I remember the Summer of 1973, when John Dean was testifying before the Watergate committee.<\/p>\n
At the time, I would rather have watch cartoons, or Ultraman, but we had one TV, and my mom was determined to follow the hearings, so I watched a lot of testimony, Dean, Halderman, Erlichman, Porter, etc.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, John Dean\u2019s testimony about Trump’s obstruction of justice<\/a> was a trip down memory lane:<\/p>\n The star witness of Watergate took a turn as the star witness for House Democrats\u2019 inquiries into President Trump on Monday. And in doing so, he laid out a compelling series of parallels between the two situations. <\/span> I’m not sure that the outcome will be at all similar, Nancy Pelosi is no Carl Albert, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember the Summer of 1973, when John Dean was testifying before the Watergate committee. At the time, I would rather have watch cartoons, or Ultraman, but we had one TV, and my mom was determined to follow the hearings, so I watched a lot of testimony, Dean, Halderman, Erlichman, Porter, etc. Needless to say, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[447,389,560],"class_list":["post-177783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-congress","tag-history","tag-impeach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177783"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Former White House counsel John Dean acknowledged at the start of Monday\u2019s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he wasn\u2019t there as a \u201cfact witness.\u201d Instead, he noted in his opening statement several ways in which he sees the report of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III echoing Watergate. <\/span>
<\/span>
Dean didn\u2019t run through each of those verbally during his testimony, but his written statement<\/a> lays his case out in detail. <\/span>
<\/span>
The most obvious parallel Dean noted involved himself: It concerns the role of the White House counsel. Just as he was the most significant witness against Richard M. Nixon, former White House counsel Donald McGahn has emerged as the most significant witness in the Mueller investigation. McGahn didn\u2019t technically flip on Trump, as Dean did when he pleaded guilty in Watergate, but as Dean pointed out, \u201cMcGahn is the only witness that the special counsel expressly labels as reliable, calling McGahn \u2018a credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House.’ “<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n