You cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
So we have a Tuesday Night Massacre for our time. And for those of you who always wondered what it felt like to live through Watergate, welcome. That catch in the throat, that intake of breath that doesn’t go all the way through, that repeated sensation that the future of democracy in this country rests on the events not of an administration, nor a year, nor a month, but on those of the next few weeks—that’s what October 20, 1973, felt like. Richard Nixon had been able to get a new attorney general approved by the Democratic Senate only when that attorney general, Elliot Richardson, swore to name a special Watergate prosecutor. On Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon decided that prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had to be fired. The attorney general wouldn’t do it, and resigned. The deputy attorney general wouldn’t do it; Nixon fired him. The third man at the Justice Department, the solicitor general—he fired Cox.
When the sun rose that beautiful Saturday morning, Nixon may have had enough political capital, enough House and Senate support, enough public approval, to survive. When the sun rose the next morning, most of that was gone. Politically, he was a dead man walking. Because you cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
Republican Representatives Amash, Comstock of Virginia, Curbelo of Florida, and Senators Burr, Corker, Flake, and McCain had, by breakfast, made correct and patriotic responses to the crisis. Nevertheless, it may require still more evil from Trump to shake the remaining disloyal or disbelieving Republican political whores loose from the tree. But if the Comey firing doesn’t do it, Trump will provide that evil, and even the Republicans will abandon him. But will they abandon him in time? You cannot fire the man who is investigating you, because the next man will now also have to investigate you for that.
“Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men,” read the entirety of Archie Cox’s statement after Nixon fired him in 1973, “is now for Congress, and ultimately the American people.”
AN APPEAL TO THE WORLD’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
Post date • THURSDAY, MAY 11
I appeal to the intelligence agencies and the governments of what is left of the free world—to them as entities, entireties, as bureaucracies making official decisions, and to the individuals who make decisions of conscience, to GCHQ and MI6 in the UK, to the BND in Germany, the DGSE in France, the ASIS in Australia, and even to the GRU in Russia, where they must already be profoundly aware that they have not merely helped put an amoral cynic in power here, but an uncontrollable one, whose madness is genuine and whose usefulness even to them is over.
To all of them, and to the world’s journalists, I make this plea: We, the citizens of the United States of America, are the victims of a coup. We need your leaks, your information, your intelligence, your recordings, your videos, your conscience. The civilian government and the military of the United States of America are no longer in the hands of the people, nor in the control of any responsible individuals on whom you can rely. The first step toward compromising our FBI occurred Tuesday with the unilateral firing of its director by the president, prompted by the attorney general, both of whom are—or were, at least in theory, possibly to be—under investigation by the FBI as led by that director.
Our CIA is run by one of that president’s political appointees. The first national security adviser was fired and may have been a Russian stooge. The second national security adviser has reportedly been yelled at by the president because he had the temerity to disagree with him. Our State Department is in the hands of useless amateurs. Our United Nations mission is bereft of power and uninformed. And the White House is run by a cabal of an amoral family syndicate that has spent its first three months slapping a dollar sign on anything that stood still long enough. A cabal with, at its head, a man with seemingly no interest in our laws, in our rights, in our Constitution, and with a brain that appears to not work properly.
Through our own negligence, the resentments and stupidities of millions of us, and the boundless greed of our elite class, our democracy has all but slipped away from us. It hangs today by a thread, and those who could protect it and restore it and fight for it, even at this late date—the Republican politicians whose voices today could force Trump out of office tomorrow—they are all but silent. Owned by special interests and silenced by a power that exceeds even whatever dedication to freedom they once had, all but a few of them fall back into platitudes about the leader of the country firing the head of the FBI and precipitating a constitutional crisis in order to shut down the investigation of his possible high crimes and misdemeanors. Our majority party impotently wrings its hands about “timing” and how “troubled” they are, and then they go back to calculating how they will most easily get reelected—with whose money; by whose instructions.
We, the citizens of the United States of America, are the victims of a coup. For months we have heard that your organizations have damning evidence against Donald John Trump. Whatever evidence you may have, you cannot conceal it any longer. Whatever we in this country are to you now, wherever you are now, you know that this nation has been a savior to you at some point in the past, and that our stability and our freedom and a government controlling this country that is at least sane are your surest guarantees of a prosperous future—indeed, perhaps your surest guarantees of any future at all. Now: We. Need. Your. Help.
Whatever there is, on Trump: reveal it. Issue it officially if you can; leak it if you cannot. If your directors and your governments want you to wait, look to the last days here and ask yourselves—plumb your consciences—if there is any time left to wait. Give it to a reporter, give it to an American friend, put it on the internet, leave it outside somebody’s back door. There is no time left for protocols and estimations of long-term impacts and tradecraft.
A dictator-in-training has betrayed our Constitution, and nevertheless survived two nights in office. The dictatorship he may want—the dictatorship he may feel is the natural extension of his past life, the dictatorship he may believe he has earned—has gone, in this week, from crawling to taking its first few tentative steps. What you have, we need, and we need it now.
And to the intelligence community of this country: your patriotic duty is clear. In many respects, in the months since the election, you have provided your greatest service in our history. A democracy that has lost its political way staggers down the street like a drunk and lurches toward the gutter, yet you have walked a virtually bipartisan straight line, and have followed your rules, and the rules of the civilians—and yet the evildoers still exist, regardless.
The greatest threat to the freedoms of this nation that this nation has ever faced—the Trump administration—the Trump junta—is playing by no rules. They just offed the FBI director and let him find out about it by reading a TV news crawl in the back of the room in which he was addressing his Los Angeles office.
They have no rules. For now, the rest of us, who only want our democracy back, we can have no rules, either. We will take the risk of reestablishing the rules later. What you in the FBI, in the CIA, in the Justice Department have on Trump, we need now. Because by tomorrow it may disappear, and your ability to do anything with it may disappear as well. Some of us on the outside have tried the best we could to prevent this day, others less so—now it doesn’t matter who did how much, when. You, in the FBI, the CIA, the other intelligence agencies, the Justice Department—you must be the patriots now. You, in the “Five Eyes,” in the PSIA in Japan, in the outfits too secret to have their names known to us, you must become, for the moment, Americans. We need what you have, and we need it now, and we need it made public.
It is more than just the fate of this sloppy country that is at risk. For all our faults, for good or bad, we cannot be left as a fascist, rogue state and an enemy of freedom and international comity. The fate of all freedoms may rest in your hands and your willingness to not merely hint, but show what you know.
The freedom you save will be your own.
THE TRUMP-RUSSIA COVER-UP CASE
Post date • MONDAY, MAY 15
And so we conclude a week that began with the Trump-Russia scandal as a complicated, labyrinthine, bizarre international tangle of questions about computer hacking and money laundering and collusion, but ended with the Trump-Russia scandal as a simple, straightforward, traditional American, easy-to-digest set of questions about obstruction of justice and witness intimidation and presidential cover-ups. “Trump and Russia” is no longer about Trump and Russia. He could be as pure as the driven snow about Russia. He and he alone has made the Trump-and-Russia story about covering up the Trump-and-Russia story.
In articles of impeachment—and, if he leaves or is removed from office, perhaps in criminal prosecution afterwards—Trump could theoretically wind up being accused of eighteen separate counts of six separate crimes in just the past week.
Working backwards: Friday’s tweet—“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” That could be prosecuted as a blackmail threat to a private citizen. That tweet could be interpreted as intimidation of a possible witness in an official proceeding—18 U.S. Code 1512—which carries a sentence of up to twenty years. That’s two possible crimes in the Trump-Russia Cover-up.
Plus—the reference to “tapes”? In the District of Columbia, there’s nothing illegal about taping your own conversation. But as Richard Nixon learned, to his chagrin, a president doesn’t own the recording. If Trump destroys the recording—or can’t prove he was just lying in the tweet and it never existed—that could be a charge of destruction of government property. And the third of the three articles of impeachment against Nixon in 1974 was entirely about the president’s refusal to turn over secret White House tapes that Congress had subpoenaed. His handling of evidence—the tapes—was believed to fit the Constitution’s definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
So—one tweet—four possible charges.
The day before, Thursday the eleventh, came the New York Times report that Trump had brought Comey to the White House for dinner on January 27. That was when Trump reportedly asked if he was being investigated, and asked Comey for his loyalty. That loyalty pledge, Trump has only partly denied, and his adviser Kellyanne Conway has endorsed. As the Harvard professor and scholar of constitutional law Laurence Tribe noted, “That is clearly, on its face, obstruction of justice. What it really means is ‘Can I count on you not to make me a target of this investigation?’ That’s clearly an impermissible question.” So there’s a fifth potential charge: obstruction of justice in the possible investigation of Donald J. Trump.
But here’s a sixth. That dinner was the day after the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, first warned the White House that Michael Flynn had been compromised by Russia. So was Trump also trying to get Comey to obstruct justice for the sake of Flynn?
It’s more of a stretch, but here’s a seventh. Could Trump be charged with trying to get a threat or warning to Yates to lay off Flynn, via Comey? And a can of worms Trump opened that might be bigger even than whether or not he has recorded White House conversations. When the report came that he had reportedly asked Comey to, in essence, swear loyalty, another question bubbled up: Did Trump ask anybody else to do that? Each time he asked someone who may have been involved in the investigation, it could be another count of obstruction of justice. And, just as important—did anybody say yes? Because once somebody else says yes, you could then have a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Just one of each here charge, and there are already nine counts in the Trump-Russia Cover-up—just against Trump.
And we’re still not done with Thursday the eleventh.
Trump’s interview with NBC that evening, in which it almost seemed as if he had deliberately unraveled the stonewall defense his staff had used for forty-eight hours—insisting Comey’s firing had nothing to do with Russia, and happened only because the attorney general and the deputy attorney general recommended it: “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey . . . and in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.’” Not only could this be yet another obstruction-of-justice charge, our tenth charge of the Trump-Russia Cover-up, but you could go out on a limb and accuse anybody in Trump’s administration—Trump included—who advanced the claims that it was about Comey’s competence, or the Hillary Clinton emails, or the recommendations of others, of obstructing justice again if they knowingly lied about why Comey was fired, essentially obstructing justice about obstructing justice! So that’s an eleventh charge. And a conspiracy to do that—with Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Vice President Pence, and Trump all involved in that original story—conspiracy makes twelve.
Moving back to Wednesday, May 10, there’s a thirteenth possible charge. McClatchy news quoted White House sources who say that when Attorney General Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, went to see Trump two days earlier to complain about Comey, Trump had asked them to write the letter that he had originally cited as the cause for firing Comey. That’s now another possible tentacle of conspiracy in the Trump-Russia Cover-up Case: Trump asking the Department of Justice to give him a weapon with which to fire the head of the FBI.
The day before, Tuesday the ninth, had the most obvious of the possible charges, number fourteen: Comey’s firing itself. You can’t fire the criminal investigator investigating you for possible criminality, in the middle of his criminal investigation. It’s obstruction of justice, and, as a reminder, the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was a string of obstructions of justice. As Obama’s presidential ethics czar, Norm Eisen, tweeted, “Newly revealed demand for loyalty was the obstruction—firing was consummation of the threat.” Legally, the loyalty demand and the firing could be viewed as separate events.
But there’s still one more. On Monday the eighth, before her dramatic testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trump tweeted about the once acting attorney general. “Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel.” Well, we are back where we started: just like Friday with Comey, Monday with Yates, Trump may have violated Section 18 U.S. Code 1512—intimidating a witness in an official proceeding, and maybe intimidating a whistle-blower and a private citizen.
Seventeen possible charges, for Trump, in the theoretical articles of impeachment pertaining to the Trump-Russia Cover-up Case. There’s one each for possible destruction of government property and in the hypothetical, possible refusal to turn over subpoenaed evidence. Two for intimidating witnesses, two for threatening private citizens, two for threatening whistle-blowers, one for threatening the acting attorney general. Maybe two more for separate conspiracies to commit obstruction of justice. And perhaps seven for obstruction of justice.
It’s staggering, but it may still be burying the lede: As he started to compose his tweet about Sally Yates on the eighth, Trump faced terrifying and solemn accusations about Russia. But they were also complicated, confusing ones. Frankly, how many Americans know what Alfa-Bank is? How many might not be certain if Carter Page is a guy or a document? What can cause even well-informed citizens to check out faster than a bunch of Russians all named Sergey? Donald Trump has eliminated his own benefit of the confusion. The Trump-Russia Cover-up Case is now about threatening people and firing people and pressuring people to keep them from investigating you and your colleagues. The most immediate threat to his presidency is no longer about Russian smoke that not everybody can see and even fewer can trace. It is now about “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, ‘You know, this Russia thing . . .’” It is now about “Ask Sally Yates.” It is now about “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations.” The sm
oke doesn’t matter anymore.
Who needs Russian smoke, when the White House is on fire?
“SOME KIND OF PARANOID DELUSION”
Post date • TUESDAY, MAY 16
“Across Washington,” wrote Philip Rucker of The Washington Post, “Trump’s allies have been buzzing about the staff’s competence as well as the president’s state of mind. One GOP figure close to the White House mused privately about whether Trump was ‘in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.’”
Ya think?
What you and I have been not debating but quantifying—me for eighteen months—seems finally to have gotten through, even to the occasional Republican: Donald Trump is not well. “Some kind of paranoid delusion” is as good a placeholder as anything else. Trump could have a psychiatric condition. It could be physical. It could be an illness. It could be substance-related. It could be the long-term effects of concussions. This is apart from questions of good and evil. This is about whether the equipment works. “After President Trump accused his predecessor in March of wiretapping him,” wrote The New York Times, “James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, was flabbergasted. The president, Mr. Comey told associates, was ‘outside the realm of normal,’ even ‘crazy.’”
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 40