The true analogy to Watergate

It's the Democrats' conduct during and after the 2016 election

We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. This gives Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein the opportunity to claim, to no one’s surprise, that Donald Trump is even worse than Richard Nixon when it comes to undermining democracy. They are referring to Trump’s post-election conduct in late 2020, early 2021, and ever since.

In my view, Trump had the right to challenge election results he believed, correctly or incorrectly, were fraudulent. That conduct did not undermine democracy.

However, I consider it reprehensible that once his legal challenges failed, Trump tried to pressure Vice President Pence into rejecting the electoral vote, called his followers to Washington for that end, and riled them up to the point that some stormed the Capitol. Congress is investigating these actions, as it should (though the legitimacy of the investigation is undermined by its excessive scope and Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to let Republicans select members of their choosing for the committee).

Yet, Trump’s conduct, as anti-democratic as it was, posed little direct threat to American democracy. Trump, unlike Nixon’s team, did his mischief largely in the open. And there the electoral vote was always going to be counted and Joe Biden’s victory ratified. (I’ll discuss the question of indirect threat later.)

“Watergate” represented a different and probably more serious threat to democracy. The two-party system is a core component of American democracy. Thus, when one party sabotages the other one, democracy is undermined.

As Woodward and Bernstein say, the dirty tricks, spying, and various unlawful acts performed by Nixon’s team, which culminated in the break-in at Democratic headquarters, represented an attempt to sabotage the Democrats. For example, Nixon’s undercover operatives worked to derail the presidential campaign of Edmund Muskie, whom they viewed, probably correctly, as the Democrats’ most electable candidate.

There’s no evidence that Trump and his team did anything like this. On the other hand, the opposition to Trump engaged in dirty tricks, spying, and lawless acts in an effort to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign, his presidency, and therefore democracy.

William Barr, in his autobiography One Damn Thing After Another, does an excellent job of recapping how Team Clinton and its supporters in the government went about this (the discussion begins at page 180). The main elements of these pro-Clinton efforts were the infamous Steele dossier and the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation against the Trump campaign, which began in July 2016.

Barr states:

It was almost inconceivable to me that the FBI opened a counter-intelligence campaign against a presidential candidate’s campaign in the middle of an election. As far as I was aware, this had never been done before, and for good reason.

The election process is at the very core of our First Amendment liberties. From a civil liberties standpoint, one of the greatest dangers to our free system — indeed one of the nightmare scenarios — is that officials in an incumbent administration, entrusted with the most sensitive law enforcement and intelligence tools of government power, might abuse them to spy on their opponents and inject their own proclivities into the political process under the guise of national security.

The risk is not just that they might attempt to advance their own partisan political preferences. . .there is a more subtle form of corruption: that officials take on a “praetorian guard” mentality — a smug self-assurance that they know what is best for the country and can justifiably use their powers to prevent the people from making mistakes. The risk is that officials like this, convinced they have a higher duty to protect the country from itself, use the government’s security apparatus to undermine candidates whose fitness for office or whose policy proposals don’t measure up to their standards.

This is what the FBI, spurred on by the Clinton campaign, did through its Crossfire Hurricane operation.

The FBI investigated Carter Page, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn (a senior foreign policy adviser to the campaign), and Paul Manafort (the campaign manager). It used undercover sources to meet with Page and another campaign staffer, George Papadopoulos, and secretly tape the resulting conversations. And it surveilled Page’s phone conversations.

The two lead bureaucrats in this investigation were Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok. Both fit Barr’s description of partisan officials bent on trying to protect the American people from themselves. Strzok fits it to a T.

Barr proceeds to demolish any pretense that an “adequate predication” existed for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. That’s the standard for investigating any American citizen or group. It must be applied rigorously and in good faith, especially when the investigation intrudes on the election process.

Here, the so-called prediction was a claim by an Australian diplomat that a low-level campaign adviser [Papadopoulos] said the Trump team received a “suggestion” from Russia that it could assist Trump by anonymously releasing information damaging to Hillary Clinton. As Barr notes, there was nothing about the conversation, as reported, to indicate that the Trump campaign expressed interest in such a release.

Nor was it reasonable for the FBI, even if it believed the foreign diplomat’s report warranted following up, to leap immediately to a full-blown investigation of the campaign, including surreptitious surveillance. According to Barr, twice the U.S. Attorney General, the normal course would have been to approach a senior person in the Trump campaign — e.g. Chris Christie or Jeff Sessions — and provide a “defensive briefing” explaining the concern that the Russians might be enlisting members of the campaign.

In fact, the FBI had provided such a briefing to the Clinton campaign when it learned that foreign money was being channeled improperly into its coffers. The FBI has never provided a plausible explanation for why it didn’t do this for the Trump campaign.

In seeking court authorization to spy on Page, the FBI relied on the infamous and bogus Steele dossier. The DOJ’s inspector general later found that the FBI failed to disclose to the FISA court evidence that undercut Steele’s credibility and the dossier’s allegations. And the FBI pressed ahead even after it knew that materials it was using were part of Team Clinton’s propaganda campaign.

When it comes to spying on the opposition, Team Nixon and its “plumbers” never matched Team Clinton and the FBI.

The Clinton-FBI collaboration did not prevent Trump from winning. I think this was due in large part to the fact that during the campaign the mainstream media largely resisted attempts to have it publicize claims that Trump was collaborating with Putin.

I’d like to believe the media’s forbearance was due to the baselessness of the claims, but more likely the main factor was complacency. Media stalwarts were certain Trump would lose.

When that didn’t happen, the media’s mischief began almost immediately. The media flogged the phony Russia collusion narrative relentless and the FBI continued to pursue it. The result was a full blown investigation by a special counsel.

Here, in the aftermath of the election, we finally see some resemblance between 2016 and 2020 (but not Watergate). For some, the post-election assault on Trump undercut faith in the legitimacy of his election and thus his presidency. For some, Trump’s unrelenting claims of election fraud undercut faith in the legitimacy of Biden’s election and thus his presidency.

There’s a major difference, however. Trump’s claims of election fraud have not harmed Biden’s ability to govern. Biden must look elsewhere for excuses.

By sharp contrast, the collusion claims of Democrats and their media allies impaired the Trump administration for years. In Barr’s words, Russiagate became “a tidal wave threatening to inundate his administration.” It “dominated the first two years of President Trump’s term, looming over every aspect of his administration.” It “occupied much of my [Barr’s] time for the first six months of my tenure,” which began in February 2019.

When, following a corrupt effort to spy on and smear a political campaign, a phony scandal peddled by the opposing party diverts the victorious target from performing the job he was democratically elected to do, the anti-democratic implications are obvious — even if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ignore them.