As that great philosopher Yogi Berra once put it, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” It’s not that former FBI director James Comey’s relatively brief appearance before the U.S. Senate’s Joint Committee on Intelligence on Thursday can match the depth and breadth of the inquiry conducted by the Senate Watergate committee 44 years ago. But it does suggest the odor of the breeze in those corrupt days.
What the Senate Watergate investigation did was synthesize a sprawling series of storylines into something resembling a coherent narrative. The story featured law breaking, political skullduggery, and abuse of presidential power. By August 1974, President Richard Nixon had resigned rather than face impeachment, 40 administration officials were indicted, and several were convicted of obstruction of justice and other felonies and imprisoned. The situation may have been baroque, but the takeaway was simple: The cover up is more painful than the crime.
Nothing, of course, is linear – let alone artful – in Donald Trump’s White House. Comey’s testimony could be construed as meaning that the cover-up (Comey’s firing) occurred before any criminals were identified. Let’s call it a reverse Watergate. Comey was mum about whether Trump did anything illegal, as opposed to wrong. But he was very clear that a crime was committed.
“The reason this is such a big deal,” Comey testified, “is we have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time, but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for except other Americans. And that’s wonderful and often painful. But we’re talking about a foreign government that – using technical intrusion and lots of other methods – tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal.”
Comey’s testimony should have established once and for all that a crime was committed. (That is if Republicans recognize that surreptitious foreign aggression – Russian hacking and cyber interference with the 2016 elections – is by common sense definition a bad thing.)
Comey’s testimony that the Russian cyber activity was part of a chain of such interference that is by magnitudes greater than what occurred in the past, and that the nation can expect even more of the same in the future was, well, sobering.
Having convincingly established that the Russian threat is real, Comey proceeded to close two loopholes Trump’s enablers have struggled to exploit, and will, no doubt, try to reopen in the weeks to come.
It’s a variation of what Republican Senator Howard Baker was getting at when he defined the existential charge of the Watergate investigation by asking, “What did the president [Nixon] know, and when did he know it?”
During Thursday’s hearing, Republican Senator James Risch of Idaho asked Comey whether Tump “directed” him to drop the investigation into now former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
Comey’s answer was artful: “I took it as direction. He’s the President of the United States, with me alone, saying, ‘I hope this.’ I took it as, 'this is what he wants me to do.' I didn’t obey that. But that’s the way I took it."
There were no “ifs.” “ors,” or “buts.” Comey was smooth and steadfast.
While Risch tried to misdirect Comey, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida appeared to position Comey to slip a conceptual stiletto right between Trump’s ribs.
Rubio: “You perceived it as an order, given his position, the setting, and some of the circumstances.”
Comey: “Yes.”
Before Comey testified, Republicans tried to spin that Comey’s written remarks exonerated Trump. They will, no doubt, try again. The Rubio-Comey exchange, however, is a showstopper.
More subtle but perhaps just as significant -- to the degree that Comey was effective, he issued special counsel Robert Mueller a life insurance policy of sorts.
“You can have confidence that when he’s done, he [Mueller] will have turned over all the stones,” Comey said.
Words have always been cheap in Washington and never more so than today. But Comey’s endorsement of Mueller’s professional values and competence raises the stakes if Trump were ever to 'pull a Nixon' and dismiss the nation’s investigator, as Nixon did with Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.
Digesting the import of Comey’s testimony will take days, weeks. But Washington is a different place in its aftermath. A series of leaks and informed speculation is now established as political fact. That may not mean as much today as it did, say, during the Watergate years. But it means something.
Obstruction of justice may still be in the eye of the beholder. Impeachment may be a Democratic pipe dream as long as Republicans control the House of Representatives. Mueller’s tenure may prove to be as tenuous as Cox’s. But Trump’s incredible shrinking presidency shrank a tiny bit more in the wake of Comey's words.
