Tag: Watergate

Posted on

The Wednesday Night Massacre — The battle between Trump and America is joined

The Wednesday Night Massacre

The battle between Trump and America is joined

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 14th, 2025

Some of you may remember the Saturday Night Massacre. It was the turning point of the Watergate scandal in 1973, when it was revealed that Richard Nixon had taped his conversations in the Oval Office—which would likely include conversations pertaining to the break-in at Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate hotel and subsequent conversations about the cover-up of the crime and possible White House complicity.

The special prosecutor investigating the case, Archibald Cox, promptly issued a subpoena for the tapes. Nixon refused, and ordered Cox to drop the subpoena. Cox refused. Nixon then ordered the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered the assistant attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. He refused and resigned. Finally, Nixon found a willing toady in the contemptible Robert Bork who said, in effect, oh, hey, master, no problem! Cox is gone. Bork went on to become a hero to the morally bankrupt conservative movement, even getting nominated to the Supreme Court before people remembered who he was.

The fiasco pretty much sealed Nixon’s fate. Americans hadn’t yet been subjected to 50 years of right wing propaganda designed to erode their confidence in democracy, freedom, justice and themselves. They realized that Nixon’s behavior was not that of an unjustly accused president, and his support plummeted.

Now here we are not one month into the most criminally capricious and ethically destitute administration in US history, and an even bigger massacre has taken place.

Eric Adams is the mayor of New York City, and he is a piece of work. He was, at best, a shady cop for many years, and rose to captain. He retired, got elected to the state senate, then became Brooklyn borough president, and then ran for mayor, winning handily against an inept vigilante.

Adams’ ethics, if he ever had any, vanished, and by 2024 he had been indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. He was the first mayor to face federal charges while still in office.

Then Trump got elected, and set about destroying rule of law. After Matt Gaetz flamed out, he picked his second-best alternative, Pam Bondi, to run the Justice Department. (Yes, she was sloppy seconds to Matt Gaetz, so don’t get your hopes up.) The DoJ immediately became what Trump claimed it was when it was prosecuting him: corrupt, incompetent, and politicized. (Trump ALWAYS accuses others of being what he is himself).

Trump needed scapegoats who couldn’t fight back to blame the country’s problems upon, and immigrants are his version of the Jews under Hitler. He was delighted that Eric Adams shared his views and wished to punish people in order to make it look patriotic. Eric Adams wouldn’t be much use in prison. So he told Bondi to make the charges go away, just like he did with hundreds awaiting trial for January 6th, and she passed word down to one of her flunkies, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, to make the case go away. Emil, no hero, passed word down to one Danielle Renee Sassoon, who was appointed the acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York by Trump just the month before. Bove claimed that the charges against Adams, a Democrat, were politically motivated. (The charges were brought under Merrick Garland during the Biden Administration.) Bove no doubt presumed that Sassoon would be as corrupt, nuts and/or servile as all Trump’s other appointments.

Well, turns out she isn’t.

She wrote a seven page letter detailing why she could not follow Bove’s orders to drop the case against Adams, and resigned effective immediately. Starting to sound familiar?

It turned into an avalanche. According to an MSN report, “According to a person briefed on the matter, after Sassoon refused to dismiss the case, the Trump administration directed John Keller, the acting head of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, to do so.

“Keller also resigned on Thursday, two people familiar with the matter said. Kevin Driscoll, a senior official in the department’s criminal division, has also resigned, one of the people said.

“Three other deputies in the Justice Department’s public corruption unit – Rob Heberle, Jenn Clarke, and Marco Palmieri – also resigned on Thursday over the orders to dismiss the Adams case, a person familiar with the matter said.”

Wow. This already makes the Saturday Night Massacre look like an office spat over nuking popcorn in the microwave and stinking up the place. Seven resignations on principle, and counting.

An army of skunks couldn’t stink up the place the way Trump has.

More resignations are expected as all the decent people get out, leaving the Justice Department (and our dependence on a fair and just legal system) in the hands of obedient strutting swine and toadies. Good luck, America. I’ll probably end up in Gitmo for writing this.

Mind you, the massacre 52 years ago took place when lack of evidence made the entire Watergate case a matter of “he said she said.” Many people sided with Nixon in good faith. That’s not the case here.

Bove’s order to Sassoon made it clear that there was a fiddle in the case. Again, according to MSN: “Sassoon said the memo Bove wrote directing the case be dropped makes clear Adams is being granted leniency in exchange for assisting the federal government with its immigration priorities, citing a meeting Jan. 31 that she, Bove, Adams’s attorney and members of her office attended.

‘Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,’ Sassoon said in the letter Wednesday.”

Rachel Maddow reported that the order was to dismiss the charges against Adams “without prejudice” which, Maddow explained, meant that they were to be suspended rather than dropped entirely, and would be left hanging over Adams’ head for as long as he was in office and carrying out Trump’s pogrom against immigrants for him. No hint of coercion there, right?

It’s been 52 years since the Saturday Night Massacre. Since then, Americans have been subjected to a half century of endless propaganda designed to erode American confidence in democracy, freedom, justice and self-respect. The Massacre effectively ended Nixon. Will this end Trump? With a corrupt Court and servile, cringing Republican congress? Will the public finally rise up against this criminal?

When the right decided to avenge Watergate and end the American experiment, they probably didn’t think it would culminate in Donald Trump, already known back then as a vicious and unreliable clown.

But their cause is a broken and twisted one, so it’s no surprise their hirelings are broken and twisted people.

All the decent people in the Justice Department are getting out. What remains are swine and lower than swine.

Good luck to all of us

Posted on

Consciousness of Guilt – He did it.

Consciousness of Guilt

He did it.

Spetember 26th 2019

Robert Harrington, in a piece titled the same as this one, was kind enough to pull the legal definition of “Consciousness of Guilt” from RationalWiki. It reads:

Consciousness of guilt is a legal concept and a type of circumstantial evidence of guilt. It is based on a criminal suspect who demonstrates a guilty conscience by their actions or speech. Some examples of consciousness of guilt are:


Fleeing from the crime scene or jurisdiction
False statements and lies
False alibi
Changing one’s name or personal appearance
Concealing or destroying evidence
Witness intimidation or bribery
Generally, any attempts to cover up a crime
Simply put, consciousness of guilt is an action or statement that a person accused of a crime makes that an innocent person would not make.

We’re in a very peculiar situation where no honest person can look at the evidence, mostly provided by Trump’s own words and actions, and have any reasonable doubt that he is guilty of obstruction of justice, a cover-up, misuse of office, and efforts to impede legal investigations into his actions through working corruption of office [cough, Barr and Kavanaugh, /cough].

During Watergate, even those of us willing to believe the worst of Nixon had, if not a frisson of doubt, at least the frustrated knowledge that the available evidence might not be enough to get an honest verdict of guilty. At least, not until the 8-0 Supreme Court ruling that forced Nixon to release the unredacted tapes. Then, finally, there was no longer any doubt. Nixon plunged in public opinion polls, Republicans stopped putting up any real resistance to the impeachment hearings, and a head count in the House made it clear Nixon would be impeached on at least four counts.

Two weeks later, he was gone.

In 48 hours, we covered the same amount of ground that the Watergate scandal covered between July 13, 1973 and July 24, 1974. Why those two dates, slightly over a year apart? The first was the day Alexander Butterfield revealed to Congress that Nixon taped all his Oval Office discussions, and the world suddenly realized that here was evidence that could impeach or exculpate Nixon. The second date was when the SC said, “Turn ‘em over.”

The tapes were released to the public on August 5th, and included the famous ‘smoking gun’ tape in which Nixon was advised of the break-in. He resigned on the 9th.

Unfortunately on this zeitgeist-y anniversary of August 5th, 1974, I don’t expect to see Trump gone in three days. Oh, it could happen, but Trump is not Nixon. Nixon was corrupt and vicious, if by an order of magnitude less so than Trump, but he was also intelligent, self-aware, and mostly sane. Trump is clearly none of those things and in a nation that had a healthier attitude toward the rich and famous, he would have been gone a year ago. If his candidacy was ever taken seriously in the first place. Hopefully America has learned wealth and power isn’t the same thing as wit and wisdom.

It’s going to get really ugly, and nobody can really say in what ways it will happen. We do know that he’s trying to implicate and possibly destroy vice President Mike Pence. Aside from the usual Trumpian strategy of trying to shift blame to the nearest available target, there is the possibility that he’s hoping the prospect of Nancy Pelosi moving into the first-in-line slot might dissuade Congress from kicking him out of the White House.

The Republicans are probably concluding that Trump has reached the end of his shelf life, and they are doing their own calculations. If I know my Republicans, they are thinking that if Trump abruptly resigns, there’s a good chance there will be scattered violence among what David Brin memorably called “legions of McVeighs” and a possible recession. If general conditions did go south, wouldn’t it be ever so much better if they could play their usual game of gleefully and visciously blaming the nearest Democratic president for all the unrest and bad conditions that they themselves caused? Additionally, Mike Pence at best would be an underwhelming president, and carry with him the stench of Trump’s criminality and cruelty. Indeed, given his complicity in many of Trump’s scandals—yes the same complicity Trump is trying to bring to our attention now—it’s quite likely that the Democrats will be having impeachment hearings for Pence, and an aroused electorate would be preparing another blue tidal wave. A year of Pelosi, they think, could work to their advantage, especially since they still have the Senate and so can keep her hands tied whilst portraying her as a do-nothing ‘caretaker’ President.

But first things first. They have an avowed criminal and seditionist in the Oval Office, and they need to figure out a way to get him out before he takes into his head to drop a nuke on San Francisco or something.

The Dems are not going to rush to an impeachment vote. Yes, they have the evidence, the most solid evidence a Congress has had in an impeachment process since Nixon released the tapes. But they want to implicate the whole rotten gang—Pence, Barr, the family whelps, all of them. They are truly a cancer on America, and if some of the Democrats are using a political calculus of their own about the advantages of full, lengthy hearings, it’s a rare situation where such calculation and serving the national interest are actually congruent.

Yes, I would like to see Trump gone tomorrow. But I think it’s important that they identify, indict, and convict their entire rats’ nest of corruption that has poisoned the county.

Otherwise we will remain enveloped in the miasmic stench of Trumpism. And that cannot be good.

error

Enjoy Zepps Commentaries? Please spread the word :)