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"The fumes of Watergate waft around the current FISA-gate scandal. The now septuagenarians Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, of All the President’s Men fame, are back in the news. As seasoned crusading reporters, they currently offer admonitions that Donald Trump is replaying the role of a supposedly paranoid and imperious Richard Nixon.
"But is he? The two investigative journalists who first brought Watergate to public attention are certainly not wrong about parallels—but not in the way they imagine. FISA-gate is becoming Watergate turned upside down. The respective roles of the government, liberal Democrats, civil libertarians, and the White House are now reversed—and this turnaround is, in a strange way, redefining Watergate itself.
"In 1973-74, civil libertarians were shocked at White House efforts to use the CIA to suppress information about the break-in at the Watergate complex and the subsequent efforts to hide or misrepresent it. They were rightly outraged that the Nixon reelection campaign broke the law in efforts to find dirt on Democrats. They were incredulous that the White House used hush money to silence those charged with the crime, and to hide the origins and transference of such payments.
"In 2018, however, the FBI and the CIA were said to have good reason to have once trafficked in purchased campaign dirt. The Clinton campaign in 2016 paid a private law firm and Fusion/GPS consultants millions of dollars for myths supplied by the Russians to create pejorative fantasies about Trump-Russian collusion. Clinton-paid Fusion/GPS operatives, then sought to plant and authenticate their wild stories with the FBI, the State Department, perhaps the CIA, and certainly sympathetic news organizations. Only by dogged subpoenas and lawsuits has the public discovered who commissioned the Trump dossier, or how it was manipulated to obtain court-approved surveillance of American citizens." . . .
Full article at the Hoover Institution
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