The Similarities with Nixon Grow

Bob Bauer: “How the case develops from here is not possible to judge at this time, but the Cohen campaign finance plea resonates unmistakably with the special counsel investigation, which also concerns what a candidate is prepared to do to win an election and then cover his tracks. The criminal information cites the involvement of unnamed members of the Trump campaign; the campaign, like the candidate, is now clearly in separate legal jeopardy.”

”The similarities between Trump’s problems and those of Richard Nixon continue to grow. In the short term, should there be any doubt about Trump’s unwillingness to sit for an interview with prosecutors, this seems yet another reason why he had no intention to do so. His lawyers will now busily attack Cohen, as they have already begun to do, but they don’t know what he’s told prosecutors or what evidence he has supplied to back up his claims. Any interview with the president would touch on these issues, among others—and the president whose lawyer has proclaimed that ‘truth is not truth’ and who repeatedly rails about ‘perjury traps’ is surely not able to take his chances with his own version of the Daniels and McDougal tales.”

“This is another possibility raised by the Cohen plea. It may not matter whether the president agrees to testify. Others seem prepared to bear that burden. As Nixon found when one of his lawyers also became a witness for the government, this can be the beginning of very hard times.”