Is January 6, 2021 the New Watergate?

 

A piece in the Washington Post lays out the manner in which Mark Meadows' effort to cover up Donald Trump's coup attempt on January 6, 2021, is rapidly falling apart. Ironically, some of what is making Meadows' effort crumble is documentation and text messages Meadows turned over to the House Committee before deciding to refuse to cooperate.  Even more fun is the fact that many text messages are showing the lie of claims by Fox News mouth pieces and congressional Republicans that the coup attempt and assault on the U.S. Capitol were no big deal.  Moreover, the taxt messages - some of which have beem aloud in the House Committee hearings suggest (i) the senders believed Trump controlled the crowd and could have made the assault stop and (ii) the event was preplanned.  The big questions not yet answered are whether Trump and his acolytes were involved in the planning or, if not initially involved in the planning knew about it and allowed the assault to take place after Trump told the mob he "was with them" as he directed them to the Capitol.  Those of us over a certain age remember the Watergate hearings and how it took time for the investigation to jell and ultimately take down Richard Nixon.  A piece in Salon looks at the parallels and suggests the bottom may yet drop out of the cover up effort for Trump and members of Congress who may well have had involvement.  Here are article excerpts:

It happened twice on Tuesday, and one person was involved both times: Liz Cheney. The House Jan. 6 committee has been moving in the same direction the Watergate investigation moved for a while now, but the thing with Mark Meadows' text messages is what turned the corner. Cheney took center stage the way Sen. Howard Baker gained the spotlight during the Senate Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973 when he asked his famous question: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

Baker's question was prompted by the testimony of former White House counsel John Dean, who had just blown the roof off the Senate hearing room when he testified that he discussed the cover-up of the Watergate burglary with Richard Nixon at least 35 times. Cheney's question was apparently prompted by the revelation of a series of texts between former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and several members of Congress on Jan. 6 as the assault on the Capitol was underway. "We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes," Ms. Cheney stated grimly. "Mr. Meadows's testimony will bear on a key question in front of this committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress's official proceeding to count electoral votes?"

At the time they asked their questions, Baker and Cheney had access to more information than that which was provided to the public. Dean had been questioned for days by the Watergate committee's staff of lawyers and investigators before he took the oath and began his testimony in full view of the entire country — the hearings were being covered live by all three major television networks, something impossible to imagine today. 

In the case of Mark Meadows, staff lawyers and investigators for the Jan. 6 committee have interviewed, under oath, some 300 witnesses and gone through tens of thousands of pages of evidence that has been provided to the committee. At the time Cheney asked her bombshell question on the floor of the House on Tuesday, we had been informed that Meadows exchanged texts with several Fox News hosts as well as Donald Trump Jr., all of whom were trying to get Meadows to influence the president to call off the assault on the Capitol. Cheney read several texts written by lawmakers who were cowering in their offices off the floors of the House and Senate chambers trying to convince Meadows to do the same thing. 

[H]er question indicates that at least some of the testimony they have taken from witnesses, and other texts she has seen from lawmakers, indicate that the committee has concluded there was a conspiracy between Donald Trump and lawmakers from one or both sides of the Capitol to disrupt the counting of electoral ballots and possibly to influence several battleground states to change their slates of electors from Joe Biden to Trump.

All of that is speculation at this point, but it's important to remember that investigations like Watergate and the assault on the Capitol largely don't unfold in the light of day. Here's how the New York Times framed it on Wednesday: "In closed-door interviews held in a nondescript federal office building near the Capitol, Ms. Cheney has emerged as a leader and central figure on the panel, known for drilling down into the details of the assignment she views as the most important of her political career. She is well-versed in the criminal code and often uses language borrowed from it to make clear she believes the former president and others face criminal exposure." . . They've gathered far more information than they've made public, and late on Tuesday they announced they will begin holding hearings in January. 

But I think we can begin to see the outlines of where they're headed in the question Cheney asked during the debate over Meadows' contempt citation. What we know publicly right now is that the assault on the Capitol was planned in advance and organized at least in part by several right-wing militia groups, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, possibly with the help of figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. Both of them have been subpoenaed by the committee and one of them, Bannon, has already been found in contempt of Congress and is facing federal charges for refusing to testify. 

We knew fairly early on that the Watergate break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters was planned by the burglars themselves, assisted by figures on the edges of the Nixon campaign like Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. What we didn't know was whether the conspiracy reached into the White House and involved the president, Richard Nixon. 

The White House tapes would reveal the truth about that conspiracy, and it's beginning to look like the Meadows text messages, along with other evidence gathered by the Jan. 6 committee, will reveal a similar White House connection to the assault on the Capitol. The break-in at the Watergate was a crime, and so was the break-in at the Capitol. Covering up the planning and organization behind Watergate turned out to be a crime that brought down a president. It's looking like covering up the same kind of conspiracy involving the assault on the Capitol will turn out to be yet another crime, one that may bring down several members of Congress, perhaps to face federal charges for a crime that Liz Cheney has already named out loud. 

Things are getting interesting, folks. The assault on the Capitol is being Watergated.