Might Have Survived

John Dean: Nixon ‘Might Have Survived If There’d Been a Fox News’

The star witness of the Watergate investigation says the Russia scandal is far from over, but Trump has advantages his predecessor didn’t.

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel, has a stark warning for White House lawyer Ty Cobb and the rest of President Donald Trump’s defenders as they enter 2018: Believing the investigation and prosecutions will be over any time soon is “wishful thinking.”

And, says the man who famously flipped and became the prosecution’s star witness in the process that helped take down Richard Nixon, no one in the president’s orbit should assume they’re prepared for everything that cooperating witnesses George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn might be telling Bob Mueller, as their statements have suggested—whether it’s done out of confidence from their own review or just out of public bluster.
That’s exactly the mistake Dean saw Nixon and his close aides and accomplices, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, make about him: overconfidence.

“They didn’t know how much I knew. I knew much more than they thought I did,” Dean told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, pointing in particular to Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser. “With Flynn and his proximity, he had even more proximity than I did.”

Dean scoffs at the idea floated by Trump lawyer John Dowd in December that the president, in his role as America’s top law enforcement official, couldn’t be guilty of obstruction of justice. He finds equally ridiculous, in terms of how it would hold up legally, that the defense of Trump and other aides has at times suggested that the president was ignorantly blundering through what then-FBI director Jim Comey took as attempts to influence the investigation, but was really just the bluster of a personality who thinks about the world in terms of loyalty and doesn’t know the technicalities of the law well enough to violate it.

Ignorance is no defense, according to Dean.

“Everybody who got involved in the obstruction of justice at the Nixon White House didn’t have a clue what obstruction of justice was, including me. Later, after I read the statute and telling Haldeman and Ehrlichman, as well as Nixon in some tapes, it’s clear Nixon didn’t know anything about obstruction of justice,” he said.

“Unfortunately, motive and intent in the law are different. What they thought [was that] because what they were doing was purely political, and trying to minimize the impact of this blundered break-in at the Watergate, they had no criminal intent,” Dean said. “Well, they intended to do the actions they did, which was stop the investigation. That’s what Trump did. His motive is irrelevant.”

After being part of the conversations about break-ins and payments—and feeling like he was being set up as a scapegoat by Nixon’s top aides—Dean cut his own plea deal in exchange for a reduced sentence, got out of prison, moved to Beverly Hills and became an investment banker and author who has churned out 11 books and hundreds of columns, most rooted in the experiences and lessons of Watergate. He appears on TV as a CNN contributor and in frequent other interviews, called on for his first-hand perspective on presidential scandals and for his blistering critiques of modern conservatives (his book on George W. Bush, in a framing that seems almost quaint today, was titled Worse Than Watergate).

Dean says he never expected a Nixon pardon, so wasn’t holding back on anything for fear of jeopardizing one. Last week, White House lawyers shot down the possibility of a pardon after Flynn’s brother demanded one on Twitter, and Trump’s notably left the door open to giving one. But Dean, citing his own experience with federal prosecutors digging into a White House, says he doesn’t believe the dangled suggestion of a future pardon would neutralize Flynn for Mueller.

Even if Trump pardons Flynn, “that doesn’t end his testimonial responsibilities,” Dean warned. “In fact, to the contrary, he can be indicted again for perjury.”

Dean's read on the possibility of Trump's impeachment is a mix of politics and law, weathered by experience and a clear disdain for this president. "You could impeach a president for being incompetent without committing a crime," he said. "What’s been argued by anybody who’s been subject to impeachment—this runs from presidents to judges to anybody, any officer of the government—they’ve always claimed that it has to be criminal activity, but really there’s no such standard. It’s high crimes and misdemeanors, as well as bribery and what have you."

As for the inevitable comparisons between the presidents themselves, Dean says that from what he can see—his time with Nixon was fleeting and decades in the past, and his experience with Trump is purely as an outside observer—he sees two men with authoritarian streaks, but only one with the knowledge of the powers of the office to really carry them out.

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Click here to subscribe to the full podcast and hear Dean discuss the moment when he realized he was in over his head as Watergate unfolded, and the sequel he’s thinking of writing to his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience, that he says was “prescient” about Trump.

“Trump isn’t likely to be found guilty of the same abuses of power that Nixon was because he doesn’t know he has the power to pick up the phone and tell the secretary of the Treasury to start auditing Bob Mueller’s tax returns. He hasn’t thought that through yet. Nixon had,” he said. “Trump doesn’t even know where the levers and buttons are that he can push and pull.”

Dean’s concern with the active efforts of Trump and his allies to undermine Mueller’s investigation goes deeper. During our interview, on his lap was a pile of research about the case law on the speech and debate clause in Article I of the Constitution, which he’d pulled up after reading a POLITICO article about how House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is leading a small group of House Republicans meeting secretly to discuss ways to call attention to claims of corruption within the FBI and Mueller probe. Dean argues that by bypassing the normal committee process, members of the group have negated whatever immunity they might have to legal repercussions by saying they’re acting within the realm of legislating.

“Members of Congress in both the House and Senate have tried to use the speech and debate clause to protect themselves from everything from bribery to taking care of constituents with the executive branch, and been shown that that clause is not that broad,” Dean said. “I think they’re on dangerous ground.”

In the meantime, Dean urges everyone in the West Wing to read some history about Watergate, Iran-Contra and how other White Houses have responded to legal trouble. “It’s really remarkable the little they’ve learned about what went on in the past. Every signal they’ve thrown from the get-go has been, ‘We’re covering this up,’” Dean said. “While Ty Cobb says he’s cooperating with the prosecutors, turning over documents and witnesses and what have you. Well, those witnesses should have all been marched down there to the grand jury and said, ‘We’ve got nothing to hide.’”

For all that he’s never stopped reliving the Watergate years, Dean seems surprised at how relevant what he went through 45 years ago remains. Not that everything is the same—for one, he thinks that in today’s media and political environment, Nixon might have finished his term.

“There’s social media, there’s the internet, the news cycles are faster. I think Watergate would have occurred at a much more accelerated speed than the 928 days it took to go from the arrest at the Watergate to the conviction of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Mitchell, et al.,” Dean said. “There’s more likelihood he might have survived if there’d been a Fox News.”

Nine hundred twenty-eight days. He repeats the number several times. Even at an accelerated pace and this many months on, he says, the Russiagate investigation feels closer to the beginning than the end. He’s reflected on the paranoia that’s running rampant through the West Wing, looking over shoulders at who might be wearing a wire or forwarding emails to the special counsel—but he also remembers well the dug-in feeling and insistence that maybe it’ll all pass. Watergate is now a part of history as a fully formed event. In the moment, in the midst of a scandal like that, he recalls, it’s far easier to jut out your chin and project optimism than it is to see where the prosecutors are really headed.

“When you’re in the bunker, you do catch the incoming fire and see it coming,” Dean said, “but you think you can weather it.”