WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Worse than Watergate” has become a Washington cliche that is both inescapable and meaningless. Dozens of political scandals since then have been objectively worse, but the scandal still looms large. This is because of the mythos it created involving a press corps and a Washington establishment allegedly concerned with moving heaven and earth to get at the truth, even when the story involved little more than “third-rate burglary,” as Richard Nixon’s secretary famously called it.
Watergate also marked a sea change in how we held presidents accountable. Prior to his downfall, Nixon’s sentiment that “if the president does it, it’s not illegal” was to some extent the informal understanding, even if that sounds outrageous to contemporary ears. A corrupt president could either be impeached by Congress or thrown out of office by voters, but there was no constitutional middle ground to hold them accountable. Since Watergate, the FBI and the Department of Justice more broadly have increasingly found themselves in the awkward and untenable position of being subject to the president’s constitutional authority while simultaneously being tasked with investigating White House corruption.
So 50 years on, the post-Watergate question remains: How is empowering the FBI and unelected deep-state bureaucrats to hold the president accountable working out for us? With last week’s release of special counsel John Durham’s 306-page report into the origins and development of the Russia collusion investigation that engulfed Donald Trump’s presidency, the question has been definitively answered. The corruption it has enabled has been calamitous, and no one in Washington seems to care about the truth anymore.
Thanks to the report, the public finally has a clear and reliable accounting of possibly the most complicated scandal in American history. The big-picture conclusions of the report sound almost understated: “Senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities.” But make no mistake, the details in the report that buttress those conclusions are devastating to the credibility of the FBI and those who championed the collusion investigation into Trump…
