Avoid Obfuscation: Going down the road to Watergate

Whatever the original scandals were, whatever Nixon may have had to do with the break-in at Watergate,
or Secretary Clinton may have said that was embarrassing in an email or two, the cover-ups afterwards
only made things worse for both of them, and for Hillary, the story goes on.

On June 17^th, 1972, there was a break in done by five men at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters that was stationed in the Watergate hotel. While there, as they attempted to steal campaign documents and plant bugging devices so members of the Republican “Committee for the Reelection of the President” could gather information on their “enemies,” they were caught and arrested.

The Watergate Scandal was born.

In the months and years that followed, a chain of lies, deceptions, purposeful confusion, or obfuscation, was forged, until those very chains strangled and killed the presidency of our 37^th president, Richard Millhouse Nixon, making him the only President of the United States of America in history to resign his office.

But the thing that brought down the presidency was not the break in to the Watergate Hotel, indeed, it is doubtful the president ordered it or had any hand in the burglary, which really amounted to not much more than a petty break-in of itself. The thing that brought down Nixon and his “palace guard” was what happened afterwards.

As Nixon desperately tried to defend those who ordered the break in, including former US Attorney General John Mitchell. When that did not work Nixon attempted to throw Mitchell to the sharks while keeping those higher up the food chain unaffected. Of course, in the end, this all led to the discovery of Nixon’s tapes, proving he had a hand in the failed attempt to hide Mitchell’s involvement, and thus involved Nixon in charges of obstruction of justice, which forced him to resign.

Now, more than forty years later, another high elite, this time a woman, and this time named Hillary Clinton, is treading down the same path.

It seems that perhaps, , a crime of some sort was committed. However, we don’t know, because Clinton kept the thing which would have housed any evidence, her email server, in a bathroom.

After keeping the evidence for herself, (while handing some of it over selectively to the proper officials) Clinton then destroyed it. Currently of course, there are attempts to retrieve that evidence while Clinton continues to complain that this is a Republican conspiracy to destroy her. One wonders where else one has heard similar sounding charges before, until when returns to the tomes of Watergate, and finds that Nixon often said Watergate was cooked by his enemies, (mostly Democrats) to destroy him.

Whatever the original scandals were, whatever Nixon may have had to do with the break-in at Watergate, or Secretary Clinton may have said that was embarrassing in an email or two, the cover-ups afterwards only made things worse for both of them, and for Hillary, the story goes on.

 

The drip-drop of the Clinton story continues, with recent findings that some of the information that passed of the former secretary of state’s server was probably classified from the beginning, and also with the revelation that she paid a non-department employee to keep the server. But Clinton did not come clean about these things in the beginning. Drip-drop.

The longer the story continues to grow, the longer the water continues to come in through the hole, the more public trust erodes, and the more we need to turn our eyes not to what happened before the fact, but, rather, in the cover-up that happened  afterwards.

It is obvious to even the most casual observer that Clinton has not always been forthright with the American people about her motives and activities, (case in point: she said she only had one mobile device, we now know she had two) it is, of course, not a crime to lie to a TV camera, if that were true ninety percent of pundits would be in jail for their bad predictions.

But what we need to look for is evidence that probably exists that not only did Clinton obfuscate with the American people, she also stonewalled and obstructed justice with the investigators.

She apparently thought that she could protect herself by handing over emails she wanted to hand over, in effect, the edited version of the tapes. But now of course the entire server is in the hands of the law, although she claims she wiped it. (Burning the tapes, something even Nixon wouldn’t do.) And now the recovery process begins. 

If Clinton had come clean in the beginning, none of this would have happened, and there would have been no possibility, as very real one now exists, that American school children will wake up one day to an image of America’s once most admired woman, standing at the door of a helicopter, giving a defiant symbol of the letter “V” for all the world to see.

Andrew C. Abbott