What the Watergate Committee Taught Me, LOWELL P. WEICKER JR

*As the last living member of the Senate committee that investigated the Watergate affair, I am often asked about what similarities I see between the criminality of the Nixon operation and this hash of a presidency that is the Trump White House. My answer is that there is no comparison. Yet.

Watergate was a multimillion-dollar enterprise of political spying, bribery, burglary, fraud and other criminal and unconstitutional activities run out of the White House over several years. As a result, some two dozen close associates of the president went to prison, and the president resigned to avoid impeachment proceedings. Mr. Nixon himself probably avoided prosecution only because of the pardon granted by his successor, President Gerald Ford. The scandal destroyed the Republican Party as we knew it. Remember, Watergate was years in the making. We are only six months into the Trump administration. There is ample cause for concern, and I hear disturbing echoes of the past.

President Trump’s reflexive use of official statements to lie about facts large and small, and his directing of his staff to do the same through the media, are redolent of the Nixon White House, even as Washington shakes almost daily to the sonic booms of revelations. . .

When the committee released its final report on Watergate on June 27, 1974, I offered a few additional recommendations. “This won’t be the Watergate to end all Watergates,” I wrote. “Other men will tape the doors of America in other times. Whether they succeed will be a matter of spirit. For then as now, the state of our spirit will determine the state of this Union.”

That’s my comparison.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/opinion/watergate-nixon-trump-russia-investigation.html?