"[Nixon's] men broke into the Democratic National Committee in 1972—so what?"

"Lyndon B. Johnson’s men almost certainly bugged Barry Goldwater’s campaign plane in 1964. The John F. Kennedy administration authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. for its own political reasons. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration surveilled Charles Lindbergh when the famous aviator led the America First Committee and contemplated a presidential run in 1940. Did Nixon try—albeit unsuccessfully—to obtain the tax returns of political adversaries? Well, Roosevelt successfully ordered the Internal Revenue Service to investigate opponents such as William Randolph Hearst, Huey Long, and Charles Coughlin. Nixon operated a clandestine unit inside the White House—the so-called plumbers—to trace and stop officials who leaked to the media, you say? Under previous administrations, the FBI acted as a giant government-plumbing agency, surveilling troublesome journalists such as Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. Indeed, a probably core reason for the exposure of the Watergate break-in was that the long alliance between Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover faltered after 1971, for complex reasons, obliging Nixon to use amateur investigators for the Watergate burglary and other black-bag jobs that, under past administrations, the FBI would have conducted for the president...."

Writes David Frum in "Richard Nixon Was Unlucky/The Watergate scandal forced his resignation 50 years ago. Today, he’d probably have gotten away with it" (The Atlantic).

Nixon gave his resignation speech 50 years ago last night.

ADDED: The Atlantic homepage has a link to Hunter S. Thompson, "He Was a Crook/A scathing obituary of Richard Nixon, originally published in Rolling Stone on June 16, 1994."

"This is not the first midcentury, middle-America food craze to find new life online: Jell-O molds, 1970s-era desserts and 1970s-themed dinner parties..."

"... have all made unexpected comebacks. That’s all 'packaged-food cuisine' born of the hyper-consumerism of the 1950s.... For some, the box mixes and cans — triumphs of postwar prosperity — are a rosy portal to an imagined 'simpler time' of family dinners and easy living. 'That is nostalgia for America,' she said. 'That is our national comfort food.'"

From "Watergate Salad Makes a Comeback/The 1970s-era dish made with pistachio pudding mix, canned pineapple and mini marshmallows has caught the curious eye of the TikTok generation" (NYT).

It's absurd that something embodying nostalgia for a lost culture should bear the name "Watergate." But the nostalgia is felt by young people today, who don't mind mixing the 50s, 60s, and 70s together, not like us Boomers who think the early 60s, mid-60s, and late 60s were distinctly different eras and have long indulged in the deep, mystic belief that the first few years of the 70s were the real 60s.

And maybe there is nostalgia for the Watergate scandal. Maybe it seems poignant and delicate compared to the scandals of today... and even for Nixon. My son Chris — who is reading a biography of each American President — texted me about Nixon recently — somewhat jocosely — "Nixon is underrated. He was liberal!/Got more done for progressive causes than democrats do today." 

Anyway, the nostalgia for lost mid-century America is about far more than food. There's a sense that people lived more rewarding, warm, and loving lives back then. Here's something I saw on TikTok the other day. Let me know how it made you feel or, better yet, if you are not young, show it to someone young and ask them how it makes them feel:

"The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor."

"Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries.... Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work...."

Writes Harvard lawprof Jack Goldsmith, in "The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences" (NYT).

"One of the reasons 'Secret Honor' is so affecting is that, with the distance of time, we feel sympathy for the man, especially because we are aware of how Nixon-hating..."

"... had a lot to do with a very personal reaction to the man. There was a sort of loathing that wasn't about politics, but about the way he looked and spoke and certain personality qualities of the sort that would have made him unpopular even as a child. And the truly challenging thing to think about is how he could have been politically effective if he repelled people on a deep psychic level. Bush-haters of today might try imagining themselves thirty years in the future, looking back at him as a mere man."

That's something I wrote on February 14, 2005, in a post called "Small and large falls." 

I'm reading that this morning after seeing this new piece at New York Magazine, "In Secret Honor, Philip Baker Hall Plays Nixon As a Wounded Animal." New York Magazine is writing that now because the actor who played Nixon, Philip Baker Hall, recently died. He was 90.

I was writing about "Secret Honor" in 2005 — 17 years ago — because I was teaching the Watergate Tapes case and I had a nice, new Criterion Collection CD of the Robert Altman film. 

"Leaks can serve a really important role in helping to correct government malfeasance, to encourage government to be careful about what it does in secret and to preserve democratic processes."

Said Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, author of "Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11," quoted in The Washington Post on December 6, 2012, in a column titled "Why we don’t need another law against intelligence leaks" (by Leonard Downie Jr.).

And here's a CNN piece by Princeton history professor Julian Zelizer, "Why Washington is leaking like a sieve," published May 31, 2017:

"The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol..."

"... battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.... The House panel is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as 'burner phones,' according to two people with knowledge of the probe, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information."

From "Jan. 6 White House logs given to House show 7-hour gap in Trump calls/The House select committee is now investigating whether it has the full record and whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, according to people familiar with the probe" by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (Washington Post). 

Bob Woodward — his name on the article evokes the Watergate scandal and its famous gap — the 18-and-a-half gap in the Nixon tapes. Who did it?!

One indelible image sums up the lameness of the official explanation:

"I don't want a Nixonian ending for Trump. He was pardoned by Ford and allowed to go to retirement. I want Trump prosecuted to whatever extent the law allows..."

"... both as punishment and by way of warning to others who would run for election, not to serve the country but to serve themselves."

That is the top-rated comment (by far) on a WaPo column by Joe Scarborough, "Trump is hurtling toward a Nixonian ending."

The commenter's name is "prairie fire," which can refer to several things, one of which is has to do with the Weather Underground:

The leading members of the Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn) collaborated on ideas and published a manifesto: Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The name came from a quote by Mao Zedong, "a single spark can set a prairie fire."....

The manifesto's influence initiated the formation of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in several American cities. Hundreds of above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather Underground. Essentially, after the 1969 failure of the Days of Rage to involve thousands of youth in massive street fighting, Weather renounced most of the Left and decided to operate as an isolated underground group. Prairie Fire urged people to never "dissociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence"....

According to Bill Ayers in the late 1970s, the Weatherman group further split into two factions — the May 19th Communist Organization and the Prairie Fire Collective — with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding and establishing an above-ground revolutionary mass movement....

That reminds me: Mitt Romney is predicting that Donald Trump will be "solidly" reelected in 2020:

"I think that not just because of the strong economy and the fact that people are going to see increasingly rising wages," Romney said, "but I think it's also true because I think our Democrat friends are likely to nominate someone who is really out of the mainstream of American thought and will make it easier for a president who's presiding over a growing economy."

Some people love Trump and some people hate Trump. Both help Trump. I wonder how many people are hoping the economy goes bad, that it would be worth it to get Trump. Meanwhile the lukewarm among us are hoping the Democrats keep calm, stick to the middle, and give us a blandly normal candidate.

And I should say it again: I think if Nixon were having his troubles within the present-day framework of new media, he wouldn't have to resign and the impeachment route would also fail.

"This is much worse than Watergate, folks. That was a third-rate burglary that went awry."

"Trump was called a liar. He was mocked for tweeting about Trump Tower being wiretapped. David Gergen, you’ll hear on the sound bites today, practically chokes when confronted with the news that Trump was right and doesn’t quite know what to say about it. But, I tell you what, folks, in many ways it’s worse than Watergate, and it’s still going on even with Trump in the White House. Richard Nixon was accused of spying on the DNC, but Nixon never ordered any such spying. In fact, he didn’t know anything about it. He was accused of using the IRS against his political opponents, but he never did. We know for a fact that Obama did both of these things, used the IRS against political opponents and probably more. There’s no outrage in the media on this. They think it’s great that Manafort’s lock was picked. The New York Times reports this as though it’s something that happens every day. Yep, the FBI showed up, they picked the lock of Manafort’s front door in Virginia and walked in and woke him up along with his family and then started demanding things and taking things...."

Rush Limbaugh, today.

"Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower."

WaPo reports.

"Citing no evidence" doesn't mean he has no evidence. What happens next?

Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump's senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration's activities.

What's "credible news" these days? Maybe Trump is fighting fire with fire. The Russian business is a conspiracy theory so why not distract with a conspiracy theory on top of the conspiracy theory? There was a conspiracy to plant a conspiracy, etc. etc.

But Trump is accusing Obama of wiretapping his New York office. That's a very specific charge. Presumably Trump has high-level security within his homestead. Maybe something was detected. Here are Trump's tweets this morning:

1. "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

2. "Is it legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!"

3. "I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!"

4. "How low has President Obama gone to tapp* my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

#3 feels vaguely like a threat to get a criminal investigation going against Obama. This is a big move by the art-of-the-deal master. Perhaps the goal is to get his attackers to stand down.
____________________

*"Tapp" would be a good name for an app.

ADDED: Meade is saying "You over-educated professional class elites, you don't understand TrumpTweet." Most important, he says, is that Trump put "wires tapped" and "wire tapping" in quotes and that misspelling "tapp" could have been intentional. Is it some figure of speech? Is there a special way of speaking within Twitter that the grownups don't understand?

"Forty-five percent of voters say they agree with Trump’s claim that Clinton's email scandal is worse than Watergate."

According to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll (conducted after Comey's letter to Congress).

I wonder if people being polled today really know enough about what really happened in Watergate to use it as a standard of comparison. I remember growing up in a time when Teapot Dome was the standard of comparison. Worse than Teapot Dome was what people said, but no one ever quizzed them about Teapot Dome.

Nixon was a contemptible, horrible man — as we knew him, not personally, but from press reports. And so we came to understand that Watergate was the epitome of a scandal, which was convenient, because we lived through it, and then we never had to feel embarrassed about not knowing much about Teapot Dome.

But you kids today — Watergate is for you what Teapot Dome was to me — the symbol of presidential scandal, to be used in cogitations about whether something new is worse. So thanks, everyone, for answering Politico's question.

Now, can I add a little subtlety? Do you remember how Watergate looked on the eve of the 1972 election? We knew about the Watergate break-in when we went to the polls. Here's how we voted:



Here's a Watergate chronology. The break-in occurred in June 1972. The burglars, caught in the act, were indicted on September 15th. Nixon had made an announcement on August 30th that his counsel John Dean had done an investigation that determined that no one in the White House was involved, but on September 29th, WaPo reported that Attorney General John Mitchell "controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats." On October 10th, WaPo reported:

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

So that's what people had to think about when we reelected Nixon in the biggest landslide ever. (I was 21 and it was the first time I was eligible to vote, though the voting age was suddenly 18. All that youth vote — which represented a lot of opposition to the war (and, especially, the draft) — wasn't enough to stop Nixon. Like everyone I knew, I voted for McGovern.)

The news that there were audiotapes of White House conversations didn't come out until July of the following year, and without these tapes, Nixon would have hung onto the presidency. The slow roll out of the Watergate scandal went on for more than a year after that before Nixon resigned. It was August 8, 1974. Almost 2 years after that landslide election.

So let's look back in 2 years and see how Hillary's big trouble looks compared to Watergate. But if you want to compare it to Watergate now, try comparing it to how Watergate looked on the eve of the 1972 election. And think about what it was like to go through those 2 years from landslide election to forcing the President to resign. What an ordeal! But I'm not saying that if Hillary Clinton gets elected — even by a slim margin — that she'll be swamped by scandal the way Nixon was. The press won't be straining to take her out, and for all the wars we are fighting, there's nothing like Vietnam.

"Think about that: Before the authorities knew what was on the laptops, they agreed to destroy potential evidence in their investigation."

"The evidence was also under a congressional subpoena and preservation order," said The Wall Street Journal editorial, quoted in a Commentary piece by Noah Rothman, who continues:

And what kind of cooperation did the FBI receive in exchange for this concession? Not much, it seems. Mills continued to serve as Clinton’s counsel despite having received immunity, a privilege that betrays the fact the FBI saw her as a material witness to what might have been a crime.

The immunity deals the FBI was doling out like candy effectively prevented them from carrying out a thorough investigation into the bizarre behavior of the State Department officials in Clinton’s orbit...

The Justice Department’s decision to provide FBI Director Comey with the powers of a prosecutor (instead of simply an investigator) is conspicuous. The evidence the FBI decided to dismiss is bizarre. And the sneering of Clinton defenders at anyone who dares to notice these things is confounding. It seems as though everyone—including the Republican Party’s primary voters—have done all in their power to insulate Hillary Clinton from the consequences of her mistakes. But at what cost will all this protection come? Is it all worth it?

ADDED: Nixon is rolling over in his grave.

President Nixon: I'd like for you to take all these tapes, if you wouldn't mind. In other words . . .

Haldeman: Yeah.

President Nixon: I'd like to--there's some material in there that's probably worth keeping.

Haldeman: Yeah.

President Nixon: Most of it is worth destroying. Would you like--would you do that?

Haldeman: Sure.

It would have worked! No, no, Mr. Nixon. Rest in peace. It would not have worked. You were not loved. You had to make the people want to love you first. Don't worry. We will have a new President soon, and I assure you — the American people will not love him/her. 

It's not exactly the Watergate break-in — is it? — but Bernie Sanders's campaign broke into Hillary Clinton's confidential voter information.

I guess the defense is she was asking for it, being out there in the DNC database with a software error.

Here's the story in The Washington Post:

Officials with the Democratic National Committee have accused the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of improperly accessing confidential voter information gathered by the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, according to several party officials. Jeff Weaver, the Vermont senator’s campaign manager, acknowledged that a staffer had viewed the information but blamed a software vendor hired by the DNC for a glitch that allowed access. Weaver said one Sanders staffer was fired over the incident. The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters.... 

By the way, how did the Watergate burglars get through the door into the offices of the Democratic National Committee? Sanders's people made their virtual entry into a place within the DNC where they didn't belong through a software glitch (or so they say), so let's explore the analogy. How hard was it for the Watergate burglars to get in where they knew they didn't belong? I don't think the main thing was how hard or easy it was to get through the door. It was that they didn't belong there and they chose to go in. The ease of breaking in wasn't the crux of the wrongdoing!

So how hard was it?

Then we went up to the eighth floor, walked down to the sixth–and do you believe it, we couldn’t open that door, and we had to cancel the operation.... Eduardo was furious that Gonzales hadn’t been able to open the door. Gonzales explained he didn’t have the proper equipment, so Eduardo told him to fly back to Miami to get his other tool.... I said there wasn’t adequate operational preparation. There was no floor plan of the building; no one knew the disposition of the elevators, how many guards there were, or even what time the guards checked the building. Gonzales did not know what kind of door he was supposed to open. There weren’t even any contingency plans.... Gonzales got back from Miami that night with his whole shop. I’ve never seen so many tools to open a door. No door could hold him. This time everything worked. Gonzales and Sturgis picked the lock in the garage exit door; once inside, they opened the other doors and called over the walkie-talkie: “The horse is in the house.” 

The horse is in the house!

A horse named Bernie.

ADDED: Bernie goes on the attack:

Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, held a press conference on Friday in which he described how the Democratic National Committee was unfairly choking off the "lifeblood" of the campaign.... "Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign..."...

In the context of the (arguably) destroyed IRS email, let's revisit an old question: Why didn't Richard Nixon destroy the Watergate tapes?

I've taught the Watergate Tapes case — United States v. Nixon — for 20 years, and I think I always include what I believe is a central question about that case and about law more generally: Why didn't Richard Nixon destroy the Watergate tapes?

Nixon had possession of the tapes, and no physical force prevented his people from starting an "accidental" fire or causing a chance encounter with magnets... Yeah, bitch, magnets....



Here's the description in the book "The Brethren" of how Nixon reacted to the news of the Supreme Court's decision:

His Chief of Staff, Alexander M. Haig, told him that the Supreme Court decision had just come down. Nixon had seriously contemplated not complying if he lost, or merely turning over excerpts of the tapes or edited transcripts. He had counted on there being some exception for national security matters, and at least one dissent. He had hoped there would be some “air” in the opinion. 

“Unanimous?” Nixon guessed.

“Unanimous,” Haig said. “There is no air in it at all.”

“None at all?” Nixon asked.

“It’s tight as a drum.”

After a few hours spent complaining to his aides about the Court and the Justices, Nixon decided that he had no choice but to comply. Seventeen days later, he resigned.

So, why didn't Richard Nixon destroy the Watergate tapes? 3 ideas for an answer:

1. Nixon was part of the American culture of the rule of law that had grown and deepened over the years. We were long past the days when Andrew Jackson (supposedly) said: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" This is the answer I've always liked, and I can see that if I like it too much I'm falling prey to the age-old human foible of believing what you want to believe.

2. Nixon knew that if he said the tapes were destroyed, no one would accept any attempt to explain it away as a mishap, and he'd be impeached forthwith. It was nothing other than the best self-serving political move he could make at that point.

3. Nixon was, in fact, a fool not to destroy the tapes.

"I had bad advice, bad advice from well-intentioned lawyers who had sort of a cockeyed notion that I would be destroying evidence," Nixon said years later in a videotaped interview. "I should have destroyed them."

Let's compare the IRS email story. There are some differences:

1. Nixon was more hated and people weren't apt to cut him any slack, and Obama, whatever he does, is relentlessly liked.

2. The press was bearing down hard on Nixon — "They're after me! The president. They hate my guts. That's what they're after." — and the press is ever ready to give Obama a boost.

3. Nixon seemed tricky and shifty, unlike Obama, whose lies seem less... lie-like.

4. Tapes are bigger, bulkier objects, and email is evanescent.

5. Nixon, actually, at some level, felt shame about transgressing what another branch of government says is the law, and Obama has great confidence in asserting his view of the law and sticking to it. 

6. The Watergate scandal was about unlawful actions intended to help reelect the President, and... oh, wait... that's not a difference.

"I have a source that told me that if Jeb Bush decides not to run, that Mitt Romney may actually try it again."

Said Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation" yesterday, discussed here, by Wesley Lowery, in The Washington Post. Lowery says:

Romney and Bush are considered similar candidates... Several major Romney donors told The Washington Post earlier this year that Bush would be their preferred Republican candidate in 2016.

After shrinking out of the public light following his crushing loss to President Obama in 2012, Romney has slowly reemerged as a coveted political ally for Republicans seeking office this year.

Romney, 67, has begun to embrace the role of party elder, believing he can shape the national debate and help guide his fractured party to a governing majority.

Can America go for a candidate who has already had the nomination and lost? I remember when Nixon thought he could do it, and I considered it a ridiculous notion — I being a teenager and Nixon being correct. You may say: 1. But Nixon got drummed out of office, or 2. It's a new era and what worked in the 60s hasn't worked since the 60s.

Pat Nixon "never stopped believing that the Kennedys had stolen the 1960 election..."

"... or that Watergate originated as a plot by her husband’s political enemies. She argued against his resigning even after she’d started packing."

From a NYT book review of "Pat and Dick/The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage," by Will Swift.

Swift succeeds in showing a young couple united by a degree of class resentment and a political understanding of how their apparent ordinariness could spark a sense of sympathetic identification in the mass of voters who would eventually form Nixon’s “silent majority.” More profoundly, the couple shared what the author calls “an underlying, no-nonsense melancholy” that derived from “the sadness of their difficult childhoods.”

The administration's refusal to give Congress access to the Benghazi witnesses.

On today's "Fox News Sunday," Lindsay Graham was talking about his threat of blocking all the President's nominees in the Senate until Congress is given access to the witnesses to the Benghazi attack.

CHRIS WALLACE: OK. So, when you and other senators -- because you're not along in this -- asked to talk to the survivors... or to read the interviews that the FBI conducted within hours after the attack... what does the administration say to you?

GRAHAM: They say it's an ongoing criminal investigation, which is stunning. Under that theory, we would not be able to look at 9/11 and to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was prosecuted. He's still not even going to trial....

Under that theory there would not have been Watergate hearings!

GRAHAM: Can you imagine if this was George W. Bush and he told the Congress after 9/11 -- you can't talk to anybody because there's a potential criminal investigation, we're not going to investigate how 9/11 became the failure that it was?

"When Reagan called Nixon about Watergate."

From the newly released Watergate tapes.

"We know a lot about President Obama, and I think the idea that he would want the IRS used for retribution — we have no evidence of any such thing."

Says Carl Bernstein, declaring that the Obama administration's IRS scandal is not Watergate. 

"In the Nixon White House, we heard the president of the United States on tape saying 'Use the IRS to get back on our enemies."

The link goes to Politico, which doesn't close the quotation marks around "Use the IRS to get back on our enemies," and doesn't link to specific Nixon quotes found on the Watergate tapes. It's strange to put quotes around that if it's not a quote. Here's the Wikipedia article "Nixon's Enemies List," which doesn't quote any Nixon remarks. It does have the truly shocking John Dean memo that asks "how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." Politico needs to close the quotation marks and link to the quote or take away the quotes and add some material about how Nixon never said that and perhaps Bernstein — the wheeled-out old authority on Watergate — meant to say John Dean when he said Nixon.

Now, as to we have any evidence that Obama would want the IRS used for retribution, Obama once joked about using the machinery of the IRS against his enemies:

At his Arizona State University commencement speech [in May 2009], Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU's point by remarking, "I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."

What did the President know and when did he know it?

An old question. It springs to mind upon reading today's news:

Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner.

Over at the Isthmus forum — a Madison, Wisconsin site, where lefties try to cocoon — a regular commenter who uses the pseudonym Henry Vilas had said: "Sounds like an over-zealot functionary in a local office. While such partisan use of the IRS should be condemned, it's not like a presidential enemies list." And when confronted with the news that senior IRS officials knew, he said: "So did Obama sic the IRS on them, like Nixon did with his enemies list?"

Our own Meade followed the link to the Wikipedia article "Nixon's Enemies List," actually read it, and wrote:

Obamaphiles should hope so:

"On December 20, 1973, the Congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation concluded that people on the 'Enemies' list had not been subjected to an unusual number of tax audits."

"I kid you not: The IRS just released a statement on its improper harassment of conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election including the words: 'mistakes were made.'"

Says Instapundit, under the heading "It just gets worse."

I see that "Mistakes were made" has its own Wikipedia page:

The New York Times has called the phrase a "classic Washington linguistic construct." Political consultant William Schneider suggested that this usage be referred to as the "past exonerative" tense, and commentator William Safire has defined the phrase as "[a] passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it." While perhaps most famous in politics, the phrase has also been used in business, sports, and entertainment.

The phrase is most associated with Richard Nixon and his press secretary Ron Ziegler:

U.S. President Richard Nixon used the phrase several times in reference to wrongdoings by his own electoral organization and presidential administration.

On May 1, 1973, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler stated "I would apologize to the Post, and I would apologize to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein" (referring to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post). He continued, "We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments. I was overenthusiastic in my comments about the Post, particularly if you look at them in the context of developments that have taken place." The previous day, White House counsel John Dean and Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman had resigned, as the Watergate scandal progressed.

But it's not as though the association with Nixon has worked over the years to warn off other politicians. As you can see at the Wikipedia page, President Reagan used it in 1987 (about Iran-Contra, President Clinton used it in 1997 (about Democratic Party fundraising scandals. Senator McCain used it in 2005 (about the Iraq war). There are more items on the list, including — I love Wikipedia —today's statement by the IRS.

Under the "see also" heading:

List of political catch phrases
Non-apology apology
Non-denial denial
Spin (public relations)

IN THE COMMENTS: Erich said: "Calls to mind the classic Matt Groening cartoon."