Roger Stone speaks after his appearance at Federal Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on January 25, 2019.(Reuters / Joe Skipper)
Friday’s arrest of Roger Stone, the longtime political adviser to Donald Trump, was greeted with a striking signal from the man who will play a critical role in deciding whether this scandal-plagued president will face impeachment.
“Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn,” tweeted House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler, who ticked off the names of presidential aides and associates who have since the 2016 election been charged, indicted, pleaded guilty, or been convicted of criminal wrongdoing. Then, reaching back into the playbook from a previous impeachment inquiry, he asked the classic question: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
That’s a reference to a question asked in 1973 by Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. The panel was better known as the Senate Watergate Committee, and Baker had been seen as a key defender of Richard Nixon against what the Republican president decried as—and this will sound familiar—a “witch hunt.” In June of 1973, when White House counsel John Dean appeared before the committee, Baker began his round of questioning with a statement of intent.
“My primary thesis is still, what did the president know, and when did he know it?” the senator explained. Baker was seeking clarity, a clarity that many Republicans thought would protect Nixon by showing that he did not know what his associates were doing. But, as The Christian Science Monitor recalled, “Dean turned this question around. Among other things, he charged that Nixon had been involved in discussions about clemency for those who had carried out and organized the break-ins, as well as talks about payoffs. Dean said the president had continued these activities even after he, as White House counsel, had warned his boss of a ‘cancer’ on the presidency.”
White House tapes and testimony from other Nixon associates would quickly confirm that Dean was telling the truth. Suddenly, Baker’s question sounded like a challenge to Nixon. And a damning one at that. The details of what the president knew and when the president knew it would form the underpinnings for articles of impeachment that would be approved in the summer of 1974 with bipartisan support from the House Judiciary Committee. Threatened with accountability, Nixon cut and ran.
Nadler’s recollection of the essential question of the Watergate era was a knowing response to the news that Stone had been arrested on the basis of a seven-count indictment from a criminal case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. According to The New York Times, the Stone indictment “revealed on Friday the most direct link yet between the Trump campaign’s and WikiLeaks’ parallel efforts to use Democratic Party material stolen by Russians to damage the election campaign of Hillary R. Clinton.”
Stone identifies as a Trump ally and says he will not turn on the president. Trump tweeted last month that Stone has “guts!;”—perhaps encouraging his longtime fixer and friend to remain loyal, and quiet, even as other Trump aides and employees were cooperating with investigators and being talked up as potential witnesses before the Judiciary Committee.
Nadler’s tweet served as a reminder that this is not the first time that Stone has been associated with a scandal-plagued commander in chief who faces scrutiny from prosecutors and members of Congress. Stone started his political journey doing dirty tricks for Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and then took a low-level job in the administration.
So Nadler’s mention of Baker’s line was ironic.
But this mention of the “what did the President know and when did he know it?” quote also went to the heart of the matter that Nadler and other members of Congress will have to deal with as the Mueller inquiry unravels the details of wrongdoing by the president’s associates—and, potentially, the president. Nadler has been cautious in his approach to impeachment questions, just as House Judiciary Committee chair Peter Rodino was during Watergate. Nadler will not rush to judgment. But the current Judiciary Committee chairman will not rush away from it.
Nadler has employed a series of questions to establish a standard for consideration of impeachment: “One, were impeachable offenses committed, how many, et cetera. Secondly, how important were they? Do they rise to the gravity where you should undertake an impeachment?” Now, he has raised the most historically and practically consequential question: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Advocates for impeachment, such as this writer, believe that the president has already crossed the line. Some Democratic members of Congress agree. Most, including Nadler, have signaled that they are waiting to see what the Mueller inquiry produces. But that does not mean that we lack measures of progress toward the accountability moment that, to the view of a growing number of Americans, seems inevitable.
Back in 2017, when Trump fired then–FBI Director James Comey, Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan, said: “Trump firing Comey reminds me of the doomsday clock, but maybe we should start an impeachment one.” The firing of Comey, Pocan suggested, had “moved us an hour closer to midnight.”
As the discussion turns to what Donald Trump knew, and when he knew it, it is safe to say that the impeachment clock is ticking faster.
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.