It’s often been said that the coverup is worse than the crime. Had Richard Nixon immediately condemned the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972, even though some say he ordered the crime, he may have gotten away with it by denying he was behind the action.
Instead the president went all out to keep the burglary a secret and the train wreck known as "Watergate" ensued.
Donald Trump is headed down that exact same path, except we know he illegally took the documents. Once he got busted however, had he willfully handed the papers back to the National Archives, his thievery would have been nothing more than another Trump-being-Trump episode and long forgotten by now.
But no - he asked his aides to shuffle and hide the boxes full of classified documents under the scrutiny of security cameras (duh), and then after the Justice Department said they wanted to see the recordings, he ordered them destroyed.
Just like Alexander Butterfield changed history in 1973 by disclosing the existence of Nixon’s audio tapes at a Senate hearing, an unnamed staffer in charge of the security system refused Trump’s order to erase the video footage, which means that he or she will become the star witness in the upcoming trial and will occupy the same status as Butterfield in the annals of history.
תגובות