A Watergate Every Day

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

One of the hardest things to do in the modern moment is keep up with the daily slog of scandals and corruption unfolding in this administration — sometimes in broad daylight in front of cameras in the Oval Office. On the one hand, it’s just too much for the media to cover, but there’s also a bigger problem: The media does a terrible job noticing them as the scandals go by. I think often of Steve Bannon’s infamous quote: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” 

Almost every day there’s a scandal that just skates by that in any other moment of presidential history would launch endless follow-up stories, congressional investigations, and sink an administration.

I want to zero in on just two scandals from this week — and it’s only Wednesday morning! — to show how little attention the media gives truly awful, democracy-threatening episodes that are forgotten by the following day, if they’re ever noticed at all.

First, JD Vance and John Bolton. The search at the end of last week by the FBI of former Trump national security advisor John Bolton’s house was hardly surprising — Trump telegraphed throughout his reelection campaign that he was coming for his political enemies and opponents. And yet we’ve seen statements in the hours since the search that make clear that this process was probably even more corrupt than we imagine. Trump himself seems to walk right up to the line of bragging that he personally ordered the raid. JD Vance, in an interview, went even further: “We’re in the very early stages of an ongoing investigation into John Bolton ... if we think Ambassador Bolton committed a crime, of course eventually prosecutions will come ... there's a broad concern about Ambassador Bolton.”

It’s a stunning series of admissions, beginning with the use of “we.”

There’s no role for a vice president in criminal prosecution decisions. In previous moments, the president himself wouldn’t be carefully kept out of even knowing about a criminal investigation like this. But it’s hardly the first time we’ve seen Vance wade into meetings with FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi over Jeffrey Epstein too.

Max Kennerly, a smart online legal critic, wrote, “This sort of admission—the VP is involved in prosecutorial decisions, the ‘concerns’ arise from political actors, and the administration knows they don’t have probable cause—would have prompted the Founders to impeach everyone involved.”

And yet we just move on.

Then we come to the second scandal — one that has received even less critical media attention.

Trump’s attempt to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook this week grew out of a very odd set of allegations of mortgage fraud that cropped up in recent days. The director of Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte has been on a one-man jihad in recent weeks against some invented scourge of mortgage fraud — he’s previously tried to launch criminal investigations of Sen. Adam Schiff and New York attorney general Letitia James — and then earlier this month posted on social media that Cook falsified information to get better bank loan terms.

CNN called it “the most consequential example yet of how Pulte has become an unlikely political attack dog.” The New York Times coverage, under the headline “Housing Official’s Push on Mortgage Fraud Gives Trump a Political Weapon,” was even worse — seeming to give Trump creativity points for weaponizing part of the federal government. As the Times wrote, “Mr. Pulte, who has more than three million followers on social media, has used his position at the housing finance agency to attack and investigate Mr. Trump’s political enemies.” 

Georgetown Law School professor Adam Levitin wrote plainly what no one in the media seems to be willing to say: This isn’t normal—it’s corrupt and an out-and-out abuse of power.

Levitin suggests, “Reporters—there's probably a paper trail about this...you might want to fire up your FOIA machines or start calling your contacts at [Fannie and Freddie].”

I was really struck yesterday how Levitin’s essay was treated as a curiosity rather than tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of an administration-shaking scandal. POLITICO Playbook cited it as the last sentence in the literal last paragraph of a 900-word write-up about the Lisa Cook firing, saying, “It’s also worth reading this short essay by Georgetown Law School’s Adam Levitin accusing Trump’s mortgage fraud attack dog, FHFA Director Bill Pulte, of abuse of office.”

And then the world moved right on. “Huh, neat — looks like Trump and his cronies are criming! Smart politics by them! Anyway….”

As Levitin points out, this is Nixon’s enemies list all over again. If Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and Lisa Cook all faced this scrutiny, how many other people do you think Bill Pulte has targeted and tried to drum up criminal charges against? Surely they’re not the only three.

As many of you know, I wrote a book about Watergate (a well-received one, in fact!) and through my research came to see what we call “Watergate” as far more than just a burglary on June 17, 1972. It was a broader umbrella encompassing nearly a dozen specific, related but separate scandals, from the Chennault Affair — one of the most serious allegations approaching treason we’ve ever seen in US politics — as well as the Huston plan, the Kissinger wiretaps and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon Papers, ITT and the Dita Beard memo, the Vesco donation, milk-price fixing, campaign “rat-fucking,” Spiro Agnew’s bribery case, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, plus a little bit of presidential tax fraud. (In fact, Nixon’s most famous line in history, “I am not a crook,” came not because of the Watergate scandal but because of an associated and concurrent tax investigation.)

Overall, Watergate is best thought of not as an “event” but as a mindset, a criminal and conspiratorial posture that emanated from the Oval Office and corrupted Nixon’s operation from top to bottom.

One of the major parts of that scandal was how Nixon had tried to weaponize the IRS against his enemies. Setting the IRS loose on political opponents was an early goal of the administration; in the fall of 1969, Jeb Stuart Magruder authored what would come to be known infamously as the “rifle and shotgun” memo, encouraging Nixon to stop “shotgunning” wildly at the media when he faced criticism but instead to more carefully target reporters individually using IRS audits and the regulatory powers of the FCC and the Justice Department to coerce companies and broadcasters more generally. “The possible threat of antitrust action I think would be effective in changing their views,” Magruder wrote.

Later, on an Oval Office recording on May 13, 1971, Nixon described what he wanted from an IRS commissioner: “I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he’s told, that every income tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends.”

As the 1972 re-election campaign started up, White House counsel John Dean urged the IRS to investigate a stunning 575 of the president’s enemies. “We have been unable to obtain information in the possession of the IRS regarding our political enemies,” Dean complained. 

Now John Dean has made a career for two decades out of regularly proclaiming that modern presidential administrations are “worse than Watergate” or “more dangerous” than Nixon, but I think in this case it’s true.

Both of these scandals — the FBI search of John Bolton and the trumped-up mortgage fraud case against Lisa Cook — are worse than the comparative scandals of the Nixon years, in part because in these instances where Nixon was once stymied, Trump was successful in pulling them off.

We don’t want to live in a country where every new administration is able to rifle through all the data and documents of the federal government to investigate personal enemies, media critics, or the political opposition — whether it’s FBI raids, mortgage documents, or IRS returns.

(Think back, for instance, to the years of controversy we faced in the Clinton administration from “Filegate,” when it appeared that the Clinton White House had improper access to security-clearance documents.)

And, in fact, we have a lot of laws that in normal times prevent government data from being shared willy nilly across government and rules and regulations that are meant to prevent political appointees from rooting into the lives of individual Americans.

Here’s where we come to something I worry a lot about right now: Trump’s circle of criminality is expanding daily. Now he may have total criminal immunity for official acts, thanks to John Roberts and the Supreme Court, but those around him don’t.

Most people don’t realize that the associated investigations of Watergate eventually encompassed criminal charges against a total of 69 people — including George Steinbrenner! — and companies from Goodyear Tires to Gulf Oil to American Airlines and 3M pleaded guilty to illegally financing Nixon’s reelection.

Just imagine how wide the criminal liability will be after this Trump administration — if we’re able to get back to a normal functioning Justice Department.

Therein lies a big danger to me.

The longer the Trump administration continues, the more grave the future criminal, civil, and legal liability for nearly all involved will be — from ICE officials facing civil rights and abuse of force charges to White House and administration officials facing bribery investigations to random officials and appointees who, say, enabled DOGE data pillaging or Pentagon leaders who might face courts-martial for actions in the coming military occupations that violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

The deeper we get into this morass of corruption and criminality, the more people are going to confront their own future legal liability and will worry about what happens if and when Trump leaves office. That goes right to the top. Whereas Mike Pence spent four years as Trump’s vice president appearing to avoid ever participating in a meeting or a decision, Vice President JD Vance is right in the middle of many of these conversations and will presumably be among that crowd — it’s not clear that vice presidents get blanket criminal immunity, after all.

What happens when the music stops playing? We all saw how Trump basically had to win the presidency last year in order to avoid jail time — and the damage that has come from that decision. A recipe where desperate more people — sometime very powerful people! — need to stay in office if only to forestall their own possible prosecution and prison time is a terrible and dangerous recipe for America’s future — and one that we should be thinking a lot about.

GMG

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