U.S. presidents and their crime spree since 1968 | Will Bunch Newsletter

Twenty years ago this week, I became the person I am today. It’s no exaggeration to say that watching George W. Bush’s Iraq War unfold as a slow train wreck of blatant government lies caused a then-44-year-old to question everything. Especially journalism, which I’d entered as a child of Watergate, convinced that truth-telling would prevent unjust wars. Two decades later, I’m still demanding accountability.

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On Nov. 17, 1973, Richard Nixon stood before a room of newspaper editors in Orlando and said, famously, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

But people didn’t know the full story. The 37th president was indeed a crook, and the Watergate scandal he was addressing that night wasn’t even the worst of it.

It’s taken nearly a half-century to unravel the 1968 campaign tale of Nixon and all the future president’s men, their go-between Anna Chennault, and their dirty dealings with the South Vietnamese to put the kibosh on LBJ’s push for a speedy peace deal in Southeast Asia. Experts think such an agreement would have kept the soon-be-be-disgraced Republican out of the White House. But more importantly, an early peace also would have prevented the horrific deaths of more than 20,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese that occurred after Nixon took office.

Even for the Watergate caper, cover-up, and conspiracy, which led to criminal convictions for 48 others, Nixon escaped real justice. Emboldened by his 1974 pardon from successor Gerald Ford, he even had the gall to tell interviewer David Frost that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” But even more outrageous than Nixon’s statement is that decades of high crimes and misdemeanors at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seem to have proved him right.

Until, apparently, this week.

The news that Donald Trump expects to be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury and arrested as early as the next few days — in a belated probe of his $130,000 payment to a porn star, allegedly to keep her quiet before the 2016 election — has rocked the world of American politics, and not just because the 45th president is the leading candidate to get the GOP nod to run to become the 47th. He’d also become the first U.S. ex-president to get indicted.

But there’s an incredible irony in the timing — one that ought to spark a national conversation about just when and how does a commander-in-chief cross the line, and what are the consequences. Arguably the biggest non-Trump stories of the last couple days are about awful things done by two of the previous three Republicans who served in the White House — things that would seem to be far worse than paying off Stormy Daniels, and for which the men were never punished.

This weekend, an 85-year-old former top Texas politico, ex-Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, confessed to the New York Times that he flew around the Middle East in the summer of 1980 with his mentor, the former governor and Nixon Treasury secretary John Connolly, to convince Arab leaders that Iran would get a better deal from then-GOP nominee Ronald Reagan if they waited to release 52 American hostages until after his November contest with Jimmy Carter.

The Barnes mea culpa was the best confirmation yet of a long-standing theory about a Reagan “October surprise” (that’s what we call it, even though it was actually a plot to avoid an “October surprise” of Carter freeing the hostages and winning reelection) that prolonged the suffering of the captured Americans. Indeed, the captives were released in the first hour of the Gipper’s presidency, and arms were soon covertly flowing to the regime in Tehran through our ally Israel. The illegal weapons sales (but not the “October surprise” talks) were uncovered in Reagan’s second term as part of a bigger scandal called Iran-Contra, but the 40th president was not impeached or charged with a crime. Even rival Democrats seemed wary to take down an U.S. president barely a decade after the trauma of Nixon’s Watergate.

A president did it, but it was not illegal — even when American citizens were held in cruel bondage.

Also this week: a flurry of remembrances marking the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, a turning point in modern U.S. history. It was when George W. Bush and his manipulative vice president, Dick Cheney — eager to reassert American world domination after the trauma of 9/11, and plant the American flag in a region rich with untapped oil — told a cascade of lies to sell frightened citizens, a gullible media, and cowardly lawmakers on their immoral scheme.

And yet their war crime in invading Iraq was merely the centerpiece of what was essentially a national-security racketeering enterprise that included a CIA-backed network of unlawful prisons called “black sites,” a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay where rounded-up Muslims were held without trial, and the human stain of government-approved torture, an open-and-shut violation of a treaty signed by none other than Reagan.

Yet there was never any real talk about charging Bush (or Cheney) for acts so immoral that America’s global image was permanently damaged. The one and only time I had an opportunity to question Barack Obama, when he came to The Inquirer in April 2008, I wanted to know if there would be accountability for torture — and I got a mealy-mouth answer. Democrats feared the political backlash for pursuing crimes that were committed in broad daylight.

A president did it, but it was not illegal — even as 4,550 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died for Bush’s lies.

Do you really think it’s a coincidence that public faith in government has plunged from 77% in the mid-1960s, according to Pew, to near-record lows of just 20% last year? Americans have seen the fish stinking from the head, and the lack of accountability for the deadly lies and bad behavior in the Oval Office coincided with massive income inequality and an increasingly unfair society. No wonder we’ve seen the nihilism of more and more Americans buying guns, or abusing opioids — or electing a corrupt clown like Donald Trump as our president.

Today, with Trump for the first time facing some serious consequences for more than 40 years of bad behavior in the public sphere, a chorus of critics is attacking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case as too small and inconsequential. It’s not that POTUS 45 didn’t do what he’s being accused of — his personal lawyer Michael Cohen has already done prison time for the same scheme — but that an ex-president shouldn’t be tagged with a misdemeanor.

So let me get this straight: We look the other way when our leaders oversee war crimes or greenlight torture or commit quasi-treason with foreign adversaries because the American presidency is too big to fail, but we’re also going to ignore a cut-and-dried lower-level crime because it’s too small? I’d argue that charging Trump with violating a law that applies to 333 million other Americans is a first baby step toward undoing 55 years of gross injustice, and it’s long overdue. We need to rediscover that it’s still illegal even when a president does it.

Question: What about that Sy Hersh story about the Baltic pipeline? Is it all speculation or is there any there there? — Via Donald Albertson (@DGA12) on Twitter

Answer: Donald, I’m grateful for your question because I’ve been wanting to somehow address this for a while. Seymour Hersh is a legendary journalist with a more-than 50-year record of swinging for the fences on huge stories, and sometimes hitting home runs (My Lai, Abu Ghraib) but also sometimes striking out. His recent article (on his own Substack site) made a sensational allegation that the Biden administration planned and was ultimately behind the September 2022 under-the-North-Sea bombings of the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines connecting Russia and Germany. Despite Hersh’s past prominence, no one in the U.S. mainstream media raced to match his scoop — which did thinly hang on one anonymous source. But recently, U.S. intelligence officials went to the New York Times with a leak seeking to deflect blame — toward unnamed pro-Ukrainian activists — with a tale that defied credibility and thus actually (in my opinion) gave more credence to the Hersh report. Look, this was an attack on a Russian asset that benefitted Ukraine and its biggest ally, the United States. Its sophistication suggests it was done by a major state actor. There should be a full investigation. We may not like the answer.

In the 72 or so hours since Donald Trump went on Truth Social to urge Americans to turn out and “PROTEST” what he predicts will be his indictment this week by a Manhattan grand jury, police have hastily erected barricades around the hulking Manhattan Criminal Court building. And on Monday night, members of the New York Young Republican Club did flock to that site — a not-so-massive throng that reached about 50 people at its peak. Observers said that journalists greatly outnumbered pro-Trump demonstrators. One Trumpist who did show up told Politico that conservatives “are nervous that this would be a setup” that would lead to their arrest, as eventually happened to hundreds who took part in the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Another claimed Monday’s protest was small “by design.” Yeah, right.

Trump’s online protest plea caused many of his critics to say he was trying to foment another Jan. 6. He probably was. It probably won’t happen, and here’s why. First and foremost, people forget that the actual Jan. 6 required a lot of planning. Folks with followings — like future statewide candidates Doug Mastriano and Kathy Barnette here in Pennsylvania — spent several weeks renting buses and urging supporters to come to Washington. No one is doing that for lower Manhattan (a congested and expensive place to travel to, under any circumstance). Also, many of the people most committed to radical action on Trump’s behalf — leaders of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, for example — are behind bars or awaiting trial for the last “protest” egged on by Trump. The threat of political violence from the extremist right — from angry “lone wolves,” or at some future date — is real. But don’t bet on the American Experiment ending this week — and not over an ex-president’s payoff to a porn star.