![]() In late January, White House counsel Don McGahn was warned by Sally Yates, then acting attorney general, that Flynn had lied to the FBI about those conversations. (Nixon, of course, knew at the time that both staffers were key figures in the events leading up to the Watergate break-in, which Nixon had orchestrated.)įast-forward to January and February 2017, when the White House was alerted to Flynn’s legal exposure stemming from conversations he had during the presidential transition period with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The president called his staffers “fine, upstanding guys,” according to Petersen, and said he didn’t think he should fire them. “He said he couldn’t believe it,” Petersen testified to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, referring to Nixon. Petersen suggested that Nixon fire them to protect the presidency from any legal exposure. On May 19, 1973, Petersen testified that he had visited the White House a few months earlier to alert Nixon to the fact that his chief of staff and assistant for domestic affairs were both under federal investigation. ![]() One episode cited by the author, which Petersen described in 1973 grand-jury testimony that was later included in the road map, is particularly striking in its similarities to the events of last year. Baker was one of three top FBI officials who knew about Trump’s conversations with Comey between January and May of last year, in which Trump requested Comey’s loyalty, attempted to shield his then–National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn from FBI scrutiny, and asked Comey to reassure him, and even state publicly, that he was not a subject of the ongoing Russia investigation. But it seems safe to say that Baker’s interest in the road map is not purely historical, and that he perceived some eerie parallels between 19. Their interactions, moreover, “must be understood within the larger context of the president’s knowledge of the facts regarding Watergate at the time.” In other words, what did the president know, and when did he know it? “The president, in short, was using a senior Justice Department official to gather intelligence about an ongoing criminal investigation in which he was personally implicated,” Baker and Grant wrote, pointing out that Nixon repeatedly asked Petersen whether he himself was being investigated. As the road map laid out, Nixon interacted regularly with the man supervising the Watergate investigation-Henry Petersen, then the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division-and pumped him for information. In a piece for Lawfare published on Monday, Baker and co-author Sarah Grant, a student at Harvard Law School, used the newly unsealed Watergate road map to show how one president’s attempts to control an investigation targeting him and his associates were quickly exposed and, ultimately, used against him. ![]() Nearly 45 years ago, the House Judiciary Committee concluded that President Richard Nixon’s contact with high-level Justice Department officials overseeing the Watergate investigation, detailed in a 62-page “road map” of evidence collected by prosecutors in 1972–73, amounted to an impeachable misuse of executive power.Ī half century later, the FBI’s former top lawyer, Jim Baker-a close friend and associate of fired FBI Director James Comey-is laying out parallels, albeit subtly, to President Donald Trump’s interactions with the law-enforcement officials who have been investigating him and his campaign team since July 2016. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |