Trump Worse Than Nixon on White House Offenses

      The American people need to have, and deserve to have, confidence in the president. Richard Nixon famously said as much as the enormity of the Watergate scandal began to be disclosed. "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook," Nixon declared at a meeting of the nation's newspaper editors on November 17, 1973. "Well, I'm not a crook."
      Nixon in fact was not a crook, as commonly understood, but worse that he had corrupted the office of the presidency by multiple criminal and political violations. He had used the power of his office to spy on political opponents and had impeded through various means lawful investigations into his illegal actions.
      Now, another embattled president, Donald Trump, is proclaiming his innocence and integrity as the evidence mounts that he was corrupting the political process as a presidential candidate and has used the power of his office to impede investigations into his actions, some of them patently illegal and others arguably contrary to law.
      The latest evidence is the filing by the government, specifically the U.S. attorney's office for the southern district of New York, that Trump — so-called Individual 1 — organized and directed the scheme to conceal hush-money payoffs to his former sexual partners. Those payoffs, in the form of buying the rights to the women's stories to suppress them, were made in the final month of the 2016 campaign for the specific purpose of benefiting Trump's candidacy.
      Federal campaign finance law requires candidates for federal office to disclose campaign expenditures. Trump's former fixer, Michael Cohen, is now headed toward four or more years in prison for multiple crimes, including the campaign finance violations that he said were "in coordination with and the direction of Individual 1." Trump is shielded from indictment for the offense, however, under the never-adjudicated Justice Department policy that precludes prosecuting the president while in office.
      Trump, who is counted by fact-checkers as having lied more than 6,000 times in less than two years in office, responded to the sentencing memorandum in Cohen's case with the demonstrably false tweet that he had been "totally cleared." Two presidents in recent memory, Nixon and Bill Clinton, have faced impeachment for lying, but the contemporary Liar in Chief shows both of them to have been inept pikers at deception.
      "Trump’s most important lies are not spin, or misleading statements," according to the Trump-critic political scientist Brian Klaas, author of The Despot's Apprentice. "They are the complete inversion of truth, an Orwellian assertion that the truth is what he says. The documents directly implicate Trump in directing multiple criminal conspiracies. A tweet doesn’t change that."
      Trump's most effective denial has been in the form of a repeated incomplete sentence, often rendered in all-caps "No collusion," aimed at discounting the legal significance of the proven and acknowledged contacts between officials in Trump's campaign and representatives or agents of the Russian government. The filing in Cohen's case adds new evidence that the contacts began earlier than previously known and that Trump had a personal stake in currying favor with the Russian government even as he repeatedly and insistently denied any business interests in the United States' most important adversary nation.
      In an acknowledged effort to avoid prison time, Cohen has cooperated, however incompletely, with the office of special counsel Robert Mueller by spilling some of the previously unspilled beans about Trump's campaign. Cohen, while still in Trump's good graces, acted as intermediary for an offer he received in November 2015 from an unnamed Russian with ties to the Kremlin for "government-level" synergy between Russia and the Trump campaign.
      At the time, Trump was scouting the possibility of opening a Trump Tower in Moscow, a project that would depend on favorable treatment from the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. The discussions about the project included the thought of offering Putin a $5 million penthouse in the planned edifice. News of the never-offered bribe sparked discussion among legal experts about invoking the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but any speculation on that issue runs afoul of the president's practical immunity from criminal prosecution and his effective immunity from removal through impeachment as long as Senate Republicans turn a blind eye to what would be impeachable offenses for any other president.
      Nixon was forced to resign only after the White House tapes confirmed his personal role in the hush-money payments to the Watergate burglars to keep silent.. Trump is trying another tactic to buy silence from those who can implicate him: publicly demeaning any who cooperate with the special counsel's investigators and publicly raising the possibility of presidential pardons for any who need executive clemency. Nixon, it will be remembered, was counseled against any hint of pardons for the Watergate burglars or the architects of the later cover-up.
      Thus, it is imminently fair to make the comparison: Trump is worse than Nixon ever was, even with Mueller's investigation not yet complete. Unlike Nixon, Trump is a kind of crook: he is personally enriching himself in open and notorious violation of the Constitution's foreign and domestic emoluments clauses as his hotels rake in money from domestic and foreign lobbyists seeking his favors. And, unlike Nixon, he openly sought and accepted assistance from a foreign enemy in his campaign and since then as president. But Trump has so shattered political norms that none in his party will call for the only remedy: impeachment.