The word “Obamagate” has recently become ubiquitous in the news, referring to spying by Obama administration officials on the campaign and then the transition and administration of President Trump. The use of the “gate” suffix of course hearkens back to the scandal known as Watergate, the affair that drove President Nixon from office in 1974. Like Obamagate, the Watergate scandal was also about spying by those in power on opposition political actors. Because of the close similarity of subject matter, it is appropriate to compare the facts of the two scandals.

Since Watergate was way back in the early 1970s, only a minority of today’s Americans today had even been born, and an even smaller minority has any personal memory of the events. In my own case, I was in law school, and the events that then dominated the news every day are seared in my memory. But for those who weren’t around, I’ll begin with a summary of the Watergate affair, derived from a long Wikipedia article here.

The Watergate Affair

The Watergate is a large apartment, hotel, and office complex located in Washington, DC, near the Potomac River. Here is a picture:

In the Spring of 1972, as President Richard Nixon’s campaign for re-election was gearing up, the Democratic National Committee had its headquarters in the office part of this complex. On June 17, 1972 a security guard at the Watergate noticed that some door latches had been tampered with, and called the police. The police then found and arrested five men in the act of burglarizing the DNC offices. The five, along with two other co-conspirators, were indicted in September 1972; and those seven were all convicted (some by guilty plea, some by jury) by January 1973. Meanwhile, Nixon had been re-elected by a landslide in November 1972, carrying all states but Massachusetts and DC.

The leader of the burglars was a guy named James McCord, who turned out to be a security co-ordinator for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), as Nixon’s campaign was known. After the convictions, many in the media and the Congress would not let go of the idea that knowledge of the operation would have to reach higher in the campaign than this small group of miscreants, and perhaps even to the President himself. Investigations continued and intensified.

Over the course of the next two years, facts that came to light included the following: (1) The purpose of the burglary was to tap the office phones of two high-ranking members of the Democratic Party, Larry O’Brien (Chair of the DNC) and Robert Spencer Oliver (Executive Director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen), as well as to photograph documents. (2) The operation was planned by the CRP and paid for by donations to the re-election campaign. (3) The operation had been approved in March 1972 at the highest levels of the campaign, including by John Mitchell, who had then only recently left the position of U.S. Attorney General to devote full time as campaign chair.

As to the involvement of Nixon himself, no evidence ever emerged that he had been aware of or approved the operation prior to its taking place. Nixon also at first denied any role in covering up the involvement of his campaign. However, there existed a recording system that taped meetings held in the White House. The tapes were subpoenaed, including by Congressional committees, and Nixon claimed executive privilege. Ultimately the Supreme Court overruled the claim of privilege in July 1974, whereupon the tapes became public. One tape from June 23, 1972 — just a few days after the burglary — had Nixon agreeing to a proposal from his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to tell the FBI to “stay the hell out of this.” That tape became known as the “smoking gun.”

Nixon resigned in August 1974. In the end some 48 people, many of them high-ranking members of the administration, were convicted criminally in the affair.

Comparison of Obamagate to Watergate

Private versus Government Operation

In the Watergate affair, the political spying was planned, financed and carried out by private actors working for the political campaign. In the cover-up phase, government officials including high-ranking members of the White House staff and the President himself definitely got deeply involved.

Obamagate is fundamentally about use of the powers and instrumentalities of the government to carry out espionage against political opponents. Yes, the Steele dossier that kicked off at least some of the spying was privately financed and acquired by the DNC and Clinton campaign. But those entities then passed that information on to their friendly allies in the administration to do the real dirty work under the color of law and on the taxpayer dime. FISA warrants enabled the FBI to surveil Carter Page and anyone he might have been communicating with for about a year. And now we learn of more than three dozen “unmasking” requests relating to General Michael Flynn, all in the short period from the 2016 election to Inauguration Day in January 2017. Now we have gone beyond mere FISA warrants, and into the realm of using the massive NSA data base with almost unlimited capability to snoop on everything Americans do.

Scope of the Operation

Watergate involved the wiretapping of a total of two land-line telephones. There was also an intent to photocopy some physical documents, but as far as I can find, none of that was ever accomplished. It all seems so puny by Obamagate standards.

With Obamagate we have only begun to learn the extent of the snooping, but all indications are that it was massive and pervasive. Put aside the Page FISA warrants, and start by considering the three dozen plus unmasking requests as to Flynn just in the ten week period from Election Day 2016 to Inauguration Day 2017. According to the Wall Street Journal piece linked above, the requesters included everyone from VP Biden, to Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, to CIA Director John Brennan, to UN Ambassador Samantha Power, to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, to several other people in the Treasury Department, and many others. Could it be possible that Obama’s political operatives, who went on this unmasking blitz against Flynn in this short time window, confined their unmasking NSA activities only to Flynn and only to this ten week window? If you think that, then kindly recall this June 26, 2019 piece from The Hill. Excerpt:

Congressional investigators confirmed more than two years ago that there was a massive spike between 2014 and 2016 in the number of names Obama officials asked be unmasked, including dozens involving Trump campaign and transition officials. Though Power’s U.N. job did not have regular intelligence-gathering responsibilities, her name was invoked as the authority for unmasking hundreds of American names in 2016 . . . .

That’s hundreds of unmasking requests from Samantha Power alone, even though her job at the UN would not have called for her to be involved in such activity. And how about the involvement of Treasury? These are the people who have your tax returns and probably access to your bank records. Why were multiple officials from Treasury, of all places, looking into Flynn? And if Flynn, was he the only one? If you are curious about that, check out this brand new piece from the Ohio Star from yesterday, reporting on new revelations from a “whistleblower” in the Treasury Department about political snooping there:

The Treasury Department Spied on Flynn, Manafort, and the Trump Family, Says Whistleblower. . . . By March 2016, the whistleblower said she and a colleague, who was detailed to Treasury from the intelligence community, became convinced that the surveillance of Flynn was not tied to legitimate criminal or national security concerns, but was straight-up political surveillance among other illegal activity occurring at Treasury. . . . The other names [subject to improper Treasury Department snooping] include: Members of Congress, the most senior staffers on the 2016 Trump campaign and members of Trump’s family, she said.

This report is anonymously sourced, so perhaps should be taken with a degree of skepticism until more facts come out.

Personal Involvement of the President

With Nixon, we are fairly certain that he did not know of or authorize the Watergate burglary before it occurred, but was involved in the cover-up from the outset.

How about Obama? Again, the details remain to be revealed. But two documents that have come to light seem to me particularly significant. First, there is the text message from Lisa Page to Peter Strzok of September 2, 2016, in which she explains why she needs to prepare written talking points about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, saying “potus wants to know everything we’re doing.” That is strong evidence that Obama knew of the political spying by his people while it was occurring. The second significant document is the famous email that Susan Rice sent to herself on January 20, 2017, even as Trump was delivering the inaugural address. The email describes the equally famous January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting attended by Obama, Biden, Deputy AG Sally Yates, Comey and Rice, and contains this gem:

 “From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

I read that as Rice coming up with the best euphemism she could concoct for Obama’s having given a direct instruction to hide as much as possible about the political snooping from the incoming President and his people, using the “Russia” line as the excuse and cover story. Of course, the whole idea that any matters of national security can or should be withheld from the President — who personally embodies the national security function in the constitutional structure — is completely preposterous.

Attitude of the Press

The thing I personally remember most about Watergate was the press feeding frenzy as the investigations continued through 1973 and 1974. For example, a Senate Watergate committee held hearings from May to August 1973, in the era before cable news or C-SPAN. The three major networks took turns broadcasting the hearings “gavel to gavel,” thus each canceling all their regular programming every third day. The nightly news shows — which were far more important then in the days long before the internet or cable news — were totally dominated by Watergate for months on end. The press had the sense that Nixon had more involvement than he was admitting, and they kept at it relentlessly until they got their quarry.

Obamagate? It’s totally a phenomenon of the small minority of the press that can be called conservative. The lack of journalistic curiosity is truly incredible. Much of the “mainstream” coverage looks to me like desperate spin to try to control the damage. As a couple of examples, consider this from The Atlantic May 15, headline “How to Understand ‘Obamagate’”:

Precisely what Trump is alleging against Obama is obscure, and probably beside the point. Trump isn’t really interested in alleging any particular crime. The point of “Obamagate” is to try to recapture the force that propelled Trump to political prominence—questioning the legitimacy of the first black president—as he heads toward a difficult reelection campaign in the midst of a global crisis.

The piece goes on to compare Obamagate to birtherism. Or there’s this from The New Republic, May 15, “Obamagate Is the Ultimate Republican Non-scandal.” There are dozens of other such.

I would have said that by the use of government agencies in political spying, by strong indications that the spying was massive in scope, and by clear documentary indications of personal presidential involvement in both the initial wrongdoing and the cover-up, this looks like a much bigger scandal than Watergate. But that’s just me.