Historian Michael Beschloss sounded the alarm on Wednesday hours after Donald Trump forced attorney general Jeff Sessions to resign.
During an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, Beschloss said the president firing Sessions has the potential to be far worse than Nixon’s Saturday night massacre.
“If this is going the way this looks, this is ten times worse than Nixon,” Beschloss said.
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.@BeschlossDC drops a chilling reality check about the firing of Jeff Sessions. #ctl #p2 pic.twitter.com/rSpkJWXxNi
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) November 8, 2018
Beschloss said:
If this is going the way it looks, this is ten times worse than Nixon because, let’s look, if this leads to let’s say the firing of Robert Mueller or the substantial limiting of this investigation – ten times worse than Nixon. Because let’s look at what Donald Trump has done here. Let’s first look at the Supreme Court. He now has a five justice majority on the Supreme Court. The fifth justice is the one person of all those people on that federalist society list that has the most extreme views of permitting a president not to be investigated, not to be indicted, not to be subpoenaed, use pardons to help himself. There is no doubt in my mind that the reason why Brett Kavanaugh is on the court tonight is because Donald Trump wanted him to be reliable if a Trump case could come to the court. And remember, that was a vacancy that Donald Trump created by encouraging Anthony Kennedy maybe to resign from the court earlier than expected so that it would be Brett Kavanaugh in this position tonight and not Anthony Kennedy who might have been a little bit more in a position to stand up to Donald Trump. And then on the other side, this is a president who now looks as if he’s very directly not only firing the attorney general and putting in someone to replace him, who is by most accounts, by most accounts, not terribly qualified. By some accounts a political hack. By almost all accounts someone who can be relied upon to be completely obedient to President Trump.
Trump installed a lapdog AG to go after Mueller
Not only did Trump force Sessions to leave his post on Wednesday, but he replaced him with a lapdog – Matt Whitaker – who has been a critic of Mueller in the past and has even said that Hillary Clinton should be indicted.
In other words, Whitaker talks a lot like the voices in Trump’s head, and now he’s the acting attorney general.
As PoliticusUSA’s Jason Easley noted a short time ago, “Trump’s choice to be interim attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, believes that the Mueller investigation has gone too far and should not be investigating Trump or his family’s finances.”
With Trump puppet Whitaker now overseeing the special counsel investigation, it leaves open the possibility that Mueller could be fired at any moment. At the very least, the special counsel investigation could be defunded or severely limited.
Not only should the new acting attorney general recuse himself from the Russia investigation; he should be removed altogether.
Ultimately, one thing is clear: Tuesday’s election results scared the daylights out of the president as more Democrats are headed to Washington with the promise of holding him accountable. He’s now moving to protect himself before it’s too late.
In the process, Trump could make Richard Nixon’s obstruction look like child’s play.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
