It could be that the ghosts of Nixon and Trump are conjured up once more in the 2020 election case

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The behavior is a result of his momentary whim, and it seems that prosecutors and the political establishment would like to hold him accountable for it. There are no statutes against upsetting the reliable order, despite the fact that he creates chaos. Breaking the rules — often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child — is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.

Democrats assumed that the effect of Trumps political success was that he has an evil purpose. During his trials, prosecutors will try to establish that precise link. That may be a bigger challenge. He is being pursued under a number of ill-defined statutes like the Espionage Act and RICO. Without an exchange of money or quid pro quo, proving his crimes will largely come down to showing specific intent or capturing his state of mind — and with Donald Trump, that’s quite a trip down the rabbit hole.

His prosecutors are going to try to use his words against him, one of the reasons being that he admitted on tape that he was behind the attack on the Capitol. He still had classified documents, his various plots about how to game the Electoral College system, his insistence that he won his election and his comments to his bag man, Michael Cohen before he paid off Stormy Daniels.

The pattern is that he often makes a statement that is not clear in its logic, so that he can keep his own mental balance.

The trio will try to show that the former president has been trying to deceive rather than simply talk, that there have been a number of crowd pleasing gestures and that he has tried to obstruct the investigations. The Trump opponents are grateful that Mr. Trump has hoisted himself by his own petard.

At that moment, it was a challenge to every news organization, election observer, academic and parent, and they came to a relief, wondering what to do with a man on the verge of presidency selling such an outrageous distortion. Most of American mainstream journalism did not use the term lie at the time.

We had always assumed that once the word lie was attached to political speech, it would become devalued. And so indeed it has. The shock value is long gone because it is used so frequently in the media. And that has, too, has proven to be a tool and a weapon for Trump.

We cannot say we were not warned. In his first campaign, Trump signaled his intent to behave just this way, to revise reality and insist on his version. For example, in September 2016, after five years of harassing Obama over his birth certificate, Trump insisted he and he alone had resolved at long last the controversy he had promoted. He was looking for credit for his work.

The Nixon case posed an even more fundamental question than the Trump prosecution. That is because Trump is insisting that his perception of a stolen election should prevail over all evidence. In essence, he insists that his version of the facts, his view of the situation and his reality should all take precedence over anything else.

“At first I wasn’t sure,” Barr said, “but I have come to believe he knew well he had lost the election.” Barr said he thought Smith would be loaded for bear on this issue, calling the evidence in the indictment “the tip of the iceberg.”

The problem is that Trump went much further, not just in words but in actions, to overturn the result of the election. Barr insisted that those actions wouldn’t be protected even if Trump believed them.

William Barr, who was Trump’s attorney general in 2020, spelled this out on CNN this week: “They are not attacking [Trump’s] First Amendment right To free speech. He can say whatever he wants, he can even lie. He can say the election was stolen, even though he knew better.

There are two problems with this defense, of course. One is that it does not matter what Trump thought because it would not excuse his actions. The charges Smith has brought against Trump would not be insulated by what Trump thought he had won.

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In this sense, the question would become the famous question posed in the Watergate hearings on Capitol Hill in 1973: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

In that imaginary scenario, why not tell the secretary of state in Georgia to “find another 11,780 votes”? Call your state legislature and urge them to call special sessions to reverse the voters’ decision.

Then there is the idea that Trump did all the things he did in the sincere belief that he was correcting error, that he was blameless because he genuinely believed he was “stopping the steal.” Convinced of his “sacred landslide victory,” for whatever reason, he was simply carrying out his own distorted sense of justice.

That assertion of an overriding right to supersede the law under certain circumstances may well figure in Trump’s defense, whether in court or in the media, when he goes to court to face the charges released this week by Special Counsel Jack Smith regarding Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

In 1977, almost three years after he had left office, Nixon was still telling BBC host David Frost that certain actions might be against the law, but that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Another argument likely to re-emerge from the Nixon era is the contention that presidents have unique responsibilities for the nation’s security and well-being and thus must, at least at times, exercise extraordinary powers to execute those responsibilities.

There have been indications that Trump and his lawyers will try to make his trial in Washington, D.C., an opportunity to attack actions by predecessors such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and to readjudicate his own claims of election fraud and even his allegations of influence peddling on the part of current President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Nixon never went to court to defend himself after the pardon. The special grand jury was considering cases against some of his former subordinates in 1975, and he spoke to a delegation about it. On that occasion, under questioning, he admitted to making mistakes, but insisted he did nothing others had not done before him, calling himself a victim of “selective prosecution.”

Jaworksi could have indicted him at that point, but the new president, Gerald R. Ford, promptly weighed in with a full pardon. The case is closed for Nixon.

Nixon resigned later that year, which was put down to pressures by the impeachment of him in the House.

Jaworksi didn’t charge Nixon due to a memo from the Justice Department that said sitting presidents couldn’t be accused of crimes while in office.

Source: Trump’s defense in 2020 election case could conjure ghost of Nixon once more

The Nixon’s defense in 2020 election case could conjure ghost of nixon once more: How far could a president go after winning reelection?

The Electoral College votes were reported to Congress, but Donald Trump was accused of trying to alter vote counts in individual states and promoting alternative electors to replace ones elected by the voters. There are potential jail sentences of years for all of them.

Nixon made a cover-up of his own campaign’s extensive illegal “black bag jobs” that included wiretapping. The most famous of these was a bungled burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex in June of 1972.

Both Nixon and Trump, in pursuit of a second term in office, took it upon themselves to find means to ensure their success – even it meant going beyond the usual processes of a campaign and an election.

The current levels of stress on the system will only go up in the months and years to come.

The Nixon episode had a huge impact in its day, but when he left Washington he largely left the public eye. The Trump trajectory is still moving in a direction. He currently dominates the polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and has vowed to press on, whatever happens in the courts. He says that he was even from prison.

How far could a president go to stay in office if convinced his reelection was crucial to the nation? What would his legal liability be in regards to what he decided to do?

Half a century apart in time, the cases against both men raised crucial constitutional questions about authority within the three branches of the federal government — questions about the legal culpability of presidents and the limits on their individual power.

The common elements of both Trump’s and Nixon’s cases have come into view before. Nixon was the subject of impeachment hearings in the 70’s and an impeachment process in the 1980’s, which ended because he resigned from office. The Senate acquitted Trump of his crimes twice, in a bid to get a two-thirds majority.

Source: Trump’s defense in 2020 election case could conjure ghost of Nixon once more

On the name of the 37th president of the United States, Richard Nixon, indictment of six unindicted ‘co-conspirators’

The phrase was back in the news this week after Trump’s latest indictment revealed six unindicted co-conspirators. Some of them may still be charged in the ongoing prosecution, which claims that Trump led a multi-prong effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

That distinction, such as it is, belongs to Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, still in office in March 1974 when a specially appointed prosecutor named Leon Jaworski indicted Nixon aides and advisers for their roles in the Watergate scandal. All of Nixon’s men were named as co-conspirators, despite the fact that Nixon was not indicted.

The charges against Donald Trump are often described as unprecedented. A lot of presidents were named in criminal indictments.