Yeah, We're Settling Into A Watergate Pattern

What intrigues me is how little anyone is bringing Watergate up at all in the Mar-a-Lago contoversy. It occurred to me just yesterday how much Watergate added to our daily vocabulary, from the suffix -gate to characterize any scandal (like Irangate, Travelgate, Troopergate and Whitewatergate) to expressions like "stonewalling", "modified limited hangout", "deep throat", "[expletive deleted]", "what did he know and when did he know it", and more.

I'm sure part of it is this only got into motion 50 years ago as we speak, and most of the first-hand participants are long departed, while even reporters and commentators who might have covered it early in their careers are retired. Nor does it help that something like Mar-a-Lagogate doesn't trip off the tongue. On the other hand, I lived through it as a full adult while my intellectual faculties were still being formed in graduate school, and in fact as I followed it closely, it fed my already contrarian nature.

So I'm starting to see real parallels even if they don't seem to be occurring to anyone else. The big one today is how quickly spokespeople (often "anonymous sources") present a quasi-official version only to have new surprises explode it in a matter of days or hours. Take the pronouncement in Newsweek from Deep Throat A or Deep Throat B, whichever it was, that Attorney General Garland did not approve the raid, which Garland himself refuted in yesterday's press conference. I went back to the Newsweek piece only to find they'd already scrubbed that part of it:

6:30 p.m.: A quote about Garland's role was deleted after the attorney general himself addressed the issue.

So much for credibility.

This brings up a second parallel, how much the media is shaping the story in its coverage. The difference is that in the 1970s, there were three networks and the big-city papers that could project a unified line that was anti-Nixon. Now the legacy successors to those outlets are pro-Biden and anti-Trump, while the new conservative press is divided into pro-Trump and never-Trump -- but the range of opinion and the Overton window are at least somewhat wider.

As of this morning, here's the range of reaction to Attorney General Garland's press conference. At Slate:

This puts the onus on Trump and his lawyers—who for the past three days have unleashed fury against the FBI and gone so far as to suggest the bureau was “planting” evidence—to object in court to unsealing the documents in order to keep them secret. This immediately flips the script away from the saturation of “what is the DOJ hiding” media coverage of the past few days and raises the obvious question: If Trump objects to unsealing these documents, what is he hiding?

But Trump immediately responded,

“Not only will I not oppose the release of documents related to the unAmerican, unwarranted, and unnecessary raid and break-in of my home in Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago, I am going a step further by ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those documents,” Trump wrote on social media Friday night.

Just as in Watergate, versions are put out, but they collapse within hours. It's hard to avoid thinking the Justice Department's ostentatious show of consideration to Trump, offering him the chance to object to releasing the documents, was a desperate move that might justify slow-walking the process, but it looks as though Trump feels he has nothing to lose by letting things out.

Actually, I think this points to a little-mentioned question that arises from Eric Trump's account of the raid: his version on Sean Hannity's show was that the FBI opened a safe in search of stolen documents only to find it empty. Why would this be important?

One potential explanation is in a comment on a right-wing discussion site, that the Trump organization knew it had a mole and used the same strategy it had used to expose a mole in the White House: plant false information to see who passes it on. Thus someone tells the mole there are secret documents in the safe, the mole enthusiastically relays this to the FBI, the FBI goes in balls-to-the-wall only to be embarrassed. Whether or not this was the specific strategy, it's starting to look like the outcome of the raid will only make the administration look inept.

In fact, it looks like Attorney General Garland and the Justice Department have a dilemma. Several news organizations, as well as Judicial Watch, had already filed motions to unseal the warrant and supporting documents on Tuesday, and I would imagine that the Justice Department recognized that these would almost certainly be successful. Thus Garland's announcement that Justice would also file such a motion (although apparently asking for a more limited unsealing) is superfluous, but potentially also a move to slow-walk or limit that process.

This continues to convince me that making the basis for the warrant public can only damage the administration, while Trump has nothing to lose from it and everything to gain. On the other hand, the establishment media is using whatever interval remains between now and the unsealing of the documents to stir up suspicion that Trump is still a spy:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

. . . The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search.

Sounds like we've gone beyond Deep Throats A and B to a whole new choir of them. All this is going to do beyond the weekend will be to bolster Trump's credibility. Just unseal the documents, that'll prove their point if this stuff is true.