Friday, April 14, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Nixon lied. Richard Nixon, the worst president in my lifetime (though the poll is still open), lied about his knowledge of and involvement in the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in 1972.
His downfall was a tape — an old-school thread-on-a-reel recording of a conversation with trusted adviser H.R. Haldeman revealing how they would hinder any investigation into the crime.
Nixon resigned from the presidency in August 1974, the summer after I graduated from high school, and not long after that “smoking gun” tape found daylight. It choked his circle of support, even among fellow Republicans.
How lucky am I to have this sort of historic political drama happen twice in my lifetime?
Charges that Nixon obstructed justice by using “hush money” (does it actually ever make anyone hush?) and pushed government officials to stifle the investigation hung over him like a sword of Damocles. Until Republican Party leaders told him they had the votes to convict him.
On Aug. 8, Nixon boarded a helicopter on the south lawn of the White House lawn bound for Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where he caught a flight. A flight bound for infamy.
A month later, President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor.
Thirty-four felony charges — that Donald Trump used hush money to stifle Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor and director (her given name is Stephanie Clifford) with whom he’d had an affair, and lied in business documents to shield its true purpose and prevent it from adversely affecting the 2016 presidential campaign — hang over the real estate developer and former president like the sword that dangled over Nixon nearly half a century ago.
In a twist on a phrase made famous by another Republican president, Ronald Reagan: Here we go again.
I’m in no way making light of what’s transpiring now. I don’t claim to be an expert on what will unfold in a New York courtroom over the coming months, but from this vantage, Trump looks to be in serious trouble.
Not just in New York. Investigations elsewhere could spawn more charges. In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is assessing whether Trump illegally tried to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. (The “smoking gun” there may be yet another recording, this of a phone call Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump pushed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”
There, too, remain special probes into Trump’s role in instigating the seditious Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his handling of classified documents (which nobody seems to handle appropriately).
Claims from some corners and crevasses within the Republican Party that the charges, leveled by a grand jury after an exhaustive investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, are “political” are mere partisan whining.
Especially a Twitter tantrum from Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., labeling the charges an “attack on democracy.” That’s truly laughable since Tuberville is infecting the entire U.S. military with his own partisan virus.
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tuberville is singlehandedly blocking a flotilla of key senior military nominations because he doesn’t believe the brave women who’ve sworn to protect our democracy should have access to reproductive health care, in accordance with military policy.
Just hush, Senator.
Full disclosure: The payoff at the heart of the charges against Trump was partially facilitated by trusted adviser David Pecker, my former boss at American Media Inc., where I worked as editor-in-chief of Men’s Fitness. Pecker was among many who testified before the grand jury brought its indictment.
Just before Nixon’s helicopter left the White House lawn, the former president said: “I found myself thinking not of the past but of the future. What could I do now?”
The look on Trump’s face as he sat in the courtroom April 4 awaiting the charges against him to be revealed seemed to emote the same sentiment.
What can he do now? Not a darn thing. Aren’t we lucky? Again.
Roy Johnson is a columnist for al.com.
