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Imagine you’ve been put in charge of investigating your own boss—who also happens to be the most powerful person on the planet. You might unearth information that will be politically, professionally, and personally devastating to your subject, and you alone hold the power to indict and potentially imprison him.
Acosta, Jim (2020-06-15T23:58:59.000). The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America . Harper Paperbacks. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
“This is CNN breaking news. . . .” I was sitting on a plane just minutes after takeoff when the news alert flashed across the cabin’s TV screens. It was the morning of October 25, 2018, and I was en route from Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport to San Francisco, where I would be delivering a speech at San Jose State University on the state of the news business under President Donald J. Trump and accepting an award from the school’s journalism program. I’d been planning on using the flight to work on my speech, but suddenly I was glued to the screen in front of me. The New York City Police Department had units surrounding the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, across from Central Park. CNN’s headquarters was being evacuated after a suspicious package had been discovered in the building’s mailroom. A pipe bomb had been sent to CNN in New York, but its intended target was former CIA director John Brennan, a frequent Trump critic. The device was similar to bombs that had been mailed to Trump’s leading Democratic Party adversaries, including former president Barack Obama and Trump’s rival in the 2016 election, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. It has all been building up to some kind of act of violence, I thought. I had feared the day would come when the president’s rhetoric would lead one of his supporters to harm or even murder a journalist. And when it happened, the United States would undergo something of a sea change, joining the list of countries around the world where journalists were no longer safe reporting reporting the truth. Perhaps we have already entered that era, a dangerous time to tell the truth in America.
The January 6 Select Committee. The January 6 Report (p. VI). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
They attempted a coup. That is the most important fact about what happened. Donald Trump led an effort to overthrow the lawful government of the United States. He lost an election, exhausted the legal options to challenge it, and then tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power to the incoming administration of the president-elect. The goal was illicit: stealing an election. Trump’s chosen methods were unlawful: trying to overcome his loss with fraud, obstruction, election meddling, abuse of power by government officials, and even plans to have the military intercede. Trump himself did not always act. He often demanded other people break the law. Sometimes that worked, and he got people to commit crimes. Sometimes they refused. Indeed, many of the most brazen, gruesome, and well-known crimes were committed by the supporters Trump summoned to Washington—not by Trump himself. He did not personally go storm the Capitol (though he tried). He did not attack police offers with his hands. He did not physically obstruct and delay the January 6 certification. He did not sign documents created to commit elector fraud. Those distinctions are based on the factual evidence, but they do not resolve Trump’s actual and legal culpability. Criminal organizations typically shield the boss, sparing him from most dirty work, let alone actual combat. So how should the United States fairly determine potential accountability for Donald Trump, who encouraged and sought to benefit from an attempted coup, and an actual (but failed) insurrection? There are legal and technical aspects to this process.
Honig, Elie. When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the President, From Nixon to Trump. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. x
Introduction
When Jill Wine-Banks returned home after the biggest day of her career and realized she’d been burglarized, her first thought was about the brown cardboard box that she kept hidden in the attic. That box contained secrets that could topple the president of the United States. Then a thirty-year-old prosecutor (and the only woman) on the Watergate prosecution team, Wine-Banks hid that box in her home because she and her colleagues understood their own vulnerability. The survival of their nascent investigation depended entirely on the good faith of others, including the potential targets—and good faith was rare in Nixon-era Washington, DC. No law protected the Watergate prosecutors or their work; they knew the end could come at any time. And when it did, Wine-Banks wasn’t about to let the bad guys grab the key evidence and put it through a shredder. As she told me more than fifty years later, “We were fighting an enormously powerful president, and we were getting signals that something bad was going to happen, though we didn’t know what. I’m not sure how brilliantly we analyzed our options. But it seemed there was a real possibility we’d all be locked out and fired, and the evidence would be lost.” That day, November 27, 1973, had been the highlight of Wine-Banks’s legal career to that point. She had cross-examined Rose Mary Woods, the loyal secretary to President Richard Nixon, during a grand jury proceeding. Plainly trying to protect her boss, Woods originally testified that a crucial White House tape recording contained a conspicuous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap of empty air punctuated only by a strange set of buzzes and clicks because of her own user error.