 |
| March 11, 1989 (Houston Chronicle) |
My first job after law school was as
an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice. I reported for work September
1974, just weeks after Richard Nixon resigned.
In the years leading up to his
resignation, Nixon turned the Justice Department and FBI into his personal
fiefdom, enlisting his political appointees to reward his friends and penalize
his enemies.
Reports about how compromised the Justice Department had become generated enough public outrage to force the appointment of the first Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.
Reports about how compromised the Justice Department had become generated enough public outrage to force the appointment of the first Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.
Before Nixon’s mayhem was over, his
first two attorneys general were deep in legal trouble — John Mitchell
eventually served 19 months in prison — and his third resigned rather than
carry out Nixon’s demand to fire Cox.
Watergate also ushered into politics
a young man named Roger Stone, who, under the Committee for the Re-election of
the President (known then and forevermore as CREEP), helped devise lies and
conspiracy theories to harm Democrats.
After Nixon resigned, the entire
slimy mess of Watergate spawned a series of reforms. During the years I worked
at the Justice Department, regulations were put into place to insulate the FBI
and DOJ from political interference.
“Our law is not an instrument of
partisan purpose,” said Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general.
In Trump’s 2016 campaign, even Stone was back to his old dirty tricks of issuing lies and conspiracy theories directed at a Democratic opponent.
Trump has out-Nixoned Nixon: firing
FBI Director James Comey after asking him to “let go” of an inquiry into former
national security adviser Michael Flynn’s interactions with Russian officials;
repeatedly calling the Russian inquiry a politically motivated “witch hunt”;
launching an assault on special counsel Robert Mueller’s own investigation; and
appointing a lapdog attorney general, William Barr, to do whatever the
president wishes.
Barr has out-Nixoned Nixon’s
attorney general, John Mitchell: whitewashing Mueller’s conclusions; defending
Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine seeking dirt on Joe Biden;
opening an “intake process” for dirt Rudy Giuliani dredges up on Trump’s
political opponents; and continuing to respond to Trump’s every whim,
including, last week, suggesting Stone should get a milder sentence than the
one career prosecutors recommended.
In November, Stone was convicted of
obstructing Congress and seeking to intimidate witnesses. Last week,
prosecutors recommended that Stone be sentenced to between seven and nine years
in federal prison.
This prompted an enraged Trump to
tweet: “Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Hours later, Barr decided to
seek a more lenient sentence. In response, the career prosecutors withdrew from
the case. One decided to leave government altogether.
The incident caused such an uproar
that Barr was forced to declare last Thursday in a TV interview that he
wouldn’t be “bullied” and that Trump’s tweets make it “impossible to do my
job.”
But anyone who has watched Barr
repeatedly roll over for Trump saw this as a minimal face-saving gesture. As if
to underscore Barr’s subordinate role, on Friday Trump tweeted that he has the
“legal right” to meddle in cases handled by DOJ.
That’s as wrongheaded now as it was
when Nixon held the same view. If a president can punish enemies and reward
friends through the administration of justice, there can be no justice. Justice
requires impartial and equal treatment under the law. Partiality or inequality
in deciding whom to prosecute and how to punish invites tyranny.
A half-century ago, I witnessed the
near dissolution of justice under Nixon and the enablers then drawn to him,
such as Roger Stone. I served in the Justice Department when it and a
bipartisan Congress resolved that what had occurred would never happen
again.
But what occurred under Nixon is
happening again. Like Nixon, Trump has usurped the independence of the
Department of Justice for his own ends.
Unlike Nixon, Trump won’t resign. He
has too many enablers — not just a shameful attorney general but also shameless
congressional Republicans — who place a lower priority on justice than on
satisfying the most vindictive and paranoid occupant of the White House since
Richard Milhous Nixon.
Robert Reich's latest book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged
It, How To Fix It," out March 24. He is Chancellor's Professor of Public
Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the
Blum Center. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written 17 other books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock," "The Work of Nations," "Beyond
Outrage," and "The Common Good." He is a founding editor of the
American Prospect magazine, founder of Inequality Media, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning
documentaries "Inequality For All," and "Saving
Capitalism," both now streaming on Netflix.