"Worse Than Watergate"?

     Yeah, aren't they all?

     Why is it with about every other Trump scandal, we're told by the pundit class, "Oh, this is worse than Watergate. This will bring him down."

     Number one, many of Trump's crimes are worse than Watergate. We hear the phrase "smoking gun" a lot (or "smocking gun", if you're Trump).

     We heard it when we learned about Trump's call to Zelensky on July 25, 2019 (He was impeached for that, as a matter of fact). We heard it when Trump unmistakably called for an overthrow of the government (He was impeached for that, too, as a matter of fact). But here's the difference

     Number two, Watergate brought down Nixon. He wasn't impeached only because the sinister-looking rat fuck scuttled out of office because God forbid a Republican should suffer any comeuppance for their crimes.

     Nothing brought down Trump except for the American people and the ballot box. And 74,000,000 assholes wanted four more years of this one man crime wave. There but for the grace of 81,000,000 of us, we would've gotten just that.

     Now we're hearing it again, that this is worse than Watergate. And it is.

     Because the new big scandal, the biggest news item of the day and the weekend (unless Florida police find a dead underage sex worker in Matt Gaetz's bed before Monday) is Katie Benner's bombshell article in today's New York Times.

     It gives us a comprehensive overview of yet another notorious call made by Trump, in far right wing circles the most beloved stalker and troll of all time, to then acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen and his Deputy AG, Richard P. Donoghue. Ms. Benner's source material for this was, of course, documents that were handed over by the new Biden DOJ to the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

     It was as bad as Watergate in that, like Nixon,.who'd tried to pressure the CIA and FBI to look the other way when it came to his own scandal, Trump also tried to pervert a major government department by pressuring it to throw the election in his favor. No, Lordie didn't provide us with tapes but we have the next-best thing: Donoghue's handwritten notes of the call.

     We've seen the holographs of Donoghue's notes, taken in real time. In other words, the man brought the receipts. We'd read days ago that Trump had been essentially stalking and harassing Rosen while his chair was still warm from Barr's fat ass. What we didn't know were the contents of those calls.

     Now we do.

     In this one, one in a flurry of panicked phone calls between Trump and Secretaries of State (such as Brad Raffensberger on January 3) and DOJ officials, Trump tried to put the arm on top officials at the DOJ to announce the election results were corrupt. When Donoghue told Trump that it "doesn't work that way", Trump said, "Don’t expect you to do that, just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen."

      He didn't mention who these corrupt Republican congressmen were to be but elsewhere Trump mentioned the names of Jim Jordan and Scott Perry as well as that of Sen. Ron Johnson. All are running way from this slowly exploding scandal as you can expect politicians to do in times of incriminating crisis.

     Now, this doesn't mean Jordan, Perry and Johnson had, indeed, also pressured DOJ officials into doing the same. However, we know Scott Perry was working cheek to jowl with a DOJ official named Jeff Clark to investigate the voter fraud that Perry had been screaming about last winter. He's since walked back from that ledge after he and Clark, like Bill Barr before them, had failed to find any evidence of voter fraud.

     Then Trump, ever the carnival barker, tried to cajole and wheedle  Rosen and Donoghue into bending to his will by pulling out of his fat, pasty ass stories of "thousands of people" calling US Attorneys to complain about the election results. He tried to insult them by telling them they "probably don't follow the internet" like he does (Because why believe the Department of Justice and Homeland Security when you can  listen to the Gateway Pundit and Pam Gellar screaming about ballots made of falafel?).

     Finally, in true mob boss fashion, Trump followed up their resistance with threats, to make an adjustment, to use the phrase of the corrupt Sheriff Cobb in Silverado. Quote, "People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace D.O.J. leadership.”

 

     Obviously, aside for the voices in his head that may or not be Hitler's and Himmler's, one of those people was the aforementioned Scott Perry, who still insists to this day that Trump won. In fact, Perry had already introduced Clark to Trump. This set the stage for a showdown in the Oval Office that was eerily similar to the pool cue scene in The Dark Knight between the Joker and two gangsters. All over a job that no one would keep for even three weeks.

     As Katie Benner said on Nicolle Wallace's show (although I'd immediately made the connection long before this), this December phone call to the DOJ was strikingly similar to Trump's call to Zelensky on July 25, 2019 (over which, again, he was impeached the first time). "I need you to do us a favor, though," he told the new Ukrainian president when the subject of military aid came up.

     He wanted Zelensky to announce, on CNN, a Ukrainian government investigation into Hunter Biden. As with the proposed DOJ investigation, he just wanted, well, the fake news to get out there so, again, Trump and his piano wire artists could take over.

     No doubt, Jordan, Perry and Johnson would've been the ones gripping the piano wire.