"Where is Howard Baker?" Adam Schiff cried out at the end of one of the sessions of the House Investigations Committee. Of course, he was referring to the Senator who, back in 1973-74, helped lead the investigations that drove Richard Nixon to resignation rather than certain impeachment and removal.
Baker was a Republican. Schiff was saying what it's been said here: In order for the nation to turn back the existential threat to our democracy that 45 represents, Republicans, not Democrats (preaching to the choir there) will have to cross over, if only temporarily, and rescue the republic, forming a coalition of the willing to thwart his lawlessness.
But before that, Baker and his fellow Senators needed something else. They needed information from inside the White House. And they got it: They got John Dean, still alive today, who spilled his conversations with Nixon; and Alexander Butterfield, who revealed the jolting information that Nixon had taped conversations inside the Oval Office. Those revelations got the Senate committee the momentum it needed, drove Nixon into an unnavigable corner, and forced him out of office rather than drag the country through an impeachment trial that, for all practical purposes, looked like a slam dunk against him.
The information necessary to impeach 45 took some digging and, again, some people stepping forward. But these people were foreign service officers, and beyond Gordon Sondland's exculpatory but admittedly circumstantial evidence, it's possible but a stretch to put together the pieces and reveal what 45 has done against his country.
It says here that that's enough to convict and remove from office, but unquestionably, too many Republican Senators will be able to hide behind, among other things, the lack of the evidence's proximity. Nobody inside the White House has spilled. Nobody will do so. The White House has stonewalled any documentation or testimony that could be given to the Investigations Committee. That, all by itself, is and should be enough to convict. But it isn't and it won't be. Republicans can create a narrative that ignores that, reaching back to the circumstantial evidence to say that, well, it just ain't really there, is it? They can slip right past it and out the door, knowing full well that with full revelation, the issue has way, way too much guilt attached to it and they'd be forced to turn against 45.
We need to get inside the White House. We need witnesses. But they're ignoring subpoenas, and waiting for the courts to rule. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell wants to rush through whatever evidence is there, rubber-stamp the finding of innocence, and it's on to the election. The courts can say what they want. With the impeachment trial concluded, it's all moot.
Barring them, we need information, on paper or on e-mail. It's there. Everybody knows it. Someone has to get it.
Watergate and Nixon's downfall began with the people inside the White House. Reaching still farther back, though, it all began with his rage about the 'leaks' that turned the Pentagon Papers over to the New York Times and Washington Post, which caused Nixon's overreaction and the creation of the "plumbers" by the Committee to Re-Elect the President to fix "leaks," except they got caught in the act. That happened because Daniel Ellsberg, who worked with a government contracting agency called the RAND Corporation, got hold of the Papers in 1971 and stole away with the enormous report that showed that several administrations had been misleading us about the hopes of winning the Vietnam War. It took several weeks for a team of Times reporters (to begin with) to go over them, verify their authenticity, and run effective summaries of their findings. He broke the law, in other words, to reveal a greater abuse of public trust. He stood above the fray and committed civil disobedience, risking imprisonment.
We need a brave, civilly disobedient public servant in the largest possible sense. We need it now. We need another, perhaps far less traceable, Daniel Ellsberg.
It won't be a big-timer like Mulvaney and Pompeo who turns up the evidence. They're huddled into the same corner, with the possibilities of further embarrassment, at the very least, hanging over their heads, too. It'll be some staffer. It could, in fact, be "Anonymous."
That's the White House insider who has now, apparently, gone one better after writing his summer '18 Times op-ed explaining that he and others were keeping some semblance of decorum and propriety intact while 45 keeps trying to puncture all of it. Now he's published a book about how awful 45 has been and continues to be--raising the ante on getting him out of there in 2020. He's the real whistleblower, operating incognito in plain sight just like 45 is also violating all we hold dear in plain sight.
But if he agrees that this is really an emergency, that we can't wait the eleven more months it'll take to remove 45 by an election that's clearly still in doubt, then he or someone nearby has to find a way to reveal documents that, although illegal to produce (by executive privilege, though certainly challengeable in court except it's painfully slow), would create the unmistakeable imagery of lawlessness that would make Senate Republicans second-guess the prevailing attitudes and cross over to vote for conviction. (Note: "Anonymous" has promised to out himself. I wonder if he's rethinking that.)
This has to happen quickly, as in just a few weeks. Nancy Pelosi can't sit on the articles forever. At a certain point, she has to play her hand and deliver them to the Senate. Public opinion, now firmly on her side, can switch away from her, too; it's a fickle mistress. She wouldn't want that.
The clock ticks. The new or old whistleblowers have to be very courageous. They also have to be very sneaky.
None of this is impossible, though. Staffers talk to other staffers; it's often how legislation moves along the assembly line (I've worked there and lived there; I know this.). Conversations happen in cabs, in bars, in city parks; the key is not to be seen. If someone still having a conscience contacts someone who can keep a secret, the machinery of revelation can be put into motion. All you'd need then is a scanner and a copy machine. Note that absolutely nobody knew that the Times and the Post were sitting on the hot news of the previous century until it was far too late for the Nixon Administration to effectively quash it (though it certainly tried, fast-tracking it to the Supreme Court within that month). That's what you get when you know that you've done the "wrong" thing legally, but the "right" thing morally.
Think, too, of the other, more electronically-orientated but progressively friendly news outlets, like Huffington Post, Politico, or Axios; all of them would hunger for such information. Keeping things under wraps would be far more challenging. It's the stuff of a page-turning novel writ very large. And we are all in the middle of it.
So, Adam Schiff, I get where you're coming from, but we're not there just yet. We need the intermediary to put those that might be Howard Bakers into the position where they'd have little choice. Remember, and it's been said here more than once: Many, some would say the deciding number of Republicans who turned on Nixon did so when and only when the "smoking gun"--the precise quote from Nixon himself that his assistants should "cover it up", meaning the Watergate break-in--was revealed by a Supreme Court ruling that the tapes themselves, not a transparently redacted effort to summarize them, should be made public. That, and only that, made Republicans unable to rhetorically hide from the clear and convincing truth. Courage would be great at a time like this, but you can't ever count on it.
It sure isn't your fault, Mr. Schiff, that you didn't get enough evidence to crush all opposition to it. You did what you could. But those upon whom the scale-tipping will depend need more. With it, this might just get pulled off. Without it, 45 will skate and, as a former business associate of his told Rachel Maddow tonight, he will exact revenge upon those who have attacked him unsuccessfully. Count on that like you know your name.
We need sneaks. We need them now. We need them not to get caught.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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