Watergate Redux
I imagine that most of you remember Watergate – the scandal that destroyed the presidency of Richard Nixon and still reverberates through American politics. Every new political controversy receives the -gate suffix – Irangate (Iran-Contra affair of the late 1980s), Travelgate (firing of the White House Travel Office staff under Clinton), Monicagate, Bridgegate (Chris Christie closes the lanes on the GW bridge for political retribution, emailgate (But her emails!), Russiagate (2016 election interference), Ukrainegate (Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Biden), and so forth.
Only the political nerds among us (I see you) recall the role of the White House Plumbers in Watergate. President Nixon was obsessed by leakers – particularly those who leaked national security information to the news media. He believed that leakers within the White House were trying to subvert his efforts in Vietnam, and he swore to root out the leakers and punish them. In 1971 he created a special investigations unit within the White House to stop or respond to leads from the White House. They were informally called “Plumbers” because their mission was to plug leaks. Get it?
Just a reminder: leaks are generally a problem for a President when the leakers report information that either provides evidence of wrongdoing within a government agency or contradicts what the administration is stating publicly. Presidents who act within the bounds of the law and tell the truth to the American people (their clientele) don’t complain as much about leakers. Just sayin’.
The Plumbers’ first assignment was to investigate Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon employee who leaked the Pentagon Papers – internal documents revealing that the people who had prosecuted the war in Vietnam had systematically lied to the American people. The Plumbers broke into his psychiatrist’s office to find information to discredit the leaker.
A later assignment was to identify people within the White House who were communicating directly with the Democratic Party in the months before the 1972 presidential election. The Plumbers had tapped phones within the White House, but they decided to attack the problem from the angle of the Democratic Party – they could tap the Democrats’ phones as well to find out who was communicating with them. To accomplish this aim, members of the Plumbers (specifically G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt) orchestrated the burglary and wiretapping of the DNC headquarters in the Watergate office complex a few blocks from the White House. An alert security guard noticed that the locks on the office doors had been taped open, and upon investigation he found five burglars (some of them Cuban exiles) in the office.
As the details of the burglary grew, it soon encompassed dozens of people within the Nixon administration. Several of them (including Nixon’s Chief of Staff and his Attorney General) went to jail. Nixon’s efforts to cover up his role in this burglary led to his impeachment and resignation.
We have learned this week that the current Republican president failed to learn the lessons of Watergate. This is not surprising – you have to know history in order to learn from it. He and the people around him are incensed that information from within the White House and Pentagon is being leaked to reporters – sometimes within minutes of it being briefed to the insiders. The current Republican president is espousing two contradictory theories – that the information is “fake news” and that it is being leaked. Of course, leaked information is not fake news, but logic has never been his strong suit.
The particular issue that has him boiling this week is the nuanced evaluations of the effectiveness of last Saturday’s strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Within hours of the attack, he and his lackeys announced the total obliteration of the facilities, although there had been no battle damage assessment, and began to push back on any suggestion that the destruction had been less than complete. Information from a classified briefing that suggested a more nuanced description of the level of destruction had been leaked to the press virtually as soon as it was published. As a result, the administration has announced that it will no longer provide detailed intelligence information to Congress. The current Republican president has also announced criminal investigations into the source of the leaks.
SECDEF Pete Hegseth’s unhinged attack on the press Thursday morning made it clear – the press is the enemy. They are, of course, the recipients of leaked information, not the leakers. If the administration was more focused on telling the truth than they are on kissing up to the president, there would be no reason for conscientious insiders to tell reporters the truth when their bosses won’t. That’s what ethical civil servants do – they go around the chain of command when the chain of command is corrupted.
Just FYI: The Democratic National Committee is currently located two blocks south of the U.S. Capitol, in case any burglars want to know. A reminder – this is where an unidentified individual left a pipe bomb in the evening of January 5, 2021.