes:
I guess I'm beginning to understand how unlikely it is that our story is going to have any kind of clean ending, where the public gasps, "OMG he did that?" and the president just has to leave.
Though when you come think of it, I don't believe the wider public ever had a perfectly clear picture of what Nixon had done, either—of the massive campaign against activists and hippies and journalists, the illegal wiretapping of government officials starting in 1969, the funding of CREEP by shakedown—
I can lay out this picture easily now, because people have conveniently written it up for me in pretty compact form (my source seems to be Glasgow-based Spike Media in fact), but I doubt many could have laid it out then. I certainly wouldn't have been able to, though I spent a lot of mornings at the radio station when the hearings were being broadcast.
Nevertheless, people did eventually get something, and they did it quickly, as you can see from this Pew chart I just found, showing not just Nixon's job approval ratings, which we've looked at before, but also the public's willingness to impeach:
As you see, the approval rating began to plunge immediately from its second-term inauguration high with the convictions of Liddy and McCord and the other Watergate burglars on 30 January 1973 to the opening of the Senate hearing on 18 May, but hardly anybody was interested in seeing him impeached until around 13 July, when Alexander Butterfield announced the existence of the secret White House taping system—Lordy, there were tapes!—and the first time a majority favored impeachment was immediately after 24 July 1974, when Nixon lost his battle with the Supreme Court and had to turn the tapes over to the special prosecutor's office. A couple of weeks later he had resigned.
When they say that it's not the crime, it's the coverup, that's what they mean: not that coverups are more reprehensible than crimes, but rather more comprehensible, as it were. Americans didn't know what Nixon was hiding. but they realized over the course of that year from summer '73 to summer '74 that he was damn sure hiding something big, and the moment a majority got to that point was pretty much the moment the Republican senators decided to dump him.
Right now it's really hard to see where Trump gets thrown out of office. It's not necessarily about a coverup at all, this time (we've known a lot about his covering up for quite a while now, and the most recent number I'm finding on support for impeachment, from a PPP poll in January, is 46% for to 44% against, which is certainly by quite a bit the highest it's been, and about where Nixon was around the time he released the first, heavily edited, tape transcripts in April 1974). I'd like to see public opinion coalesce around the sense the general criminality of the Trump gang as public knowledge of that expands through the crookedness and self-dealing character of the Trump Foundation and the inauguration funding, and the stories of grift on the parts of Trump's Christian attorney Jay Sekulow and GOP fundraiser/Playmate-payer Elliott Broidy and the story emerging today of Trump's remarkable relationship with Deutsche Bank, which kept making him the most enormous loans for years after he first crapped on them in 2004 through suing them and blatantly lying to them about his net worth—even as the very same bank became the Russian oligarchs' European money launderer of choice. It's more likely to be the House Judiciary Committee than the Mueller investigation that gets the attention (the White House has emulated Nixon's last desperate act in refusing to comply with Nadler's request for documents, while tens of thousands of documents are being delivered by other sources). I'm absolutely not giving up yet.
For more than one reason, but the main thing is that it isn't in their remit to do such a thing, given the Justice Department ruling that a sitting president isn't supposed to be indicted, as Lederman concludes:
it would be surprising if it included any express conclusions about whether Trump’s conduct did or did not satisfy the elements of any particular criminal offenses. As long as Trump is in office, it will be up to the committees themselves — and Congress as a whole — to (in the words of the Jaworski road map) “determine what action may be warranted . . . by [the] evidence” presented in Barr’s notification.That's probably too categorical; they could signal an opinion on his chargeability in indictments of other people, as an unindicted co-conspirator, as they've already done in regard to Michael Cohen and the Paramour Payoffs (can't decide whether that's the first novel in my detective series featuring a troubled metropolitan lawyer or a band name). But that will be ancillary to what I do hope will be an indictment of Donald Junior, if anything. I still believe he would be indicted in a case where his guilt was transparently unarguable—if he really killed that guy on Fifth Avenue—but this isn't one of those cases. The language in which he agreed to the basic bargain of Russia's assistance with the Moscow hotel and US election projects, if Mueller has it (and we know what he has from Cohen, not too damn much, and we know Manafort and Junior have said little and nothing respectively) will be couched in code, like all those mobster communications, and the way he tried to live up to his end by removing sanctions obscured inside a web of plausible deniability, opinions from foreign policy advisers and lawyers that he's entitled to do what he wants so he can argue he was just doing what he was told.
I guess I'm beginning to understand how unlikely it is that our story is going to have any kind of clean ending, where the public gasps, "OMG he did that?" and the president just has to leave.
Though when you come think of it, I don't believe the wider public ever had a perfectly clear picture of what Nixon had done, either—of the massive campaign against activists and hippies and journalists, the illegal wiretapping of government officials starting in 1969, the funding of CREEP by shakedown—
Nixon officials extorted money from businesses, corporate officers, and wealthy individuals through the threat of IRS audits. The extortion efforts resulted in the campaign receiving donations in cash, often arriving at the offices of the CRP in bags. The Nixon administration during its first term responded to donations with quid pro quo, easing regulations for donors through the use of waivers for specific areas, or calling off previously established investigations or legal actions.—not to mention Haldeman's slush fund for congressional candidates (including the unreported $106,000 for George H.W. Bush, in his losing Senate campaign as what Nixon cheerfully called "…a total Nixon man. He’ll do anything for the cause"). They took $2 million from the Associated Milk Producers Inc. consortium in return for $100 million in milk subsidies. They took $400,000 from the IT&T telephone monopoly to drop an antitrust lawsuit as part of a complicated deal with the city of San Diego to stage the 1972 Republican convention there. (And don't get me started on the treason of the October Surprise deal with the South Vietnamese government in 1968 and the war crimes of the secret Cambodia bombing, neither of which played a role in the Watergate matter.) It was not a "third-rate burglary" but an organized crime syndicate principally aimed at keeping its capo di tutti capi in the White House.
I can lay out this picture easily now, because people have conveniently written it up for me in pretty compact form (my source seems to be Glasgow-based Spike Media in fact), but I doubt many could have laid it out then. I certainly wouldn't have been able to, though I spent a lot of mornings at the radio station when the hearings were being broadcast.
Nevertheless, people did eventually get something, and they did it quickly, as you can see from this Pew chart I just found, showing not just Nixon's job approval ratings, which we've looked at before, but also the public's willingness to impeach:
As you see, the approval rating began to plunge immediately from its second-term inauguration high with the convictions of Liddy and McCord and the other Watergate burglars on 30 January 1973 to the opening of the Senate hearing on 18 May, but hardly anybody was interested in seeing him impeached until around 13 July, when Alexander Butterfield announced the existence of the secret White House taping system—Lordy, there were tapes!—and the first time a majority favored impeachment was immediately after 24 July 1974, when Nixon lost his battle with the Supreme Court and had to turn the tapes over to the special prosecutor's office. A couple of weeks later he had resigned.
When they say that it's not the crime, it's the coverup, that's what they mean: not that coverups are more reprehensible than crimes, but rather more comprehensible, as it were. Americans didn't know what Nixon was hiding. but they realized over the course of that year from summer '73 to summer '74 that he was damn sure hiding something big, and the moment a majority got to that point was pretty much the moment the Republican senators decided to dump him.
Right now it's really hard to see where Trump gets thrown out of office. It's not necessarily about a coverup at all, this time (we've known a lot about his covering up for quite a while now, and the most recent number I'm finding on support for impeachment, from a PPP poll in January, is 46% for to 44% against, which is certainly by quite a bit the highest it's been, and about where Nixon was around the time he released the first, heavily edited, tape transcripts in April 1974). I'd like to see public opinion coalesce around the sense the general criminality of the Trump gang as public knowledge of that expands through the crookedness and self-dealing character of the Trump Foundation and the inauguration funding, and the stories of grift on the parts of Trump's Christian attorney Jay Sekulow and GOP fundraiser/Playmate-payer Elliott Broidy and the story emerging today of Trump's remarkable relationship with Deutsche Bank, which kept making him the most enormous loans for years after he first crapped on them in 2004 through suing them and blatantly lying to them about his net worth—even as the very same bank became the Russian oligarchs' European money launderer of choice. It's more likely to be the House Judiciary Committee than the Mueller investigation that gets the attention (the White House has emulated Nixon's last desperate act in refusing to comply with Nadler's request for documents, while tens of thousands of documents are being delivered by other sources). I'm absolutely not giving up yet.
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