Donald Trump has been indicted. My new hero, the courageous D.A., Alvin Bragg, has ignored all the fatuous blather about “whether this is good for the country” or whether “it might boost Trump.” What happened is that an amoral, psychopathic scumbag and career criminal broke the law, and now he’ll be held accountable. If convicted, he’ll have to pay, just like we would.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for 55 years, since 1968. That was the year that Richard Nixon won the presidency by committing treason.
Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of legendary right-wing cranky-pants George Will. The 1968 presidential campaign was down to the last week. LBJ had gotten the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese to agree to meet to hammer out a peace deal. If the deal gets done, Democrat Hubert Humphrey becomes president. Then the South Vietnamese “mysteriously” backed out of negotiations. Turns out Nixon had arranged for Anna Chennault, a Chinese American active in Republican politics, to whisper in the ear of the South Vietnamese:
On Nov. 2 at 8:34 p.m., a teleprinter at Johnson’s ranch delivered an FBI report on the embassy wiretap: Chennault had told South Vietnam’s ambassador “she had received a message from her boss (not further identified). . . . She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are gonna win.’”The Logan Act of 1799 makes it a crime for a private U.S. citizen, which Nixon then was, to interfere with U.S. government diplomatic negotiations.
Johnson knew! He knew Nixon had committed treason! Why didn’t he go public? The whole gruesome story is here...
LBJ wanted to go public with Nixon's treason. But Clark Clifford, an architect of the CIA and a pillar of the Washington establishment, talked Johnson out of it. LBJ's close confidant warned that the revelation would shake the foundations of the nation.
In particular, Clifford told Johnson (in a taped conversation) that "some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I'm wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's best interests."
In other words, Clifford told LBJ that the country couldn't handle the reality that its president was a certifiable traitor, eligible for legal execution.
Here’s where it starts: “The American people are made of spun glass. So delicate and fragile! If we were to tell the truth and hold lawbreakers accountable, why, it would be ‘inimical to our country’s best interests.”
I was 18 in 1969. I worked my butt off for Bobby Kennedy because I knew he’d end the war. The only reason Humphrey was closing fast on Nixon is that HE finally came out for the ending the war. Nixon got elected. The precious fee-fees of the American public were spared...and the war went on for another SIX YEARS and TWENTY THOUSAND ADDITIONAL SOLDIERS DIED, and Nixon and Kissinger MADE EXACTLY THE SAME DEAL IN 1974 THEY COULD HAVE MADE IN 1968.
Of course Nixon ended up holding a “smoking gun,” taping himself telling Haldeman to order Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters to interfere with FBI Acting Director Pat Gray's investigation. Once again the issue: would a criminal, caught in the act, be held accountable? Nixon resigned before he was impeached, and then...wait for it….wait for it….HE WAS IMMEDIATELY PARDONED BY THE NEW PRESIDENT GERALD FORD. Here’s the indispensable Charles Pierce on the “Lessons of Watergate”:
The lasting "lesson" of Watergate, it appears, is that self-government was too dangerous, that the perils of it outweigh its values, and that the obligations of citizenship, beyond those which are purely ceremonial, are too heavy for citizens to bear.
NOW we know that...wash, rinse, repeat...the Republicans, having learned they could get away with it, committed treason in 1980 to propel Saint Ronald Reagan across the finish line. Remember this from earlier: The Logan Act of 1799 makes it a crime for a private U.S. citizen to interfere with U.S. government diplomatic negotiations. So here’s the March 18, 2023 NYT Times telling us that Texas pol Ben Barnes has finally come clean:
Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
A private citizen interfering with U.S. government diplomatic relations. Treason, friends. A blatant violation of the Logan Act.
And of course the Reaganauts then happily go on to commit one of the most blatant crimes in American history that goes by the moniker “Iran-Contra.” This scheme was so flagrant, so shameless and so horrifying it still has the power to amaze. A law was passed banning the Reaganauts from providing aid to the contras of Nicaragua. So the Reaganuts set up Oliver North IN THE BASEMENT OF THE WHITE HOUSE (?!?!?) so he could wheel and deal an arrangement where the United States would SELL WEAPONS TO OUR SWORN ENEMIES THE IRANIANS, a terrorist-sponsoring state, and then funnel that money the very Contras they were forbidden, by law, to support. What happened when this was discovered? As always, Charles Pierce, a god who graces us mere mortals with his divine presence, nails the story:
Washington decided, quite on its own, that "the country" didn't need another "failed presidency," so what is now known as The Village circled the wagons to rescue Reagan from his crimes. There was the customary gathering of Wise Men — The Tower Commission — which buried the true scandal in Beltway off-English and the passive voice. There was a joint congressional investigation that served only to furnish people like Oliver North with legal loopholes that prevented their incarceration. There was poor Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor, whom everybody wished would simply go away, but who pressed on, making a case that ultimately forced President Poppy Bush to pardon everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door in 1992.
Cut to 2009. I’m sure you were as sickened and horrified by the evil thugs of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove administration approving—actually ENCOURAGING—the torture of prisoners in Iraq (and then documenting it all, so the world could see). Here’s Richard Clarke, who was there and tried to stop them, on what they did:
"I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It's clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least, it's clear that some of the things they did were war crimes."
And so we elected Barack Obama! Time for these criminals to pay for their crimes, so no public official will ever be tempted to do something so outrageous again, right? Right?
NYT: OBAMA RELUCTANT TO LOOK INTO BUSH PROGRAMS
Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
And now the great Laura Clawson of Daily Kos points us to this in the New York Times, by Peter Baker:
Will it tear the country apart, as some feared about putting a former president on trial after Watergate? Will it be seen by many at home and abroad as victor’s justice akin to developing nations where former leaders are imprisoned by their successors? Or will it become a moment of reckoning, a sign that even someone who was once the most powerful person on the planet is not above the law?
I KNOW! I KNOW! It’s, umm, that third one! ‘Most powerful person not above the law’!!
Nixon, Haldeman, Liddy, Reagan, Edwin Meese, Oliver North, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove...they sent Donald Trump a very clear message: “Break the law. The more outlandish the crime, the better. The punditocracy will dry-wash their hands and mumble platitudes and then protect you, because the ‘little people’ out there—so fragile!— are desperate that their illusions be preserved. Just deny, obfuscate, blame the press for spreading lies, blame the Democrats of persecution, and run out the clock.”
Please, Mr. Alvin Bragg...and Ms. Fani Willis...and Mr. Jack Smith: We can take it. Swear to god, the idea that EVERYONE is equal under the law, that everyone reading this piece would get tossed into the Gray Bar Hotel if we did the shit Trump has done, will set us free! We won’t get the vapors! We have no illusions about our leaders!
So, 55 years. Millions dead. Democracy degraded. Fascism ascendant. BUT...or just the one brief, shining moment, I’m smiling. “TRUMP INDICTED.” Yowsah! As the great Robert Kennedy said:
Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.