Today’s flash back is on the impeachment that never was — Richard Nixon and Watergate.  While President Nixon held on until the writing on the wall was crystal clear, he ultimately did the honorable thing and resigned.  While that was a good thing for the country, it was a bad thing in the sense that it deprived us of an example of how an impeachment that had actual merit should work.

Watergate was a complex scandal in which the original issues morphed during the process.  And there were other issues about how Nixon had governed during his first term.  But at the heart of Watergate were the operations of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (which eventually got the appropriate nickname of CREEP).  Among the numerous ethically questionable attempts at disinformation and disruption related to the potential Democratic candidates, operatives of CREEP burglarized the offices of the Democratic National Committee (then located in the Watergate Office Building) in an effort to obtain documents and wiretap the office.  The operatives were a little sloppy and some of them were caught.  That led to the President (and his staff) engaging in an effort to cover-up the campaign’s connection to the burglary.  The cover-up initially worked, and Nixon easily won the 1972 election.

After the 1972 election, the House and the Senate began to hold hearings into the matter.  By April, a special prosecutor had been appointed.  The hearings led to the revelation that Nixon had a taping system for the Oval Office.  When the special prosecutor attempted to subpoena the tapes, Nixon fired the special prosecutor.  (Because the special prosecutor answered to the Attorney General, Nixon actually ordered the Attorney General to fire the special prosecutor.  Both the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General resigned instead of complying with the order.  That left the Solicitor General (Robert Bork) as the acting Attorney General, and he complied with Nixon’s order.)  In the aftermath of this blatant interference in the investigation, the Judiciary Committee opened a staff inquiry into possible impeachment in October 1973.  In February 1974, the House formally authorized an impeachment inquiry. Continue Reading...