Is the Whistleblower Like Deep Throat?

The Daily Mail has an article today entitled “Donald Trump will survive impeachment says Richard Nixon’s son-in-law.” It is largely an interview of Ed Cox. He married Tricia Nixon in 1971 in a White House Rose Garden ceremony. It was the year before President Nixon won a landslide reelection victory for president which was only a few months after the Watergate break-in that later led to the end of his presidency.

I was glued to the TV during the Congressional open hearings of the Watergate scandal, back in 1974. There is a lot that similar between that Watergate scandal and what I call the ongoing Trumpgate debacle. Cox interestingly cites two things that were very different between the time when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, in August, 1974, and the present circumstances surrounding President Donald Trump.

First, Cox recalls that when Nixon resigned the US was in the midst of its worst economic recession since the Great Depression. In contrast, right now the US stock market is still charging ahead in its 11th year of the longest bull market on Wall Street on record, and the unemployment rate is at a very historically low rate of about 3.5% unemployment.

Second, during Republican Richard Nixon’s second term as president both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats. In contrast, since the mid-term elections of 2018, Congress has been split, with Democrats controlling the House of Representatives and Republicans controlling the Senate. And if impeachment moves from the House to the Senate, it’s the Senate that will be the final arbiter on whether or not to remove President Trump from office. At the present moment, in all likelihood the Senate Republican majority will keep Trump from being removed.

So, Ed Cox, who is still married to Tricia, is really stating what is commonly believed. But it should be acknowledged that he is surely partisan, being the chairman of the Republican Party in New York state.

The Daily Mail article says, “Cox says the whistleblower that started the [impeachment] investigation over Trump’s links to Ukraine is similar to the anonymous Watergate whistleblower who would become known as ‘Deep Throat.’ In 2005, it would be revealed that Deep Throat was deputy director of the FBI Mark Felt.”

The current whistleblower in the U.S. intelligence community, who still remains anonymous, read the transcript of President Trump’s phone call on July 25th this year to Ukraine’s President Zelensky in which Trump pressured him to get political dirt on the past activities of for Vice President Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine before Trump would release $391 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. This person investigated these activities by President Trump and his aids and then wrote a memo about it which had led to the present impeaching hearings of the president.

Every American should watch the movie “All the President’s Men” It is about the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon. It is starring Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. They were two, young reporters at The Washington Post who broke the story about the botched and stupid Watergate break-in. They also uncovered vital information that later helped lead to the House of Representatives impeaching Nixon and Republican senators then convincing him to resign since the Senate clearly was going to remove him from office.

The film is quite riveting because there was a real-life mystery to it. Woodward and Bernstein by chance discovered a vital source of information. It was some guy. He was a shadowy character deep inside the U.S. intelligence community who never revealed his identity to anyone, including Woodward, Bernstein, and even his closest relatives, such as his daughter, for over thirty years. Mark Felt only revealed his identity to the public as Deep Throat when he was almost on his death bed. He told his daughter, and she convinced him to tell the world. His essential part in the plot makes it so intriguing because he surreptitiously gave information to Woodward and Bernstein many times, sometimes meeting with them in such a way that they could not discover his identity.

Nevertheless, it was mostly the so-called “Butterfield tapes” that really brought Nixon down. But that’s another story, and all American should know that one, too.

So, my answer to the above title of this post is “yes,” the current whistleblower now known as #1 has a lot of similarity to Deep Throat. As I have blogged numerous times, Trumpgate is lot like Watergate except that I think Trumpgate will make Watergate, as I have blogged before, “look like a Sunday school picnic.”