Saturday night, October 20, 1973 is remembered for one of the most infamous events of Richard Nixon's presidency: the Saturday Night Massacre.
When President Nixon ordered U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Richardson refused and resigned immediately. Then, when Nixon ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, he did the same thing. But Solicitor General Robert Bork went along with Nixon, firing Cox — which came back to haunt him when President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate voted against his confirmation (a rejection that was followed by the Senate's unanimous bipartisan confirmation of Anthony Kennedy to the High Court in early 1988).
Fifty-two years after the Saturday Night Massacre, MSNBC and NBC News' Anthony Coley — former director of the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Public Affairs — makes a comparison between President Donald Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the Nixon-era DOJ in an op-ed published by MSNBC on Tuesday, October 7. And Coley lays out some reasons why the Trump/Bondi alliance is more dangerous than what the U.S. faced during the Watergate era.
Bondi will submit to hours of questioning during a Capitol Hill hearing on October 7, and Coley stresses that she "has a lot to answer for."
"In eight short months," Coley laments, "Bondi's no-holds-barred, anything-for-Trump playbook has left the Justice Department in chaos. With today's hearings, then, Congress has the chance to shine a bright light on how her Trump-first approach has compromised the Justice Department's mission to uphold the rule of law, keep Americans safe and protect civil rights…. Under her watch, the Justice Department stands accused of unjustly firing senior FBI executives, experienced prosecutors and other civil servants; it has sought to rewrite the narrative of the January 6, 2001 attack on the U.S. Capitol; and it has opened investigative inquiries in the apparent absence of a factual pretext…. The Justice Department's indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, over the objections of career staff members and the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, further illustrates the weaponization of the Justice Department."
All of those things, Coley warns, add up to a U.S. attorney general who is much different from Richardson 52 years ago.
"The moment our country is in now is worse than Watergate and President Richard Nixon's abuses of power," Coley warns. "Nixon was surrounded by high-ranking executive branch officials who resisted his worst instincts. His attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than carry out his politically vindictive orders. A bipartisan delegation of congressional leaders, appalled at the president's excesses, headed to the White House to demand the president's resignation for interfering in criminal matters. And Nixon, knowing that he was about to be impeached, resigned."
Coley continues, "There are fewer guardrails now. Trump, with the Republican-controlled Senate's permission, installed an attorney general who is boldly carrying out his agenda and his partisan, political orders with gusto, regardless of what the facts are or what the law demands. Republican congressional leaders have capitulated."
Anthony Coley's full MSNBC article is available at this link.