Trump's Tuesday Night Massacre Puts
U.S. on 'Banana Republic' Brink
By Will Bunch
May 10, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The Tuesday Night Massacre doesn't
have quite the right ring, but then
the sequel is almost never as
satisfying as the original.
Nearly
44 years ago, Richard Nixon touched
off what many of us had hoped would
be the worst constitutional crisis
of our lifetimes when he fired not
only the special prosecutor
investigating his Watergate scandal
but also the attorney general and
his No. 2, in the notorious
Saturday Night Massacre.
But that 1973 misadventure had what
most Americans considered a happy
ending. The investigative pressure
on Nixon only increased, and he
resigned 10 months later. The system
worked, everybody said.
On May
9, 2017, President
Trump shocked the nation by firing
FBI director James Comey
-- just weeks after Comey confirmed
that his agents have been conducting
a lengthy ongoing criminal
investigation into whether Trump's
2016 campaign colluded with Russia
in hacking emails that damaged his
election rival, Hillary Clinton.
There is absolutely no guarantee
that the ending of this sequel will
be as upbeat as things turned out in
the days after October 20, 1973. Our
politics are more narrow, partisan
and divisive, our media is more
muddled, and our voters already
proved last November that not all
Americans are terrified by the
prospect of authoritarian-style
government in Washington.
And so the way we respond to Trump's
Tuesday Night massacre will decide
whether "the system works" again, or
whether this country slowly slides
into the realm of the world's
all-too-many unstable banana
republics.
"This
is Nixonian,"
Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob
Casey said in a statement
just minutes after Comey's firing.
He echoed calls by scores of
Democrats for the immediate
appointment of a special prosecutor
who would conduct the same kind of
independent investigation that
allowed
Leon Jaworski
-- who replaced the fired Archibald
Cox in the intense backlash against
Nixon -- to eventually get to the
bottom of Watergate.
This is all happening, by the way,
in just the 110th day of a
presidency of a blustery billionaire
with no political experience, an
aircraft carrier full of grievances,
an itchy Twitter finger and little
if any commitment to America's
longstanding democratic norms. To
all too many citizens, the worst
fears about a Trump presidency came
true at 5:47 p.m.
"Can we point out here that the
emperor isn't wearing any clothes,"
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin
said in those stunned initial
moments, joining most pundits in
questioning the stated reasons for
Comey's dismissal and speculating
that the president's real motive was
to ultimately squelch the
Trump-Russia probe under his own
hand-picked FBI chief. "Are people
going to suspect cover-up?" asked
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
of New York at a news conference.
"Absolutely
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Now, the real pressure will be on
the Republicans who control both
houses of Congress and who, until
now, have tended to rally behind
their party's new president despite
a steady flow of negative headlines
about the dealings between Trump
aides like fired national security
adviser Mike Flynn and
representatives of Vladimir Putin's
Russia.
The
initial response Tuesday night was
not encouraging. In fact, South
Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of
the few GOPers who criticizes Trump
on occasion, supported the Comey
firing on Twitter. "I
believe a fresh start will serve the
FBI and the nation well,"
he wrote.
No
doubt, the recent history of Comey
-- the seeming straight-arrow
attorney who had run the nation's
top law-enforcement agency since his
2013 appointment by Barack Obama --
will muddy the waters. His
unorthodox handling in 2016 of
simultaneous probes of Clinton's
private email server -- in which
Comey released information in a way
that
some experts and many Democrats
believe cost her the election
-- and of Trump's campaign, which
wasn't disclosed before the
election, managed to alienate some
folks on both sides of the aisle.
Indeed,
it's was Comey's decision to
criticize Clinton's email practices
at a news conference last summer
that Trump's men -- spelled out in a
memo by deputy attorney general Rod
Rosenstein -- cited on Tuesday as
the reason for his dismissal. And
Comey may have accidentally thrown
fuel on that fire Tuesday by
admitting that last week he'd given
wrong information about an important
aspect of the Clinton probe
at a Senate hearing.
But few
were buying that sudden concern for
Clinton's plight was the reason for
Comey's firing. After all, Trump had
praised the FBI director's role last
year. But in recent days, the
president has also betrayed a high
level of anxiety about the Russia
investigation --
trash-talking former acting attorney
general Sally Yates on Twitter
before she testified about ex-Trump
aide Flynn in the Senate on Monday,
and then claiming in Tuesday's
firing letter that Comey had told
Trump "on three separate occasions"
he's not being personally
investigated on the Russia matter.
What's
more, three investigative officials
in a position to probe the Trump
campaign -- Yates, the Manhattan
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and now
Comey -- have all been abruptly
fired by the president. That's
deeply troubling, as was the
involvement in Comey's dismissal of
Attorney General Jeff Sessions --
who recused himself from the
Trump-Russia probe because of his
own dealings with the Russian
ambassador,
dealings that he lied about in his
confirmation hearings.
Still,
in 1973 and 1974, it took the
decision to name a fresh Watergate
independent prosecutor, fiercely
independent members of Nixon's own
party like Senators
Howard Baker
and Lowell Weicker, and an
independent judiciary that voted
unanimously for the president to
release his Oval Office tapes before
America found out what that
president knew and when he knew it.
As of right now, none of these
things are teed up in Donald Trump's
America. And that should worry all
of us.
The way that Trump's Watergate
sequel starts -- a nation's leader
firing the prosecutor who was
investigating him -- happens in
tinhorn dictatorships all over the
world. Whether America remains a
functioning democracy depends on how
we end this storyline.
This article was first published
by
Philadelphia
Daily News
© 2017 Philadelphia Daily News
