Rim Country Gazette: Former Nixon counsel knows a cover up when he sees one

Monday, February 27, 2017

Former Nixon counsel knows a cover up when he sees one—and says Trump's doing it

Screenshot of Jean Dean, former Nixon White House counsel and author of "Broken Government" on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.

John Dean, White House counsel for former President Richard Nixon, has a very clear assessment about what’s going on with the Trump-Russia scandals: the White House is orchestrating a coverup. Look at his tweet from this morning:

John Dean — who’s written books like The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It, Conservatives Without Conscience, and Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches — dived a bit deeper into the parallels he sees between Nixon’s Watergate and Trump now in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (emphasis mine):

Well, what I see and hear, in following it, are echoes of Watergate. If you recall, Watergate ran about 900 days. In other words, it went on for years, starting with a bungled burglary at the Democratic National Committee and right up to Richard Nixon’s resignation, followed by the conviction of his top aides. So it ran a long time. What we’re seeing is very accelerated. It’s partially responsible because of the media and the technology today, but it’s also the behavior of Trump and his aides, as well as the media’s vigilance on this. So we’re seeing things accelerated. And what I see or hear are echoes of Watergate. We don’t have Watergate 2.0 yet, but we have something that is beginning to look like it could go there.

This isn’t the first time he’s spoken publicly about Trump. Dean doesn’t exactly mince words.

In an interview with Vox, he did not hold back on calling the Trump administration a hot mess — and that’ll be the key to his downfall:

Dean still thinks the Trump presidency will “end in calamity,” though he’s not sure how or when. “His presidency is a massive skyscraper built atop a shifty foundation — it has to come down at some point,” he told me. By “shifty,” he means slippery and haphazard, a makeshift operation without a coherent vision or plan.

Trump can survive four years in office if he manages to keep the Republican-controlled Congress in line. But Trump, being who and what he is, will make it difficult for Republicans. He simply can’t help himself, Dean said. “It’s obvious that his presidency is vulnerable, and yet he keeps creating those vulnerabilities every day. Like Nixon, he’s a slave to his own worst instincts.”