Richard Nixon's team deleted 18.5 minutes of a phone conversation regarding the theft of Democratic Party documents from his Watergate Building offices on June 17, 1972. The gap in Donald Trump's call records at the time in which his people stormed the Capitol to prevent the proclamation of Joe Biden's victory, on January 6, 2021, amounts to 7 hours and 37 minutes; that is, at 457 minutes: seven times more than the Nixon gap. Trump hides all this time of telephone conversation on the day of his coup against democracy and for the moment nothing happens.
The comparison between the conspiracy behind the bloody attack on the headquarters of Congress and the set of corruption and dirty tricks of the Watergate case is almost inevitable 50 years after the events that led to Nixon's resignation.
And the alleged attempts to cover up possible crimes or illicit acts in both episodes offer a connection that does not go unnoticed by those who had some role in Watergate and today, half a century later, contemplate the follow-up of the Trump case with astonishment.
“The lapse in the Nixon records was a single conversation about covering up a third-rate burglary,” says former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks, who was tasked with questioning Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods. , about how this purportedly “accidental” deletion occurred. The subject of that conversation is known from the notes of the president's interlocutor, Bob Haldeman, in which he confirmed that the talk was about a public relations operation to counter the Watergate break-in, as well as about the hidden microphones in the White House.
Instead, the 7 1/2 hours of possible calls from Trump that he and his team sniffed out to the congressional committee investigating the 6-E assault "probably alluded to the ongoing insurrection and various plans to nullify a free and fair election." , adds the former prosecutor. And he points out that, although we ignore what was discussed in those talks – perhaps from disposable phones – “we do know that in the days before January 6 the former president was looking for a way to undo the fraud-free election results of the United States” .
The Watergate scandal took place for a little over two years in its political aspect, if Nixon's resignation in August 1974 is taken as the outcome. The trials lasted a few more months. Of the 69 officials, advisers and agents or former agents of the FBI and the CIA who were accused of conspiracy, robbery, illegal wiretapping, obstruction of justice and perjury, among other crimes, 48 were found guilty and sentenced to sentences of mostly months including Chief of Staff Haldeman and Attorney General John Mitchell. Nixon continued to proclaim his innocence. And his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him and spared him from trial.
But, for better or worse, the mechanisms of surveillance, prosecution and public supervision of political activity – through Congress, the courts and the press – ended up working in the Watergate case. Can the same be said of the Trump case?
At the moment, the assault on Congress is being investigated by the justice system and by the House of Representatives commission. A year and a half after the events, the judges have handed down 165 sentences against the more than 810 detainees, but only 65 have received prison sentences. In any case, it is about the material authors of the assault, not its alleged political instigators, among whom Joe Biden puts Trump at the head.
The investigating commission of the Lower House, for its part, has interviewed a thousand people and charged a few former Trump advisers with contempt. And on Thursday a series of televised public hearings will begin that promise news. Will have to see. Meanwhile, the former president continues to campaign for his respect within his party and in American politics.
In 1974, Republican senator and self-proclaimed extreme conservative Barry Goldwater led a delegation of GOP veterans who told Nixon that the game was up. And the president agreed to resign. Would Trump accept similar advice today to drop his false accusation of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and back off altogether, if anyone dared to suggest it to him?
"The current partisan polarization suggests that a president can commit Watergate-style abuses of power without jeopardizing his partisan base," says Colin Kidd, a US historian at the University of St. Andrews. In his opinion, "Trump's incitement to the insurrection on 6-E seemed irrefutable proof." But the followers of the former president did not move... and they continue without abandoning their leader. Something has changed in the last 50 years in the US.
