Rid me of this meddlesome priest, Pam!

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Almost exactly a month ago, I wrote about how 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. We are watching a Watergate-level presidential scandal unfold basically every day — and they’re happening so quickly and so blatantly it’s nearly impossible to process. 

The last 72 hours have felt similar — but on steroids.

I did a Watergate book talk last week, actually, and it had me spend a few hours re-reading my own book on the subject. As I argue: 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. 

I’ve often thought that the best way to think about Trump is similar, less events and more mindset — the core scandal of his administration is not any single action, it’s the mindset he brings to everything — and to me the closest parallel we should look to is a mafia-style racketeering organization.

For years, he’s operated as a mob boss — preserving plausible deniability and arms-length distance has been key to the many many many crimes he’s been adjacent to.

It’s an observation that James Comey made in 2017, at that infamous first congressional hearing — back when we thought things like truth and integrity mattered, that scandals could take a political toll, and that Republicans in Congress might actually care about and desire a good clean government and a functional democracy. Comey explained how when Trump encouraged him to drop the FBI’s probe into Michael Flynn, in those far more innocent times when incompetence and corruptibility got one fired from the White House, Trump never exactly “ordered” his FBI director but instead merely expressed a “hope.” As Comey said, “It kind of rings in my ears as, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’”

That line, of course, comes from King Henry II, who is said to have uttered it in 1170 as regal encouragement for his courtiers to kill Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket — which, just a month later, four knights loyal to King Henry did.

The parallels continue to haunt. Way back in 2019 I wrote about how watching Michael Cohen testify on Capitol Hill made me think how the mafia-inspired RICO laws would be perfect for going after the Trump organization:

Now, in this second term, though, we’re watching Donald Trump escalate his directions, from “codes” to “direct orders.” Over the weekend, he appeared to accidentally publish on Truth Social a direct message intended for US Attorney General Pam Bondi, where he demands the ouster of the US attorney for the Eastern Director of Virginia, who refused to indict New York attorney general Letitia James, and the installation of someone else who will. It was like watching the Saturday Night Massacre occur in public — on a Saturday no less! — and yet laced with even more naked corruption. 

I don’t need to belabor why and how it’s corrupt for the president to be ordering prosecutions brought against his political enemies — or why it’s corrupt for him to be firing government prosecutors who refuse to bring nakedly politically motivated and unfounded criminal charges.

But let’s be clear about this: What Donald Trump said in public, in plain view, on his own social media feed is more corrupt and dangerous than anything Richard Nixon was caught on tape saying in the White House tapes. (Caveat: Of course, there was that famous 18 and a ½ minute gap, so maybe THAT was more criminal, but still…) It’s language where if we had ever heard a president had uttered such an order behind closed doors, it would have launched a thousand congressional hearings, wall-to-wall news coverage, and instant calls for impeachment. And here Trump is just posting it to social media!

To me, though, the Pam Bondi incident also represents a dangerous new escalation of Trump’s mob-boss behavior.

He has evolved from “who will rid me of this meddlesome priest” in the first term to “Pam, you specifically need to rid me of this specific meddlesome priest right now” just seven months into his second term. It’s another sign to me, akin to the scandal of the ginned-up Lisa Cook mortgage fraud accusation and the insanity of the “Department of War” that the guardrails of that first term again Trump’s worst instincts have completely broken down in the second.

Similarly worrisome is the blockbuster news from investigative superstar Carol Leonnig that Trump’s border czar Tom Homan was investigated last year by the FBI for allegedly accepting $50,000 in cash, hidden inside a bag from the fast-casual restaurant Cava, from undercover FBI agents — an encounter that was recorded! The cash, apparently, was a payoff to get Homan’s help for the agents, who were pretending to be business executives interested in doing business with a second Trump administration, to land government contracts. The case was shut down when Trump came to power by none other than Trump hatchetman Emil Bove, his personal lawyer turned top Justice Department enforcer and now, recently, appointed to a lifetime federal judgeship.

This story is nuts. There are a thousand questions still be answered. (Two of my biggest: The Homan handoff apparently came as part of a larger counterintelligence investigation — so who was the original, primary target of the case? And: What did Homan do with the cash and did he declare it as income, and, if not, is he also guilty of tax fraud?)

The incident raises a thousand red flags about Tom Homan, who is heading up the nation’s increasingly brutal and lawless deportation regime where thousands of people are being rounded up, chased and beaten in the streets, separated from their families, and deported overseas often for transgressions and crimes far less serious than what Homan now stands accused of.

Homan’s a powerful figure in the White House — and it’s deeply troubling not just that the Trump Justice Department shut down the case against him but even more so that he continues, post-investigation, to be such a powerful figure in government. The Trump administration saw evidence of someone being at least susceptible to corruption, amenable to bribes, a red-alert counterintelligence risk, and under-handed player and … shrugged.

It should go without saying that anyone who is handed a bag of $50,000 cash knows they’re being asked to do something illegal — and that no one starts off their life of crime and corruption by being handed a bag of $50,000 in cash. It also goes without saying that with those allegations pending under normal circumstances any standard security clearance check would have prevented Homan from ever entering government service, raising even more questions about the security checks that aren’t being done on the waves of Trump appointees entering government.

As an aside, this is not what you want your Google “autofill” for a top government official to look like:

And yet the White House brushed it off yesterday entirely — saying he did “nothing wrong.” It’s the latest in a series of actions that we’ve seen this year, beginning with Trump’s pardon of everyone involved in January 6^th , that make crystal clear a message: Be loyal to Donald Trump and any and all crimes are excusable. This deal is increasingly so clear that Megyn Kelly, who once pretended to be a journalist, made it explicit.

It’s not just politically motivated prosecutions or get-out-of-jail free cards, though. Increasingly, he’s wielding the government itself as a corrupt racketeering organization — where you have to pay him and the government for the privilege of doing business in his neighborhood, just like a local mafioso or gang that requires payments for “protection.”

Yesterday’s case-in-point is the news that Donald Trump intends the government to get a fee from the new Tiktok deal — a “deal” that follows Donald Trump blatantly ignoring the law that Congress passed and that the Supreme Court upheld ordering TikTok to be shut down back in January, a legit federal law Donald Trump has just on his own illegal say-so told companies they could ignore.

As James Temple wrote yesterday, “It’s impossible to overstate how problematic it is for the White House to demand payouts or company stakes in the course of approving deals, hand-selecting acquirers, demanding corporate compliance or anything else.”

And yet, from NVIDIA to Intel to Paramount, companies increasingly see a government-led shakedown as the cost of doing business. (One way you know company executives understand they’re paying a bribe is how Paramount executives were concerned about how to do their “deal” without being able to be prosecuted for bribery!) No matter that his “deal” with NVIDIA is literally unconstitutional; companies see it now as just the cost of doing business.

Which then brings us to Venezuela, where Trump has announced that the US has struck a fourth suspected drug vessel, a similarly lawless military campaign that the Pentagon no longer even appears to be attempting to justify under the rules of war.

It’s worth remembering how fifty years ago Nixon’s crimes paralleled many of today’s crimes.

Most people forget how sweeping the Watergate impeachment really was — that Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia was originally part of the impeachment debate, or that one of the major associated scandals was how he and John Dean tried to weaponize the IRS to go after political enemies, or how so many companies (from 3M to Goodyear Tire to American Airlines) ended up pleading guilty to illegal campaign finance donations to Nixon in exchange for favors, or how the core of the Watergate scandal was getting the FBI to shut down the burglary investigation before it touched Nixon’s White House staff.

All of that sound familiar? Replace the preceding with Venezuela, Pam Bondi, TikTok, and Tom Homan and you have yourself a nearly full Watergate.

The difference is that back in Nixon’s day, those scandals accumulated from 1968 through 1972. Today I’m just talking about the revelations of the past weekend.

It really it is a Watergate every day.

GMG

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