After Paul Manafort's Friday guilty plea and promise to cooperate with Mueller's investigation, the Republican establishment has changed its spin slightly, but significantly. This is a good sign. They are making the exact same shift the GOP made during Watergate once it was obvious to everyone that serious crimes connected to the White House could no longer be denied. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
Today on “Meet the Press,” here's how the reliably icky GOP stooge Peggy Noonan tried to spin her best possible take on Manafort's guilty plea and Mueller's ongoing investigation:
“I think part of the story perhaps with the President and all of these people who've been indicted or come under questioning, is that he (Trump) may or may not have any deep insight into their nature, because he didn't really know them. … The people around Trump during the campaign were an island of broken toys. They were individual operatives, they were driven by their own drama.” -Peggy Noonan, Meet the Press, 9/16/2018
Similary, on Friday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed at her press briefing that Manafort's plea deal was “unrelated” to Trump’s campaign:
“This had absolutely nothing to do with the president or his victorious 2016 presidential campaign.” - Sarah Huckabee Sanders, 9/14/2018
Rudy Giuliani's statement on Friday:
“Once again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign. The reason: the President did nothing wrong.” Rudy Giuliani, 9/14/2018
Of course, Team Trump's previous spin was, “Nothing bad happened and all these stories are fake news.” But over the past few days it's changing to, “Yes, something bad happened, but blame the people around the President, not the President himself, he somehow didn't know what they were doing.”
This is the exact same shift the GOP made 45 years ago during Watergate. Initially, after the break-in hit the news in June 1972, Attorney General John Mitchell told reporters:
Those arrested at the Watergate “were not operating either in our behalf or with our consent... We have no knowledge of these relationships.” - John Mitchell, June 1972
But the story wouldn’t die, so Nixon announced he would have White House Counsel Dean investigate it, and in August 1972, Nixon announced no one in his administration was connected:
“I can state categorically that his investigation indicates no one either in the White House or the administration was involved.” — President Richard Nixon, 8/29/1972
Throughout Watergate the GOP blamed the media, especially the Washington Post, just like Trump these days screaming “fake news.”
“The Post has maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate -- a charge The Post knows -- and a half dozen investigations have found -- to be false.” -- Clark MacGregor, chairman of the Nixon re-election committee, 10/16/1972
Sen.Bob Dole, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, attacked the Washington Post for its “political garbage” reporting on Watergate:
“The Washington Post is conducting itself by journalistic standards that would cause mass resignations on principle from the QuicksilverTimes, a local underground newspaper.” - Sen. Bob Dole, October 1972
But on April 30, 1973, Nixon finally announced he was accepting the resignations of Dean, plus Nixon’s two top White House advisers, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst.
After the mass resignations, the GOP’s spin shifted and they started blaming almost everyone in the White House except the President for Watergate. From the Washington Post's front-page story on May 1, 1973, the day after the mass resignations:
“There can be no whitewash at the White House,” Mr. Nixon declared in a special television address to the nation. He pledged to take steps to purge the American political system of the kind of abuses that emerged in the Watergate affair.
House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R-Mich.) called the resignations “a necessary first step by the White House in clearing the air on theWatergate affair . . . I have the greatest confidence in the President and I am absolutely positive he had nothing to with this mess.”
Nixon resigned 15 months later, on August 9, 1974.
