REFLECTIONS

REFLECTIONS

America has never in my lifetime confronted a crisis like the one it faces now.

The closest we came was with the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.

In that scandal, then-President Richard Nixon possibly authorized and definitely covered-up his re-election committee's burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).  The objective of the burglary was to photograph documents and install listening devices so that the President's re-election committee had on-going intelligence on the stategy and tactics of its opponents. On at least two occasions  -- May 28, 1972 and June 17, 1972 -- the burglars broke into the DNC's offices, the first time to install wiretaps and the second to photograph documents. On the second, they were arrested while committing their crime.

In September 1972, the five burglars were indicted.  A Republican judge made sure the case did not die with phony, low-level pleas and stonewalling, and Woodward and Bernstein met sources in their homes (and the best one in a parking garage), unearthing the truth that the burglary and subsequent cover-up went all the way to the White House. A  joint special committee of the House and Senate was empanelled to determine, in the famous words of Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, "what . . . the President [knew] and when . . . he [knew] it", and a Special Prosecutor was created to investigate the crimes and prosecute those responsible.   When Nixon directed his then Attorney General to fire the Special Prosecutor, that Attorney General refused and resigned, as did his deputy on whom the order fell.  After the third in command at the Department of Justice carried out the order,  a new -- and equally independent -- Special Prosecutor was appointed .

The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to disclose his tapes, which confirmed his guilt. The House Judiciary Committee voted to send Articles of Impeachment to the floor for a vote.  Seven of the seventeen Republican members of that Committee had voted "Aye". Republican Senators Goldwater and Scott and House Minority Leader Rhodes, also a Republican,  then marched to the Oval Office and told Nixon he would be impeached and convicted.

No one was pardoned.

Nixon resigned.

Crisis averted.

Things are different today.

In the early evening this past Friday, President Trump commuted the forty (40) month prison sentence of his friend Roger Stone. Just beforehand, Stone -- who would have had to report to prison this week -- suggested this would be appropriate payback for his silence.

Last November, a jury found Stone guilty  on seven felony counts of obstructing Congress's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.  The charges included lying to Congressional investigators and intimidating a witness into not testifying. In particular, Stone lied about conversations in which he reported to Trump the imminent publication by Wikileaks of the emails Russia stole from the Clinton campaign, lied about his contacts and conversations with intermediaries who had knowledge of Wikileaks' plans, falsely denied that he had any emails or text messages concerning these contacts and communications, and threatened a witness with death if that witness testified.  

Had Stone not lied, there's no telling what he might have said to implicate Trump.  

At the very least, truthful testimony probably would  have proven that Trump himself committed perjury when he told Robert Mueller that he could not recall any communications with Stone concerning Wikileaks' dumps of the stolen Clinton emails.  At most, that testimony might have demonstrated that Trump and Stone in fact participated in a conspiracy to aid and abet Russian interference in the 2016 election. Instead, Mueller could not prove that conspiracy and Trump has thereafter regularly -- and loudly --  proclaimed his innocence, all the while denigrating any notion that Russia helped him win his election in the first place, and despite having regularly obstructed the investigation that tried to hold him to account, ten likely examples of which, the Stone case aside, were set forth in Mueller's report.

The commutation was widely condemned.  Mitt Romney explained that "an American president commut[ing] the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president"  amounts to an act of "historic, unprecedented corruption." Rep. Adam Schiff said it was a "body blow to the rule of law."  Vice President Biden's contempt was reduced to one word -- "Enough"-- and even some of the President's ususal  enablers demurred.  Attorney General Barr, who previously called the Stone prosecution "righteous",  said he recommended against commutation, and on the Sunday talk shows former Governor Chris Christie said he wouldn't have done it. 

The man who prosecuted Stone, Robert Mueller, was having none of Trump's  phony claim that Stone had been an innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors.  "Stone was prosecuted and convicted," said Mueller, "because he committed federal crimes.  He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so." Noting that "Russia's actions were a threat to America's democracy" and that Stone himself "had communicated in 2016 with individuals known . . . to be Russian intelligence officers", Mueller then made the obvious point:  "When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government's efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable. It may ultimately impede those efforts."

Ya think?

All of this, however  was only Trump's latest outrage.

In June, he assailed nationwide protests of the death of George Floyd while in police custody.  Lumping the relatively few who vandalized or looted in with the otherwise vast majority who peacefully demanded an end to brutaity, he labelled governors "fools" who had to get "tougher", threatened to (illegally) send in the military to clear the streets, and then did so in DC so he could stage a photo-op.  This was more or less the reverse of his reaction to protests in Charlottesville in 2017, where a group of neo-Nazi protesters were counted as including some "fine people".

Last December and earlier this year, he ignored intelligence reports warning of the Covid-19 pandemic and never adopted a cohesive national program to acknowledge the danger and create the needed testing, tracing and treatment capacity to confront it.  Instead, he regularly encouraged premature re-openings, sympathized with militants who assailed state governors and legislators for ordering quarantines, and even turned the act of wearing a mask into a loyalty test. The product of  this colossal incompetence has been 138,000 dead and  a continuing pandemic that is now growing at alarming rates  in places where it had either abated or not been all that extensive.

Last Summer, he tried to bribe Ukraine's president, withholding already appropriated aid in an effort to get Ukraine to start a phony investigation of Joe Biden.  For that crime -- confirmed at the time by multiple witnesses, including one eye witness, and later by his own National Security Adviser --  he became the third president in US history to be impeached.

In addition to Stone, he has during his term in office (i) pardoned Arizona's ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted on federal criminal contempt charges of refusing to obey court orders banning racial profiling; (ii) pardoned NYC's ex-Police Commissioner Bernie Kerick, convicted of tax evasion in connection with trading on his connections to the response to the 9/11 attacks; and (iii) commuted the sentence of  Illinois' ex-Governor Rod Blagojevitch, convicted of extortion and  soliciting bribes in exchange for filling Barack Obama's Senate seat.

Unlike Nixon, Trump perpetually gives the middle finger to the law, to norms that have allowed American government to function for more than two centuries, and even to settled practices of civility and comity that make life liveable at something less than the level of a nervous breakdown.  As a matter of life-long habit, he doesn't even try to tell the truth, and over the course of his administration, he has lied so often and so outrageously that the media keep  a running tally.  It now stands at more than 20,000 lies or misrepresentations (and counting).  If the President were Pinocchio, he'd regularly trip on his own nose.

Congress will not save us.

Senate Repubican have already refused to do so.

Prosecutors will not save us.

They think a President cannot be prosecuted while in office.

The press and media will not save us.

They have published or broadcast his every outrage, lie, curse, crime, failure and pathology.

So have Comey, Bolton and Anonymous.

So has his niece.

No tweet has been left behind.

But the President marches on.

Often unglued, uninformed and  untethered.

Always unembarrassable,

Who will save us?

Look in the mirror.

That's who.