USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!!

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: As of today, President Trump has been in office for 36 days. There's already a growing chorus of voices calling for his impeachment. Nearly 900,000 people have signed an online petition entitled "Impeach Donald Trump Now." Thousands of protesters poured into the streets Monday for "Not My President's Day" marches across the country. Thousands more stormed Republican town halls this week to confront Republican leaders over their support for Trump.
Even the city of Richmond, California, has joined the movement. On Tuesday, the Richmond City Council voted unanimously to approve a resolution calling on Congress to consider Trump's impeachment, arguing Trump is in violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, which prohibits people holding federal office from accepting payments from foreign governments.
The demand for Trump's impeachment comes as he presides over an understaffed White House in near constant crisis. This comes as White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus sought unsuccessfully to have the FBI refute news reports that Donald Trump's campaign advisers were in frequent contact with Russian intelligence agents ahead of November's election. That's according to CNN, which reported on Thursday the FBI declined to publicly corroborate Priebus's denial. Priebus's outreach to the FBI violated policies intended to limit communications between the White House and the FBI on pending investigations. Priebus denied the reports during an interview Sunday on Meet the Press.

REINCE PRIEBUS: I know what they were told by the FBI, because I've talked to the FBI. I know what they're saying. I wouldn't be on your show right now telling you that we've been assured that there's nothing to The New York Times story, if I actually wasn't assuredand, by the way, if I didn't actually have clearance to make this comment.

AMY GOODMAN: Allegations of White House communications with the FBI during the investigation into Russia's influence have raised questions about whether the Trump administration has violated ethics restrictions meant to protect such investigations from political influence. They've also drawn comparisons to former President Richard Nixon's 1972 discussion with aides who used the CIA to push the FBI away from investigating the Watergate burglary that later led to Nixon's resignation.
Will the constant chaos, confusion and conflicts of interest in the Trump administration lead to President Trump's impeachment? Well, for more, we go to someone who's been at the center of the unraveling of a presidency and a vote for impeachment. That's right, President Richard Nixon's White House counsel, John Dean. He's the author of several books, including The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It and Conservatives Without Conscience, as well as Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches.
John Dean, welcome to Democracy Now!
JOHN DEAN: Good morning, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we have 36 days so far into this presidency. It took a second term of office for President Nixon before the House Judiciary Committee voted on articles of impeachment against him. He would later resign, so he wasn't impeached. But can you talk about where Donald Trump is right now?
JOHN DEAN: Well, what I see and hear, in following it, are echoes of Watergate. If you recall, Watergate ran about 900 days. In other words, it went on for years, starting with a bungled burglary at the Democratic National Committee and right up to Richard Nixon's resignation, followed by the conviction of his top aides. So it ran a long time. What we're seeing is very accelerated. It's partially responsible because of the media and the technology today, but it's also the behavior of Trump and his aides, as well as the media's vigilance on this. So we're seeing things accelerated. And what I see or hear are echoes of Watergate. We don't have Watergate 2.0 yet, but we have something that is beginning to look like it could go there.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to turn right now to what took place in Richmond, California. It became the first U.S. city to call for an investigation into whether to impeach President Trump. A resolution approved by the Richmond City Council states Trump is in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits people holding federal office from accepting payments from foreign governments. These are some of the city officials who voted unanimously in favor of the impeachment resolution.

COUNCILMEMBER JAEL MYRICK: Ordinarily, it would be odd to be talking about thewell, everything about this administration is odd. But it would be odd to be talking about the impeachment of a president only a month into his term. Unfortunately, with this president, it's oddly appropriate.

COUNCILMEMBER JOVANKA BECKLES: The word is very, very clear that the residents of these United States are not in alignment with his movement of hate, his movement of fear, his movement of bullying and intimidation, and his movement of just out-and-out lies.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices of the city councilmembers in Richmond, California. Do you think what they're accusing President Trump of could lead to his impeachment?
JOHN DEAN: It could lead there, Amy, if the Republicans didn't control both houses of Congress. It's a beginning. It takes a lot of momentum, much more than one city. It takes hundreds of cities. It takes really a national change of attitude about this president before we're going to have an impeachment. Right today, given the fact that the House and Senate are controlled by the Republicans, they're not going to impeach their president. As long as he gives them what they want and signs into legislation or signs into law a lot of the things that they've had in their dreams for many years, they're not going to give him any problem. Soand he's not going to give them any problem, because he doesn't want to have a fight with them. So, it's going to be a while. Impeachment is not a legal process. It's a quasi-legal process, but it's primarily a political process. And we're not there yet. Now, a lot of people might like it. It's not going to happen until the political process reaches that stage.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about this latest breaking news out of CNN and also The New York Times, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus seeking unsuccessfully to have the FBI refute news reports that Donald Trump's campaign advisers were in frequent touch with Russian intelligence agents ahead of November's election, CNN also reporting Thursday the FBI declined to publicly corroborate Priebus's denial, Priebus's outreach to the FBI violating policies intended to limit communications between the White House and the FBI on pending investigations. And this goes back to Watergate, when you were at the White House.
JOHN DEAN: It does.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what is improper here, and possibly what is illegal here? And talk about your position as White House counsel at the time. What were you seeing happening there? And what these allegationswhy they are so significant?
JOHN DEAN: There's actually nothing illegal about talking to the FBI. Nobody has to talk to the FBI when they come to see them or knock on their door, unless they're carrying a subpoena or acting directly for a grand jury. To my knowledge, there's no grand jury at this stage of any kind of inquiry into Mr. Trump's or his aides' conduct. So, there's probably nothing overtly illegal. There is a policy that was written in the late 2000s between the FBI and anybody in the rest of the executive branch, or the Congress, for that matter, talking to them about a ongoing investigation. That appears to be the regulation that may have been violated. And what happened is, one of the assistant directors pulled Priebus aside in the White House after a meeting and just said The New York Times story is a little bit overboard.
AMY GOODMAN: McCabe of the FBI.
JOHN DEAN: Yes, yes, excuse methe FBI investigation was a little bit overboard as reported by The New York Times. And it was just a passing remark. And then Priebus tried, apparently, to reach back and get more out of them. And that's where he probably crossed the linea regulatory line, not a legal line. So, but this is a
AMY GOODMAN: This is pressuring both McCabe and then a call to the head of the FBI, Comey
JOHN DEAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: to get them to publicly say that these stories about the contact between Trump's people and Russia were not true.
JOHN DEAN: It was an effort on behalf of the White House that failed. Comey was not about to buy into it. He has an ongoing investigation, and he wasn't about to undercut it by giving that kind of comment to Priebus. So, thatthis investigation has to play out. And it will play out. It will play out on Capitol Hill. It will play out in the FBI.
Russia kind of breaks down into three categories. There's the pre-election activity: Did the Trump campaign have contact with Russians and somehow know that they were hacking into the DNC, trying to hurt Hillary and help Trump? That's the first question. Then there's the period between the election and the inauguration, when Flynn was having contact with the ambassador. Did the president, and how manywho else on his staff was involved in those efforts to try to possibly undercut the Obama administration? And, of course, the third big area that they're investigating is: What is the truth or falsity of the dossier that appeared from the MI6 former employee, a fellow by the name of Steele, who reported what he was finding from some of his contacts in Russia as to whether or not Russia had compromised Donald Trump? Those are sort of the big three areas they're looking at in the Russian investigation. And any one of those could cause Mr. Trump a serious problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Back in 1972, you had Richard Nixon discussing with aides using the CIA to push the FBI from investigating the Watergate burglary. Were you in on those discussions?
JOHN DEAN: What happened is, before that happened, I had been overI had been called over by the acting director of the FBI, Pat Gray, to have an update and a report. And I came back and reported to Haldeman what was going on. It's interesting, Amy. And I've gone through every single Watergate conversation for the book I did, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It. We transcribed everything, about 600 tapes that had never been heard before. So I tracked it from the beginning to the end. And what happened in that conversation is Haldeman sort of took what I told him and pushed it much further than either Mitchell or I thought appropriate, and tried to sell the president on this as being a tool to use the CIA to cut off the FBI. Now, that was later called an obstruction of justice. I'm not sure, technically, it was. But what it did is it caught Richard Nixon in a lie, because he had denied he had known anything about any cover-up until I told him much later, when I started having direct dealings with him. And it was the lie that caught him more than that particular incident.

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation with former Nixon White House counsel John Dean. Now, speaking at CPAC on Thursday, White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who doesn't usually speak in public, threatened that Trump's declared war on the media is going to get worse.

STEPHEN BANNON: Corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposedadamantly opposed to a economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has. ... Here's the onlyhere's why it's going to get worse: because he's going to continue to press his agenda. And as economic conditions get better, as more jobs get better, they're going to continue to fight. If you think they're going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every dayevery day, it is going to be a fight.

AMY GOODMAN: That is White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart Media. We're talking to John Dean, served as counsel to President Richard Nixon. Your thoughts on what he is saying, and PresidentPresident Trump himself saying that the media, the press, is the enemy of the American people?
JOHN DEAN: I find it very startling and very troubling. It is more Nixonian than Nixon. And I say that for this reason. Nixon made those kind of comments, that we only know about because he had his secret taping system running and seemed to forget it was on just constantly when he was in the office. It would automatically go on. And he'd make those kind of attacks against the media, calling the media the enemy, saying that he was going to wiretap them and surveil them to find out who was leaking. He would have his top hatchet man, Chuck Colson, call the heads of the networks and read them the Riot Act for their coverage. So he did these things behind closed doors.
The big difference is, Trump is doing this right out and challenging the First Amendment, that is one of our most important because it involves freedom of the press and freedom of speech. And he's taking that on head on. Anything that he doesn't like, any reporting, he calls being an enemy of the people by not giving something that's laudatory to Trump and his administration. It's just ludicrous, Amy. And it's troublesome that he would try to sway the press by using the bully pulpit of his office to intimidate them. My hope is he does not. And I really don't think, knowing the journalists I know, that he will. Nixon failed, and he had a deep reservoir of ill will to draw on when he got himself in real trouble. And I think Trump is creating the same problem for himself.
AMY GOODMAN: Many have compared Donald Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention in July to the one given by Richard Nixon in 1968. This is a clip.

RICHARD NIXON: As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish, "Did we come all this way for this?"

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Nixon in 1968. John Dean, your thoughts on these comparisons?
JOHN DEAN: Well, he was clearlyI wasn't a part of his campaign. I didn't join him until well into his first term. And he was playing scare tactics at that point, trying to make Americans vote for him as a strong man, very much like Donald Trump did in his Cleveland speech. It's the same sort of tactic. They're both authoritarian personalities, Amy. And this is a type of personality that tries to frighten people to take a strong man as their leader. And it works. No one knows for sure how many Americans are affected by this. The best guesstimates of social scientists are about 30 percent maybe. But it looks like Trump got more than that when he used these tactics. And it is not a healthy way to run a democracy by trying to frighten people into voting for you.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to Donald Trump speaking in New York shortly before his inauguration, when he addressed questions about his business interests and asserted that, as president, he would be exempt from possible conflicts of interest.

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: I have a no conflict of interest provision as president. It was many, many years old. This is for presidents, because they don't want presidents gettingI understand, they don't want presidents getting tangled up in minutiae; they want a president to run the country. So I could actually run my business. I could actually run my business and run government at the same time. I don't like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that, if I wanted to. I'd be the only one that would be able to do that. You can't do that in any other capacity. But as a president, I could run the Trump Organizationgreat, great companyand I could run the companythe country. I'd do a very good job. But I don't want to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that's Donald Trump. And, of course, President Nixon famously said, "If the president does it, it's not illegal."
JOHN DEAN: Well, Trump is wrong. What the law says is he can't be criminally prosecuted. But a president can't be criminally prosecuted for anything, any offense. A president could theoretically shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, to use an analogy, and not be prosecuted for it. He could be impeached for it and then later prosecuted. But a sitting president, the best tradition and law we have, and lots of opinions that have come out of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, says he's immune from prosecution. But that doesn't mean he's immune from the law. It was anticipated that, as the head of the executive branch, he would set the example for conflict of interest.
Nixon, the way he handled it, he sold all of his stock, bought real estate, that was very passive investment that he couldn't affect. He did get criticized later for having the Secret Service make some improvements on the property for security reasons, that also were good for the value of his properties. But Trump has pushed this to a level that we've never seen, never had to cope with. And it's very troublesome, because almost everything he doesand it's clear he's doingthat are helping his business. And I think at some point Americans are going to say, "Hey, this isn't what we had in mind," those who did vote for him. And those who didn't vote for him are going to even be more offended. So, this is a bad play, and it's going to come back and haunt him.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, John Dean, in January, as you know, Trump famously fired the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, hours beforehours after she announced that the Justice Department would not defend Trump's executive order banning temporarily all refugees from the seven countries, the famous Muslim ban. Senator Chuck Schumer referred to the firing as the "Monday Night Massacre," which of course alludes to President Nixon and the Saturday Night Massacre. In these last seconds we have with you, talk about that and this comparison of
JOHN DEAN: That, Amy, suggests to me how ignorant he is about the job he has. I don't think he has even a good newspaper knowledge of the way the presidency works. I don't think he's ever read an autobiography or biography of any of his predecessors. And what he did is indeed an example of the way Nixon handled a special prosecutor who he didn't want to pursue his own tapes at that point. So, this was just a ham-handed very early effort. They didn't need to fire her. They had asked her to stay on as an acting attorney general. She was going to leave as soon as a permanent attorney general was confirmed. So, this, I think, is just more evidence of his ignorance.