On Friday, April 27, 1973, a dozen armed FBI agents left their headquarters in the Old Post Office building — today a gilded Trump hotel — and marched up Pennsylvania Avenue. Waving their badges, they walked into the White House.
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Caught in the web of Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon returned from Camp David and found a skinny young FBI man standing at attention down the hall from the Oval Office. Screaming in rage, he grabbed the agent by the lapels. “What the hell is this?” he shouted.
It was the rule of law challenging the power of the commander in chief—and the beginning of the end for Nixon. He knew that he was doomed. Within a year, the president would be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an iron-clad criminal case. His impeachment inevitable, he resigned the presidency in the summer of 1974.
We now stand on the verge of the same kind of confrontation.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, backed by the full force of the FBI, has one foot inside the White House. He will have another if President Donald Trump makes good on his promise to talk with Mueller in a matter of weeks, a pledge the president made on Wednesday to the evident horror of his lawyers.
Trump tried to fight back last summer. He wanted to fire Mueller, as he had fired FBI Director James Comey.
...
Any rookie prosecutor could have brought that case to court. And Bob Mueller is no rookie.
Trump wants to go to war with Mueller? A man who faced down George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to protect the Constitution from becoming a casualty in the war on terror, a Marine veteran with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star? Trump wants to attack the Justice Department and the FBI when he and his administration are the focus of the most politically charged criminal investigation in half a century?
These would be suicide missions. Ever since Nixon, no president has won a face-to-face battle with the FBI or a special counsel investigating the White House. And Richard Nixon, for all his deviousness and duplicity, was an infinitely more sophisticated political operator than Donald Trump.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...to-fight-the-fbi-its-a-suicide-mission-216533
...
Caught in the web of Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon returned from Camp David and found a skinny young FBI man standing at attention down the hall from the Oval Office. Screaming in rage, he grabbed the agent by the lapels. “What the hell is this?” he shouted.
It was the rule of law challenging the power of the commander in chief—and the beginning of the end for Nixon. He knew that he was doomed. Within a year, the president would be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an iron-clad criminal case. His impeachment inevitable, he resigned the presidency in the summer of 1974.
We now stand on the verge of the same kind of confrontation.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, backed by the full force of the FBI, has one foot inside the White House. He will have another if President Donald Trump makes good on his promise to talk with Mueller in a matter of weeks, a pledge the president made on Wednesday to the evident horror of his lawyers.
Trump tried to fight back last summer. He wanted to fire Mueller, as he had fired FBI Director James Comey.
...
Any rookie prosecutor could have brought that case to court. And Bob Mueller is no rookie.
Trump wants to go to war with Mueller? A man who faced down George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to protect the Constitution from becoming a casualty in the war on terror, a Marine veteran with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star? Trump wants to attack the Justice Department and the FBI when he and his administration are the focus of the most politically charged criminal investigation in half a century?
These would be suicide missions. Ever since Nixon, no president has won a face-to-face battle with the FBI or a special counsel investigating the White House. And Richard Nixon, for all his deviousness and duplicity, was an infinitely more sophisticated political operator than Donald Trump.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...to-fight-the-fbi-its-a-suicide-mission-216533
