more Slate - Is This Donald Trumps Saturday Night Massacre?
A Nixon biographer on two big differences between 1973 and 2017.
By Isaac Chotiner
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/05/is_trump_s_firing_of_james_comey_his_saturday_night_massacre.html
On Tuesday, President Trump fired James Comey, the director of the FBI, whose agency is overseeing an investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. To discuss Trump’s decision, and whether it has Nixonian parallels, I spoke by phone with the historian of John A. Farrell, the author of the new book Richard Nixon: A Life. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed the details of the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon’s mental state during the Watergate scandal, and the importance of bipartisanship to keeping the executive branch in check.
Isaac Chotiner: As a historian of Nixon, what do you make of the comparisons we have been hearing today to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre?
John A. Farrell: There are two big differences. One is that Trump is Trump, and this could just be Trump being Trump. And the other is that the House and the Senate are controlled by the Republican Party, and so we may never find out what happened. The actions that the president and his staff have taken, their behavior, mirrors that of Nixon and his staff when they were frantically trying to cover up felonious behavior, including in the president’s case, obstruction of justice. But up to this point, we don’t have any clear proof or evidence that this is something more than just politics—that it is a matter of law. So it would seem to me that the logical thing to do to restore confidence in the integrity of the government would be to have a Select Committee with the Democrats having real influence, or having Attorney General Sessions appoint a special counsel, as he has the power to do, to investigate whether this is Trump being Trump or Nixonian.
Tell me a bit more about the specifics about how the Saturday Night Massacre went down.
snip - worthwhile, important read.
