UPDATE 1X. There are only a few similarities between Trump scandal and Watergate By The Wayne Madsen Report

UPDATE 1X. There are only a few similarities between Trump scandal and Watergate - By The Wayne Madsen Report

Update 1x. As this story was being published, President Trump created a huge similarity between the scandal surrounding his administration and the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. Trump indicated that during a dinner he had with then-FBI director James Comey on January 27, 2016, that Comey's comments to the president may have been "taped" by the Trump White House. It is not clear where Trump and Comey dined on the evening of January 27. However, whether or not it was in the White House's private dining room in the West Wing, the presence of a clandestine recording system anywhere in the Executive Mansion is very reminiscent of the Oval Office taping system disclosed to the Senate Watergate Committee by White House aide Alexander Butterfield during his testimony on July 16, 1973. It was the contents of the Oval Office tapes about Nixon's obstruction of justice and conspiracy that helped spell the end of his Nixon administration. While it is doubtful that Trump employs an arcane analog taping system in either the Oval Office or the private dining room, there is a possibility that something as common as an iPhone, which is constantly being used by Trump to send out Twitter messages, may have recorded Comey's content. Or, a more sophisticated recording system could have been used by Trump. Is this Trump's "taping system?" White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in a mid-day press conference, said Trump's tweet "speaks for itself," adding that had no comment on Trump's tweet about possible "tapes" of the dinner conversation with Comey or two separate phone conversations Trump said he had with the FBI director. In all three conversations, Trump said he asked Comey about any FBI investigations targeting the president and that Comey replied in the negative. Spicer said, "the president has nothing further to add on" Trump's tweet about "tapes." Some legal experts believe that Trump's statement that Comey "better not" leak anything to the press smacks of witness intimidation, since Comey has been formally invited to testify before the Congress. Trump's tweet indicates that if Comey begins leaking details of his recent firing by Trump, he might face public disclosure of the former FBI director's comments. Comey has indicated through colleagues that he is not worried about Trump's tapes. Comey also indicated that during the dinner conversation, Trump inquired about Comey's willingness to sign a loyalty pledge to the president and whether he was under an FBI investigation over the Trump campaign's Russia links. Comey reportedly said that he told Trump at dinner that while he would not swear to be "loyal," he would be "honest." Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper indicated in an interview with MS-NBC that Comey expressed angst to Clapper prior to Trump's invitation to dinner. In an interview with NBC News, Trump claims it was Comey who requested the dinner with Trump. The only thing consistent so far in the entire emerging constitutional crisis are the repetitive documented lies from Trump. In another morning tweet on May 12, Trump left open the possibility that he may cancel all future White House press briefings because he feels his own spokespeople are not always perfectly accurate. Nixon's antipathy toward the press is legendary. However, not even Nixon contemplated canceling the White House's daily press briefings as a way to punish the news media.

There are only a few similarities between the current scandal surrounding Donald Trump and the Watergate affair that brought down Richard Nixon. Before highlighting the similarities, it is important to stress one big difference. The corporate media was not full of political hacks, both Democrat and Republican, during Watergate. Today, the three cable news networks constantly feature as commentators and contributors partisan bloviators offering up nothing more than talking points for their own political persuasions. The "reporters" are not digging for scoops but echoing other news reports.

During Watergate, members of the press who reported on the scandal included a number of veterans of war reporting in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East. These were unflappable "shoe leather" reporters who plied the halls of main Justice and the favorite DC watering holes for off-duty FBI agents and congressional staffers to get the "back stories" on the Nixon White House. Today, the "talking heads" on the three cable news wastelands are merely repeating "tweets" and each other's viewpoints and opinions.

FBI director Comey first learned of his sacking by Trump while attending a minority recruiting conference being held at the Directors Guild of America building in Hollywood, California. Comey actually discovered he had been fired by reading from a crawl that flashed across a television screen. He first believed it was some sort of prank. Comey huddled with FBI officials before darting off to his FBI jet at Los Angeles International Airport and his flight back to DC. 

Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, meanwhile, dispatched FBI agents to seize and seal Comey's office. When Nixon ordered Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired on October 20, 1973, his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelhaus refused to carry out the sacking and resigned. Nixon ordered armed federal agents to seize control of the offices of Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus. However, Richardson and Ruckelshaus were smart enough to remove all Watergate-related files from their offices. 

It is not known whether Comey removed files related to the investigation of Trump and his campaign but it is clear that Trump took advantage of Comey being on the West Coast to make his move in ousting the FBI director. 

A major difference between the Saturday Night Massacre and the Comey sacking is that unlike Sessions and Rosenstein, Richardson and Ruckelshaus were honorable men. The same is not the case for the totally-corrupt Jeff Sessions and the Intelligence Community puppet Rosenstein. Rosenstein is trying to come off as a "good guy" in the emerging scandal surrounding Trump. 



Rosenstein replaced U.S. Attorney for Maryland Thomas DiBiagio, who was among the U.S. Attorneys fired by George W. Bush in January 2005. Bush wanted to clear out any U.S. Attorneys who posed a challenge for his second term. DiBiagio had been pursuing a corruption case against Maryland's GOP Governor Bob Ehrlich, an investigation that linked to the Pamela Martin and Associates sex escort firm run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey and GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. DiBiagio treated Palfrey as an immunized confidential informant against Ehrlich, members of the Maryland State Police, and Republicans in the Bush administration and Congress. Rosenstein, while he was not pursuing whistleblowers and alleged leakers in the National Security Agency, was burying all the information collected by DiBiagio on Ehrlich, Abramoff, and DiBiagio's assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna, who, in 2003, was found dead in Pennsylvania, stabbed 36 times with his own penknife. Luna's death was ruled a suicide by the Lancaster County coroner.

Rosenstein's job in 2005, as well as today, is to protect certain individuals from wide-ranging investigations of corruption. This political hatchet-man is now attempting to curry favor with members of Congress. Whether or nor Rosenstein helps put a political shiv in Trump's back is too early to ascertain but the combination of Sessions, one of the Senate's most corrupt members, and Rosenstein at Justice will not help move the investigation of Trump and his cronies forward. 

Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claims that she "heard from a large number of individuals who work at the FBI who said they're very happy with the president's decision"to fire Comey. Given several reports that rank-and-file FBI agents, as well as line attorneys at Main Justice, are fuming over Trump's firing of Comey, former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, look for a steady flow of "leaks" coming from "knowledgeable sources" within the Justice Department and the FBI. Leaks from inside the Watergate investigation are what eventually spelled Nixon's doom. Although it was rather "Nixonian" for Trump to fire FBI director Comey, one important difference between then and now is that Nixon never fired FBI director Clarence Kelly. Had he done so, Nixon would have likely left office long before August 1974. Trump's firing of Comey has created an FBI that is hostile to Trump's interests and that could spell disaster for the president.

Another important difference between Trump and Nixon is the underlying criminality of both cases. Nixon was impeached not for the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by Nixon campaign henchmen, a common burglary, but because of the obstruction of justice and criminal conspiracy to cover-up the White House's involvement in the burglary. In essence, it was not the crime but the cover-up that ended the Nixon presidency.

In the case of Trump, the underlying predicate of the cover-up by the White House, is not the investigation of Russian government interference in the 2016 election, but the possibility that illegal foreign money, much of it from private Russian oligarchs acting independently of the Kremlin, flowed into the Trump campaign in mid-2016. Trump, therefore, may be more like Spiro Agnew, Nixon's vice president who was indicted and resigned from office ten days before the Saturday Night Massacre. Agnew pleaded "no contest" to federal charges that he received bundles of cash bribes not only as governor of Maryland but as vice president. 



In Trump's case, his crime may have been to launder money from Russian and other foreign sources through his Trump Organization to his campaign. The word WMR has received from sources in Washington is that the same "follow the money" investigation that helped bring down Nixon and almost brought down Ronald Reagan in the Iran-contra scandal is at play in the Trump campaign scandal. For example, Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, was vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the nation's largest, that is known to launder large amounts of money for Russian oligarchs who principally reside in Russia and abroad. Some of these oligarchs are dual nationals of Israel, Switzerland, and Britain.

It is of particular interest that after stonewalling for a year on disclosing his federal tax returns, Trump, on the morning of May 12, chose to have his lawyers reveal that for the past ten years Trump's only receipt of funds from Russian sources was income from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and $95 million received from the sale of a property to Russian "fertilizer king" magnate and billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev in 2008. The timing of the release of these small tidbits from Trump's last ten years of returns is suspicious.

The revelation about Trump's taxes comes a day after FBI agents -- not from Maryland, but from the FBI's DC field office -- raided the offices of Strategic Campaign Group (SCG) in Annapolis, Maryland. The firm is a Republican campaign consultancy that its president, Kelley Rogers, claims was under investigation for a civil suit filed by a past client, failed 2013 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli. However, that suit was largely settled after SCG's's partner, Conservative Strike Force, agreed to pay the Cuccinelli campaign $85,000. Cuccinelli is now a talking head surrogate for Trump on cable news. The FBI refused to reveal why it raided the Annapolis office. 

The senior adviser for SCG is Dennis Whitfield, a former director of BKSH and Associates. BKSH was formed in 1996 upon the merger of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly with Gold and Liebengood. Paul Manafort and Roger Stone left the newly-formed company. Manafort is reportedly a target of the FBI investigation on foreign money flows into the Trump campaign. Stone is also reportedly a target of the FBI's probe, which apparently includes grand juries now empaneled in Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, DC.

It was Nixon's Commerce Secretary, Maurice Stans, who, as finance chairman for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) who is believed to have come up with the one million dollars in cash to pay-off the Watergate burglars. Stans was eventually convicted of violating election laws and accepting illegal campaign contributions. If, as vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, Ross used the bank to launder Russian oligarch money to the Trump campaign, he could end up being charged as a co-conspirator, as was Stans in Watergate.

Attorney General Sessions appears to have violated his own recusal from the "Russia investigation" by being involved with the firing of Comey. It was the director of Nixon's CREEP, Attorney General John Mitchell, who was one of the chief targets in the Watergate investgation, primarily for obstruction of justice and conspiracy. So far, Sessions's involvement in the Comey firing skirt on the edge of potential obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges.

There is another similarity between Watergate and the Trump scandal. Nixon's political career died as the result of a thousand leaks. Likewise, Trump is looking to be swept away by a deluge of leaks, many from his own White House staff.

A week in office, Trump brings on constitutional crisis By Wayne Madsen Report

 

January 30-31, 2017 -- A week in office, Trump brings on constitutional crisis

By Wayne Madsen Report
The much-anticipated constitutional crisis many feared would come about under President Trump's bombastic style of leadership took only one week into his administration to be realized. Trump's Executive Order banning visitors, including U.S. permanent resident "green card" holders and those with valid U.S. visas, was one of the most poorly planned and implemented White House regulation in recent memory.

At airports across the world and at immigration checkpoints at airports across the United States, permanent U.S. residents were held in detention and some were put on planes back to their points of travel origination. When five federal judges issued temporary stays on the implementation of Trump's executive order, the White House balked. For some reason, the Trump administration believes the judiciary is subservient to the executive branch. It took one federal judge, John Sirica, the chief judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and a Republican nominated by Dwight Eisenhower, to show President Richard Nixon that his "imperial presidency" stopped with the federal judiciary. Sirica, who was a close personal friend of boxing stat Jack Dempsey, went several rounds in court with the Nixon administration over the Watergate scandal. In the end, Sirica delivered a knock out punch to several of Nixon's closest advisers and, eventually, Nixon resigned in disgrace.

The difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon, a lawyer and a former member of the U.S. House and Senate, understood the brinkmanship in which he was engaging with the courts and the independent special prosecutor. Trump, a pampered real estate mogul who was handed his wealth from his Nazi- and Ku Klux Klan-supporting father, Fred Trump, has not the first idea of what kind of constitutional fire he is playing with by ignoring the orders of five federal judges.

Certain pro-Trump media outlets -- the "usual suspects" -- are claiming the five judges are all Democrats. That is one of Trump's "alternate facts." The first judge to issue a stay on Trump's visa ban executive order was Ann Donnelly, a former New York state prosecutor , who was nominated by Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. A native of Michigan and a graduate of Ohio State's Moritz College of Law, nothing suggests that Donnelly is a rank-and-file Democrat. In fact, the Republican Senate voted in 2015 to confirm Donnelly in a 95-2 vote.

When a number of New York City area politicians showed up at JFK International Airport with a copy of Judge Donnelly's order and demanded the release of detainees, clueless Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents feigned ignorance because their ultimate boss, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, had not been briefed beforehand about Trump's cockamamie and ill-prepared executive order.

The next judge to issue a temporary restraining order was Leonie Brinkema, a no-nonsense judge sitting on the bench of the national security "Rocket docket" of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. So named the "rocket docket" court because it often sides with the government in national security-related cases, it would normally be the last court where a national security matter would be ruled against. However, Brinkema, who sentenced the "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui to life imprisonment in the Colorado "Supermax" prison, ruled that Trump's executive order was stayed and that removal of green card holders from Dulles International Airport was suspended for seven days.

Brinkema also ordered lawyers be given access to those being detained at Dulles, an order that was immediately ignored when lawyers and three U.S. House members, Virginia Representatives Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly, and Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, as well as New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, were denied access to the detained passengers at the airport by members of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) police, who are answerable not to the DHS or CPB but to the independent MWAA commission, members of which are appointed by the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of DC, with only three appointed by the president. The fact that glorified airport rent-a-cops disregarded a federal court order and those of three members of the House and one U.S. senator is a definite troubling bellwether of things to come.

The third judge to issue a stay on the White House order was Thomas Zilly of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle. Zilly, who ordered all deportations stopped by Trump, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan. So much for the brain dead meme by Trump supporters that the order was nullified by "Democrat judges," a major "alternate fact" in Zilly's case.

The fourth and fifth judges who temporarily stayed Trump's deportation order were U.S. magistrate judge Judith Dein and District Court judge Allison Burroughs, both of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston. Dein was nominated by Bill Clinton and Burroughs by Obama. Both were confirmed by Republican-controlled Senates, Dein in 2000 and Burroughs in 2014.

There are comments on a number of dubious pro-Trump websites that are calling for "action" against the five judges. This is where certain Internet keyboard jocks should be very careful. Violence against federal judges by purveyors of the same neo-Nazi hatred advanced by Fred Trump in the 1920s and '30s and by Trump counsel Steve Bannon today is not unknown in the United States. In 1989, U.S. Eleventh Circuit of Appeals judge Robert Vance was assassinated by a mail bomb delivered to his Alabama home. Moody was also convicted for the assassination of civil rights lawyer Robbie Robinson in a mail bomb explosion at his home in Savannah, Georgia. The convicted assassin, Walter Leroy Moody, Jr., was a habitué of Klan meetings throughout the South. In 1979, Judge John Wood, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, was assassinated by Charles Harrison, a reputed member of the right-wing kill squad that assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In 1988, Judge Richard Daronco of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan was assassinated by retired New York police officer Charles Koster, who then killed himself. The FBI revealed there were several "loose ends" in the case. In 2005, the husband and mother of U.S. Judge Joan Lefkow of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago were murdered at the judge's Chicago home. Neo-Nazi Matthew Hale had previously been convicted of soliciting a contract hit man to assassinate Judge Lefkow.



New York Times article refers to the Memorial Day 1927 arrest of President Trump's father, Fred Trump, at an anti-Catholic KKK march in Queens. The apple did not fall far from the tree.

The second Trump executive order that has turned the White House upside down is his dictate to demote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from members of the "Principals Committee" of the National Security Council. The Principals Committee, which normally include both the JCS chair and DNI, normally meet once a week. In fact, JCS chairman, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, and DNI-designate Dan Coats, have been relegated to the rank of NSC "deputies." The NSC "Deputies Committee" meets more often than the principals but they carry much less clout. Former CIA director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told NBC News: "My biggest concern is there are actually, under the law, only two statutory advisers to the National Security Council and that's the Director of Central Intelligence, or the DNI, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think pushing them out of the National Security Council meetings, except when their specific issues are at stake, is a big mistake." In other words, Trump's order removed the two NSC members whose membership is based on the law. It is strike two for Trump, as far as his ignorance of the law is concerned.

There are reports that two of Trump's closest advisers -- chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer -- have come close to resigning from a White House they believe is operating by the seat of its pants.

In what might be considered strike three, Trump elevated his political counselor Bannon to the Principles Committee of the NSC. George W. Bush's counselor Karl Rove and Obama's counselor David Axelrod sat in on a few NSC meetings but they were not members nor were they permitted to speak.

The NSC decision by Trump did not sit well with General Dunford's old Marine Corps colleague, retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis. There are rumblings in the Pentagon that Mattis is not at all pleased that his four-star Marine colleague has essentially been replaced on the NSC by Bannon, whose highest rank in the Navy was Lieutenant. At the Washington elite Alfalfa Club dinner on the evening of January 29, Mattis's unhappiness over the treatment of Dunford was the talk of the gossip circuit as was General John Kelly's irate reaction to the implementation of a visa ban order at Homeland Security over which he had zero input. White House sources at the dinner told The Atlantic's Steve Clemons that the visa ban was ordered not to be discussed with anyone outside the White House or, as was the case with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), even within the White House.

Spicer and Priebus, both of whom attended the Alfalfa Club dinner with Trump taking a pass, may have been using the absence of their vitriolic boss to vent their spleens to other attendees over drinks and dinner. Spicer, who, as a former press secretary for the U.S. Trade Representative under George W. Bush, should know what the satirical Onion is, retweeted one of their spoofs concernbing himself:


"The Onion" spoof proclaiming the Trump administration will "provide the American public with robust and clearly articulated misinformation" may not have been a mistaken re-tweet by the embattled press secretary who once worked for Priebus at the Republican National Committee.

The last president who shut the JCS out from the White House's decision-making process was Nixon. That did not work out too well for him in the long run.

There were early concerns about Trump placing so many generals in the Cabinet. So far, the generals -- Mattis and Kelly, with the addition of Dunford at JCS -- may be the only people standing between a would-be dictator and the U.S. Constitution. The clock had longer to tick out on Nixon. Trump's fast-moving clock toward impeachment is now at September 1973 in Nixonian terms.

Ghost of Richard Nixon haunts Hillary Clinton by Wayne Madsen

Ghost of Richard Nixon haunts Hillary Clinton

As the nation reflects on the 40th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon from office, Washington's pundits are wondering aloud about "future Nixons" who might assume the presidency. One name that keeps popping up again and again as a person who has the "air of Nixon" about her is all-but-declared 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 

At a July 30 panel held at The Washington Post building, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and retired Post columnist Elizabeth Drew commented on the similarities between Mrs. Clinton and Nixon and the "air" of Nixon that surrounds Clinton. The major similarity with Nixon is Clinton's tendency to be loose with the truth. WMR's editor was told by the ghost writer for Clinton's 2003 "autobiography," Living History, that the book is packed with falsehoods. Many of Clinton's claims, when fact checked, turned out to be false or hugely embellished. When the ghost writer brought these to Clinton's attention, she barked back, "I'm paying you to write this fucking book, not question it."

And it's not merely Mrs. Clinton's tendency to lie and use foul language that has many observing Nixonian traits in the former First Lady and Secretary of State. In the 1960 presidential election, Vice President Nixon distanced himself from incumbent President Dwight Eisenhower, who dearly wanted to eject Nixon from the ticket in the 1956 election, by suggesting that Ike was soft on communism. The charge stemmed from Eisenhower's refusal to be drawn into the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez to help unseat Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser from power in Cairo and his unwillingness to confront the USSR after its 1956 invasion of Hungary. Nixon was also well aware that Eisenhower secretly offered the Soviets a deal to jointly cooperate in space exploration and end the costly "space race" for both nations.

Similarly, Clinton has openly criticized President Obama over his refusal to militarily back Syrian guerrillas attempting to oust Syrian President Bashar al Assad from power. Obama has reportedly branded the charge that his inaction caused the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or "Islamic State" as "horse shit." Ike reportedly used similar barnyard epithets about his vice president.

Eisenhower, when asked before the 1960 election if he could name one thing Nixon accomplished as vice president, laughed and said, "If you give me a week, I might think of one." The slap by Ike was seen as a boost to the John F. Kennedy campaign and it was used in Kennedy TV ads.

Nixon believed that the presidency was stolen from him in 1960 by Kennedy. Nevertheless, Nixon was convinced that it was his manifest destiny to become president, even after his humiliating defeat for California governor in 1962 by Edmund "Pat" Brown. Similarly, Clinton believes that Obama took away what many considered to be her "coronation" as president in 2008. She and her husband, Bill Clinton, still carry grudges against the many Democrats who, early on, supported Obama. Nixon, as is known from the Watergate tapes and other records, was the supreme grudge keeper, blaming a number of people for his electoral losses in 1960 and 1962. Nixon carried all of his grudges into the White House in 1969 and used them as a basis for his infamous "enemy's list."

Many Washington observers believe that the Clintons also have a list of political enemies that they would bring into the White House in order to exact revenge.

Mrs. Clinton also recently publicly distanced herself from the Obama administration. Clinton endorsed Israel's military occupation of the West Bank even as her successor at the State Department, John Kerry, was attempting to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks in spite of Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza that killed a thousand and a half people, many of them innocent children, women, handicapped, and elderly. Mrs. Clinton essentially came out against a Palestinian state while Obama and Kerry are still pressing Israel to maintain its previously-held commitment to a free and independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza.        
Products of the same tide? Hillary Clinton's and Richard Nixon's worrisome similarities.

While Nixon and Mrs. Clinton both made statements that were viewed as "anti-Semitic" over their political careers, the commitment of both to Israel remains unquestioned. Nixon ranted about Jewish influence in the courts, media, and universities but was willing to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union in 1974 in order to save Israel from a joint Egyptian-Soviet military assault. 

Although Mrs. Clinton once referred to Paul Fray, her husband's 1974 campaign manager for a congressional seat in Arkansas, as a "fucking Jew bastard," her loyalty to Israel and its right-wing government is rock solid. Mrs. Clinton was also known for having some choice words, some of them referring to religion, about her husband's White House aide Rahm Emanuel early on in the Clinton administration. It is well known that Mrs. Clinton wanted Emanuel, who once served in the Israel Defense Force and whose father served in an Israeli terrorist outfit fighting the British, fired from the White House staff. But Mrs. Clinton's anti-Semitic outbursts, similar to Nixon's, never shook her support for Israel.

Ironically, before she married Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, then 27, served as an attorney on the Senate Watergate Committee investigating Nixon. Her supervisor, Jerry Zeifman, claimed he fired Rodham and refused to give her a recommendation for employment because he considered her to be a liar and an "unethical, dishonest lawyer." Rodham was accused of removing files on the 1970 impeachment attempt by the House Judiciary Committee of Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice William. The files set a precedent on the ability of an impeachment subject to hire counsel to represent them in the House proceedings. Rodham removed the documents so they would not be available to House and Senate Watergate investigators who were being asked by the White House and congressional Republicans to allow Nixon to have counsel cross examine witnesses in the House impeachment hearings. It was agreed in 1970 that Douglas would have counsel present in the House proceedings to cross-examine witnesses but Rodham had no intention of affording that privilege to Nixon. Rodham's misdeeds were supported by her colleague Bernard Nussbaum, who later became her husband's White House counsel and helped cover up aspects of the alleged 1993 suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. 

Mrs. Clinton and Nixon have one major difference. 

Nixon was a lifelong Republican. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, had been a member of her high school's Young Republican Club and she served as a "Goldwater Girl," championing the 1964 candidacy of Republican Barry Goldwater's right-wing campaign against Lyndon Johnson. Mrs. Clinton later switched to the Democratic Party, supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1968. However, at the same time she was supporting McCarthy, she was interning for House GOP Minority leader Gerald Ford and assisting the Nelson Rockefeller campaign against Nixon at the 1968 Republican National Convention. By claiming to be working for McCarthy and Rockefeller, while also working for Ford, Clinton appears to have been more of a Karl Rove-like political agent of influence than a committed candidate or party loyalist. 

Unlike Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic Party, no one ever questioned Nixon's loyalty to the GOP. And that fact, alone, potentially makes a Hillary Clinton presidency potentially more dangerous than that of Nixon. In the end, it was a delegation of the Republican Party's gray eminences of Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes that convinced Nixon to resign for the good of the country. Mrs. Clinton's chameleon-like loyalties would make her a tougher person for her own Democratic Party to deal with if she decided to violate the Constitution on a Nixonian scale. And that is why some seasoned political observers in Washington are worried about a Hillary Clinton presidency.