The Watergate burglary occurred on June 17, 1972. The now infamous phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky occurred on July 25, 2019. I want you to keep those two dates in mind as I compare the timeline of the two impeachment inquiries.
After the initial news that people had been arrested in the Democratic National Committee’s national headquarters with cameras and bugging equipment, the early investigation was carried out by the FBI and went on behind the scenes. The event had very little impact on the November 1972 election, which President Richard Nixon won in a landslide.
However, on September 29, 1972, the news broke that John Mitchell, while serving as attorney general, had been running an intelligence gathering operation against Democratic presidential contenders and that he had a secret source of funds set aside to finance this. This roughly parallels what we learned yesterday (October 15, 2019) about President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani receiving two wire transfers totaling $500,000, possibly from “an unidentified Russian businessman” to “gain influence with U.S. politicians and candidates.” We know that Giuliani was illegally seeking foreign assistance to help Trump’s reelection prospects.
The Watergate burglars were convicted on January 30, 1973, ten days after Nixon was re-inaugurated as president, but the story still wasn’t on most people’s radar. What really changed things was when burglar James McCord, a former CIA officer, informed Judge John Sirica on March 23, 1973 that perjury had been committed in his courtroom and that he and his co-defendants had been pressured to remain silent.
Technically, Congress had begun investigating before this. On February 7, 1973, the Senate voted 77-0 to create a select committee to investigate the burglary. But the now famous Senate Watergate hearings did not begin until May 17, 1973. The Senate hearings were not an impeachment inquiry. Only the House of Representatives can use the power of impeachment.
The next really significant date in the Watergate saga came on October 20, 1973, the day of the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” when Nixon accepted the resignations of his attorney general and deputy attorney general, and fired special special prosecutor Archibald Cox. There was still no formal impeachment inquiry in the House.
As for the public, for the first time since the burglary 16 months before, a poll found a plurality supportive of impeachment. Yet, it would be another nine months before the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve its first article of impeachment on July 27, 1974.
Today, less than three months after the president’s phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, there is not only a plurality but a majority for both impeachment and removal.
The formal impeachment inquiry of Richard Nixon began on February 6, 1974, when the House of Representatives voted to authorize the Judiciary Committee to explore possible impeachable offenses. Between July 27, 1974 and July 30, 1974, the committee recommended three articles, including obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.
The end came shortly thereafter. On August 5, 1974, the White House release the Smoking Gun recording of the initial coverup in the White House. On August 7, 1974, Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott informed Nixon that he would be convicted and removed from office if he attempted to go to trial in the Senate. On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced he would resign at noon on August 9, which he did.
From start to finish, the Watergate saga took two years and two months. The congressional investigation, which began in the Senate, lasted a year and a half. Yet, only the last six months involved anything we might call a “formal” impeachment inquiry.
Remember all this when you hear your wingnut relatives and coworkers complain that Nancy Pelosi hasn’t held a vote to open a formal inquiry into Trump’s impeachment. By my math, she still has about fifteen months before she’ll be behind schedule on making this thing formal.
This scandal is unfolding much faster than Watergate in part because we already have the Smoking Gun in the form of the White House’s own informal transcript of the telephone call. But there is no requirement that the House make anything formal. By the time the House had done that in the Watergate case, all the iconic things people remember about that time, like John Dean’s testimony or the Saturday massacre, had already occurred many months prior.
What we really want to know if there are still people like Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott serving in the U.S. Senate who will put the country out of its misery and spare us a trial.
Great context, thanks.
Here’s more: The Feb. 6, 1974 House to vote open an impeachment inquiry was 410-4. HJC chairman Peter Rodino said on that occasion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Richard_Nixon#Impeachment_inquiry_staff_develops_the_case
It’s hard to imagine Kevin McCarthy making a similar statement today. (It’s also hard to imagine 40% of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voting for impeachment.)
Richard Nixon was Machiavellian but not mentally ill. Nixon was able to hold it together as the slow moving process ground on, while Der Trumper is already melting down completely. This is perhaps because the process is indeed moving faster in 2019 than 1973, as you conclusively demonstrate. Or perhaps it is because Nixon was merely a criminal politician, whereas Der Trumper, like Herr Hitler in 1933, is a political criminal–an actual criminal who went into politics. Hitler, of course, focused on obtaining political power for over a decade, whereas our poor-man’s Fuhrer is a political parvenu, who ran for prez almost as a lark. Obviously both men had extreme grandiosity and hatred as their driving energies.
As you noted the other day, Trumper’s Syrian Gambit has opened him up for possible political destruction—it was a colossal blunder, both politically and strategically. It has isolated him and cornered him, and for an essentially mentally weak and insecure man with grandiose views of his “powers”, this is psychologically disastrous. The unbelievable meeting with Pelosi and other members of Congress last evening shows Trumper has moved into clear and present danger status, which was never the case with Nixon—who still had some non-sycophants in the room.
After being bamboozled by Erdogan, and now humiliated over the absurd Dear Tayip letter, Trumper is primed to lash out with the military to “re-establish” his imagined dominance. A mentally ill American prez is not in the world’s best interest, and Pelosi would be well advised to move the process along as quickly as possible–there’s already too much evidence, and those demanding “more” are either acting in bad faith or would deny the Holocaust occurred if their paycheck depended on it.
So it’s all up to the Repub party at this point, just as in 1974. Unfortunately the “conservative” movement has done everything it could over the past 30 years to create a politically irresponsible, quasi-criminal organization as the dominant party in the nation, while irreversibly poisoning the minds of at least 40% of the country via the plutocrat-created Rightwing Noise Machine. So we are long past the political, cultural and institutional ethos of the Golden Age of Democracy (1960-80), wherein a criminal (Repub) prez could be dealt with via constitutional measures. Let’s just say that this looming catastrophe is the logical endpoint of the authoritarian, anti-democratic and anti-constitutional “conservative” movement. Trumper’s Meltdown will not end well, either domestically or globally.