Nixon marked the one-year anniversary of the Watergate investigation with a plea to shut it down. "I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end," Nixon urged on January 30, 1974, in what proved to be his final State of the Union address to Congress. "One year of Watergate is enough!"
President Trump and his vice president, Mike Pence, channeled Nixon in making the same plea for an end Mueller's investigation. "I think it's time to wrap it up," Pence declared in a n interview with CNN [May 10] after claiming somewhat disingenuously to have "fully cooperated" with the investigation. Trump marked the actual one-year milestone [May 17] with a mocking tweet: "Congratulations America, we are now into the second year of the greatest Witch Hunt in American History."
Mueller himself had no reactions, but senators from both parties batted the White House's line away. "That's not his call to make," South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham said of Pence's plea. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer used a floor speech to declare Mueller's investigation "not a witch hunt" and to denounce the efforts by conservative media and "extreme" elements in the Republican Party to "distract from the special counsel's investigating."
Inconveniently for Trump, new evidence emerged only two days after his tweet in an article in the New York Times showing that his campaign entertained efforts to influence the U.S. election not only from Russia but also from an emissary purporting to represent Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It turns out that Donald Trump Jr. was meeting at Trump Tower in summer 2016 not only with Russian emissaries offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, but also with an adviser to the UAE's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and an Israeli social media specialist offering help for Trump's then lagging-in-the-polls presidential campaign.
Trump dissembled about the Russian meeting in a statement that Trump helped draft from the Oval Office. But Junior's email traffic eventually confirmed the purpose of the June 9 meeting and forced him into the fallback position that nothing ever came of it. Junior has settled more quickly on that same position in regard to the Aug. 3 meeting with the Gulf states' emissary George Nader and the Israeli social media practitioner Joel Zamel. Alan Futerfas, a lawyer representing Junior, told the Times that Junior recalls the meeting, but that after listening to the pitch Junior "was not interested and that was the end of it."
Junior's effort to fashion an innocent ending for the two disclosures brushes over the damning fact that he took the meetings in the first place instead of responding, indignantly, that federal law prohibits foreigners from contributing to a campaign for federal office. His other defense, modeled after Nixon's famous advice in the Watergate investigation, is a failing memory.
Transcripts of Junior's interview by the Senate Judiciary Committee released last week [May 16] show that he answered 171 times with the impossible-to-cross-examine reply, "I don't recall." His lapses of memory included an inability to recall the individual with a blocked number that he called to report on the meeting — thus, avoiding the evident implication that he called his candidate-father himself. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, aptly commented on CNN that "I don't recall" was "code for Yes."
Meanwhile, the Republican-majority Senate Intelligence Committee was underscoring the reasons for the Mueller probe to continue by endorsing the U.S. intelligence community's finding that Russians attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election. By now, the hyperpartisan House Intelligence Committee is the only governmental entity — apart from the Oval Office — resisting this conclusion. The evidence of Russia's active social-media campaign in Trump's behalf is damning, but not enough to move the administration or Republicans in Congress toward fashioning legislation to prevent a recurrence.
The Oval Office-inspired clamor for Mueller to "wrap it up" shows no immediate sign of receding, however illogical. One of my journalist friends noted on Twitter that Watergate was not the only special counsel investigation to last more than a year. "The Whitewater investigation lasted six years & the Iran/Contra probe lasted four," former New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse noted on Twitter. He called Russia's interference in the 2016 election and the possible collusion "far more serious matters" than those and noted that Mueller's supposed witch-hunt has already resulted in five convictions without also mentioning the pending indictments of the accused Russian meddlers.
Mueller's investigation gained judicial endorsement when a federal judge last week [May 15] rejected the plea by Trump's indicted former campaign chair Paul Manafort that his indictment went beyond Mueller's scope of authority. Judge Amy Berman Jackson underscored the charge to Mueller to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign." With more smoke emerging day by day, Mueller deserves encouragement not to wrap things up but to document the full story of foreign interference in Trump's election, however embarrassing that may be to the candidate who benefited.
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