TRUMPS DAMNING RESPONSES TO THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
'In September, 1972, about ten weeks after the Watergate break-in, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward huddled in the vending-machine room at the Washington Post’s old headquarters, on Sixteenth Street. Most days, the two reporters met there before presenting their latest scoops to the top editors. This was a particularly nerve-racking meeting. They had confirmed that John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s former Attorney General and the manager of his reëlection campaign, had controlled a secret fund that paid for the break-in.
Bernstein told me that he felt a chill, unlike anything he has felt since. He put a dime in a machine for some coffee and turned to Woodward. “Oh, my God,” he said, “the President is going to be impeached.”
Woodward agreed, and they decided that they would never use the “I-word,” as they called it, because they didn’t want anyone to think they had a political agenda. “It wasn’t our job how the information was acted upon,” Bernstein said. They left the coffee-room anecdote out of “All the President’s Men,” which was published in June, 1974, in the middle of the House impeachment hearings.
That July, the Supreme Court forced Nixon to release the “smoking gun” tape, which revealed that Nixon had instructed H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, to tell the C.I.A. to block the F.B.I. probe of Watergate. This was clear obstruction of justice, and it triggered key Republicans on Capitol Hill to break with Nixon. In August, all but certain to be impeached and removed from office, he resigned.
After a week of revelations about Donald Trump’s efforts to impede the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign, I asked Bernstein if he thought we had reached the turning point of 1972, or that of 1974.
“We’ve reached the threshold in which discussion of obstruction of justice is reasonable,” he said.
The current time line of Trump’s actions in response to the investigation is damning. On January 26th, Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General, informed the White House that Michael Flynn, Trump’s national-security adviser, had lied to officials about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador. The next day, Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James Comey, to pledge his loyalty to him, which Comey declined to do.'>>>
http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/trumps-damning-responses-to-the-russia-investigation
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