Farrell reported from the transcript in Richard Nixon: The Life. On that occasion, under questioning, he admitted to making mistakes, but insisted he did nothing others had not done before him, calling himself a victim of "selective prosecution."īiographer John A. But he did speak to a delegation from the special grand jury that was considering cases against some of his former subordinates in 1975. Nixon never went to court to defend himself after the pardon. Case closed, at least for Nixon.īut in a larger, historical sense, the case against Nixon has been tried and retried in countless ways.Īnd that case remains open today, as witness some of the arguments Trump and his lawyers are considering in his defense. Ford, promptly weighed in with a full pardon. Jaworski could have indicted him at that point, but the new president, Gerald R. Jaworski did not charge Nixon in 1974 because a legal memo fresh from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said a sitting president could not be criminally charged while in office.īut later that year, pressured by a pending impeachment in the House (and a warning from Republican senators that the Senate would vote to convict him), Nixon resigned. All are felonies with potential sentences of years in federal prison. Trump is accused of seeking to alter vote counts in individual states, promoting alternative electors to supplant the ones chosen by the voters and attempting to disrupt the reporting of the Electoral College votes to Congress. The most famous of these was a bungled burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex in June of 1972. In Nixon's case, he directed a cover-up of his own campaign's extensive illegal "black bag jobs" that included wiretapping and other forms of unlawful surveillance. That would mean the current, elevated levels of stress on the system – stress evident in many facets of everyday life in America – will only rise higher in the months (and possibly years) ahead.īoth Nixon and Trump, in pursuit of a second term in office, took it upon themselves to find means to ensure their success – even it meant going beyond the usual processes of a campaign and an election. He currently dominates the polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and has vowed to press on, whatever happens in the courts. The Trump trajectory is still drawing its arc. The Nixon episode had a huge impact in its day, but when he left Washington he largely left the public eye. How far could a president go to stay in office if convinced his reelection was crucial to the nation? And what would be his legal liability for the actions he chose to take?Īnd most important of all is the haunting question of how much stress the fragile structure of a democracy can stand. Half a century apart in time, the cases against both men raised crucial constitutional questions about authority within the three branches of the federal government - questions about the legal culpability of presidents and the limits on their individual power. For his part, Trump was impeached twice, with the Senate acquitting him both times for want of a two-thirds majority. Nixon was the subject of lengthy congressional hearings in 1973 and an impeachment process in 1974 that ended only because he resigned from office. This is far from the first time the common elements of Trump's case and Nixon's have come into view. Some of those individuals might still be charged in the ongoing prosecution, which alleges Trump led a multi-faceted effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost. That phrase was back in the news this week when Trump's latest indictment also identified (but did not name) six unindicted co-conspirators. They were all the president's men, but Nixon himself was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator." That distinction, such as it is, belongs to Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, still in office in March 1974 when a specially appointed prosecutor named Leon Jaworski indicted Nixon aides and advisers for their roles in the Watergate scandal. But Trump is not the first president to be named in a criminal indictment. The multiple criminal charges against former President Donald Trump are often described as unprecedented, and so they are.
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