It's About the Crime, Not the Coverup - Bloomberg

It's time for a quick history lesson about Watergate.

Over at Politico, James Robenalt claims that Richard Nixon "did not have to lose his presidency over the bungled break-in" because "there is no evidence that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in before it happened." Therefore, the problem for Nixon was his foolish decision to cover up the crime, which Robenalt says happened due to Nixon's deep connection with former Attorney General John Mitchell, who certainly was involved in the crime.

That's a product of thinking about Watergate backward. The popular history of the scandal is written that way; it's a story that begins with the break-in, then proceeds through the gradual process of defeating the administration's efforts to hide the truth. That's how the public learned about it, after all, and that's how "All the President's Men" (which I certainly recommend) presents the story.

But "Watergate," as a scandal, didn't happen that way at all. Watergate had deep roots in the very start of the Nixon presidency (or perhaps earlier). Watergate proper, however, began with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971 and Nixon's decision to respond by running a criminal conspiracy out of the White House to subvert the law and democracy, a conspiracy that eventually moved from the White House to Nixon's re-election committee. Nixon may or may not have specifically known about the (second) Watergate break-in before it happened. But we know he had specifically ordered other crimes, some of which were carried out and some of which were not, and he knew of others after the fact. More generally, Nixon was absolutely guilty of abusing the power of the presidency, which became the second article of impeachment against him.

Nixon didn't cover up out of sympathy for Mitchell. He covered up because fully exposing everything he and his people had done would have put them all in jail, and because there was no way to admit to some crimes committed by some of his people without eventually unraveling everything and revealing the whole truth. Or at least enough of the truth to end his presidency.

The truth is, contrary to mythology, that what hurts is almost always the crime, not the coverup.

Which doesn't prove anything, of course, about the present. We still don't really know what (if anything) Donald Trump is hiding. We only know that he's certainly acting as if some deep, dark secret must be hidden no matter how bad it makes him look, and that he's almost certainly committed at least a little "light" obstruction of justice, although not necessarily something that demands prosecution. But it could all just be Trump's foolish bravado (well, not all of it; we know of at least some misconduct from his campaign, although not necessarily anything illegal). Or perhaps he is hiding something real but not particularly important from a constitutional point of view. It's also possible that he's hiding something worse than our greatest fears.

Fortunately, the investigation has been institutionalized, and it's likely we'll eventually know what we need to know. And it's even possible that Trump will turn out to have committed "high crimes and misdemeanors" in covering up something that was no big deal at all. If so? He'll probably be the first to have pulled off that particular trick.

1. Robert Y. Shapiro and Greg M. Shaw at the Monkey Cage on how Obamacare's popular features are a significant problem for Republican repealers.

2. "The cheap talk of Trump’s rhetoric is the one thing that unites his domestic and international failures": Dan Drezner on Trump, paper tiger and president way out of his league.

3. Molly Reynolds at Brookings on where budget negotiations are so far.

4. Brendan Nyhan at the Upshot on what the polls really say about Trump's support.

5. Gregory Downs at Made in History on the "second American revolution."

6. Greg Ip on quantitative easing.

7. Shane Savitsky and Jonathan Swan on how Trump has made trouble for himself (and the U.S.) on trade.

8. Jonathan Cohn on what a bipartisan health-care bill might look like.

9. And my Bloomberg View colleague Timothy L. O'Brien on a president who cares about how things look, not their substance.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net

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