According to Bob Woodward, the biggest difference between Watergate and America’s current political situation is a smoking gun – or rather the lack of one.

The legendary Washington Post reporter was asked the inevitable “then and now” question following a screening of “All the President’s Men” on Wednesday night at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring near the nation’s capital, kicking off its “Fourth Estate” series in conjunction with Washington Monthly.

Bob Woodward, right, being interviewed by Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris

Saying it was “15 or 17 years” since he last watched the classic movie based on the book he wrote with Carl Bernstein about the downfall of America’s 37th president, Richard Nixon, Woodward said it was the revelation of the Oval Office tapes and their damning content that provided incontrovertible evidence of the cover-up that led to Nixon’s resignation. As yet, Woodward said, criminality by Trump has obviously not been established with that degree of clarity.

The “now” part of the question was in response to the statement earlier in the day by Robert Mueller, the first time that the Special Counsel had spoken publicly since beginning his investigation two years ago into Russian interference in the 2016 election – and two months after his report was delivered to the Justice Department. His televised address sent political Washington into yet another Trump-inspired news frenzy of interpretation. Among the media, there even seemed to be confusion over what Mueller said, let alone what he meant.

Woodward, the author last year of  “Fear: Trump in the White House” acknowledged the inevitability of the comparisons between Nixon and Trump, discussing how important the Post’s dogged, persistent, personal-relationship reporting of Nixon’s administration had been in developing the Watergate story and setting it – perhaps unfairly – against the way the Trump presidency is covered four decades later by a very different media using, by necessity, very different techniques.

For example, one of the key figures in Watergate, former Nixon counsel John Dean, said last year that Nixon “might have survived” if Fox News had been around to defend him.

Reaction to Mueller’s nine-minute televised press conference resonated all day Wednesday and the fallout is set to continue through to the weekend, with Attorney General Bill Barr recording what could be a tricky interview with CBS News to air in full on Friday morning and the response from politicians of both parties coming out slowly due in part to the Congressional recess.

After an initial muted response reiterating the Republicans’ “case closed” mantra yesterday – itself a shift from “total exoneration” – President Trump kicked off his Thursday with a tweetstorm railing against Mueller and the investigation, even if he had second thoughts about this one…

Then, in a remarkable 17-minute tirade this morning on the White House driveway, the president went after Mueller as a “never-Trumper” and attacked the idea of impeachment as being a “dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”

Your move, Congress

Mueller’s statement and the growing restiveness of the Democrats running for president puts even more pressure on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to make a decision on formal impeachment proceedings.  Joan Walsh writes in The Nation that Mueller has effectively put the ball back in Congress’s court, telling it “to do its damn job.”

“Mueller came as close as possible to saying that he would have indicted Trump for obstruction of justice, if Justice Department policy allowed him to do so. “Charging the president with a crime was not an option we could consider,” he said. But then he delivered the most important information in his 10-minute statement: “If we had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not.”

The impeachment argument now looks set to be the “song of the summer” according to Elaina Plott and Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic. But time to act is likely short, as the Democratic primary season gears up. The first debates are on June 26 and 27 and the party will want to avoid appearing divided on the issue. But that  may not remain in their control for long.

Writing at the Eurasia Group’s GZero, Kevin Allison says Mueller’s statement “lit the impeachment fuse” on live television. “We’re living in a TL;DR political and media age when “read the report” isn’t enough. The lines between Reality TV and politics have become so blurred that to hear direct from one of the main characters in the drama – as we just did – is likely to have a bigger impact, not only on the public but on Congress.”

While Mueller said that he considered the report to be his testimony and intended Wednesday’s statement to be his final word, Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post writes that “If Americans won’t read Mueller’s report, spoon-feed it to them,” arguing that the “assumption that Mueller will not testify is misplaced. He did not say that he would refuse to abide by a congressional subpoena, though he may stick to the script (i.e., the report) as he did on Wednesday. Given the necessity for verbally communicating the results to the public, this wouldn’t be a waste of time.”

At the end of the day, though, the over-arching takeaway from the special counsel’s statement on Wednesday was not any political slant, or any perceived conflict with the Attorney General, or even Trump’s predictable reaction to it, but Mueller’s repeated warning of the need to address the Russian interference that prompted his investigation in the first place.

It is an issue, he said, that should concern every American.

The problem is that apparently not every American agrees.

Looking ahead to how the coming months are going to unfold in the run-up to the 2020 election, amid an already febrile punditry and speculation that is only going to intensify, it’s maybe worth noting that the current edition of Washington Monthly, which organized Wednesday’s AFI screening and the Woodward Q&A, has a piece entitled “What happens if Trump refuses to concede?”

In it, Daniel Block writes: “Trump, of course, wasn’t on the ballot in 2018. Losing in 2020 would be far more personal. But even if Trump refused to concede, it doesn’t mean he’d manage to remain in office. [Chief Justice] John Roberts has worried publicly about the credibility of the Supreme Court. It seems unlikely that he would “save” Trump from a less-than-ambiguous electoral defeat. Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin form a formidable roadblock against local Republican power grabs. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that Trump lost—and no plausible pathway to mess with the outcome – Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Pence would probably tell Trump to pack his bags.”

Just probably?

As for Bob Woodward’s final thoughts at Wednesday night’s event, he was asked about the potential challenges of making a similar movie about the Trump era, responding that he had recently spoken with Robert Redford (who played him in “President’s Men”) about it.

“He had lots of ideas. I did not.”

 

Bob Woodward will be appearing in conversation with Fintan O’Toole at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on June 10.