Five Reasons the Comey Affair Is Worse Than Watergate
A journalist who covered Nixon’s fall 45 years ago explains why the current challenge to America may be more severe—and the democratic system less capable of handling it.
*The underlying offense
At some point in the coverage of every scandal you’ll hear the chestnut, “It’s always the cover-up, never the crime.” This refers of course to the historical reality that scandal-bound figures make more problems by denying or lying about their misdeeds than they would if they had come clean from the start.
This saying first became really popular in the Watergate era—which is significant for what it suggests about the gravity of the underlying crime in that case. Richard Nixon’s beleaguered press secretary Ron Ziegler, a Sean Spicer-like figure of that era, oversold the point when he dismissed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as a “third-rate burglary.” But the worst version of what Nixon and his allies were attempting to do—namely, to find incriminating or embarrassing information about political adversaries ranging from the Democratic party chairman Lawrence O’Brien to Pentagon Papers-whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg—was not as bad as what came afterwards. Those later efforts included efforts to derail investigations by the FBI, the police, various grand juries and congressional committees, which collectively amounted to obstruction of justice.
And what is alleged this time? Nothing less than attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an election—and doing so as part of a sustained effort that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere. At worst, such efforts might actually have changed the election results. At least, they were meant to destroy trust in democracy. Not much of this is fully understood or proven, but the potential stakes are incomparably greater than what happened during Watergate, crime and cover-up alike.
The blatancy of the interference'>>>
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/comey-watergate/526443/
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