It’s no secret that a lot of people close to the Donald Trump campaign had a lot of reasons to be very afraid on Friday, when former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and lying to the FBI. After all, Gates is the second highest-ranking Trump confidant to plead guilty, after former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
Well, a guy who knows something about scandal and corruption believes Gates’ decision to flip could have greater implications than we thought. It initially appeared that Gates could close the jail door behind former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. But one of the leading figures of the Watergate scandal believes that Gates could also bring down Trump.
John Dean served as White House Counsel from 1970 to 1973, and is best known for being, in the words of the FBI, “the master manipulator” in the cover-up of the Watergate burglary. When it became apparent that Nixon was about to make him the scapegoat for the cover-up, he began cooperating with the Senate Watergate investigation, and was later the first to directly implicate Richard Nixon himself in the cover-up. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and testified against several Watergate conspirators.
Dean, now a registered independent, has been a searing critic of Trump, going as far to say that Trump is even worse than Nixon. For instance, he believes, as many of us do, that Trump all but admitted to obstruction of justice when he revealed he pushed out James Comey in hopes of slowing down the investigation into Russia’s effort to hack the election. Dean believes that the real Nixon only came out in the White House tapes, but “Trump is the same in public as he is in private.”
Dean reiterated this in an interview last year with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman. Watch here.
Dean told Goodman that Trump’s relentless attacks on the media are “more Nixonian than Nixon. He recalled that Nixon only said things like behind closed doors, but Trump is attacking the First Amendment in the open.
Based on that experience, Dean told his Twitter followers that Gates could not only send Manafort to prison, but also topple Trump.
Mueller is throwing everything he can against Manafort, including Gates who can nail him. Increasingly it appears Manafort is the link to Russian collusion. If Gates can testify that Manafort was acting with Trump’s blessings, it’s the end of his presidency. That’s substantial. https://t.co/t6pHNno1xL
— John Dean (@JohnWDean) February 25, 2018
This makes sense. After all, Manafort has already been caught on tape asking Russian operatives for dirt on Hillary. He was also on hand for the now-infamous meeting between Trump campaign operatives and Russians in Trump Tower, and was the one man in that room who should have known that meeting was improper at best. At the very least, this is firmly in “what did Trump know, and when did he know it?” territory.
Later, Dean reiterated what most of us already know–if Trump thinks he can simply pardon Manafort, or anyone else, he has another think coming.
A number of folks have expressed concern in this Manafort thread that Trump will pardon him. Many of the counts in both the VA and DC indictments have state law counterparts that can be charged in NY and VA, where Trump had no pardon power. Checkmate is coming for Paul Manafort.
— John Dean (@JohnWDean) February 25, 2018
Indeed, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has two prosecutors in his office working full-time on Trump investigations. Chances are that if Trump is foolish enough to pardon Manafort, they’ll have indictments on state charges ready before the ink on that pardon even begins to dry.
As part of an unhinged burst of tweets this weekend, Trump railed for the umpteenth time that the Russia probe is a windmill-tilting expedition.
“Russians had no compromising information on Donald Trump” @FoxNews Of course not, because there is none, and never was. This whole Witch Hunt is an illegal disgrace…and Obama did nothing about Russia!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2018
If Gates indeed testifies that Manafort acted with Trump’s blessing, calling this outburst premature will be being extremely kind to it. Indeed, Trump will likely be choking on those words as he’s forced out of the White House.
(featured image courtesy Neeta Lind, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
