As URSULAFAW reported here, www.dailykos.com/... President Trump has offered to pay personally the legal bills incurred by White House Staff members and other Trump associates implicated in the Russia hacking and conspiracy probe. This is thinly-veiled hush money, the moral equivalent of bribery. It will certainly help Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller establish a pattern of obstruction of justice.
It also stupid (not to say “moronic”) in that it ignores history. Please recall that some of the most damning evidence against Richard Nixon in the Watergate Cover-up was the hush-money that Nixon authorized be paid to the Watergate burglars. See www.historycommons.org/… With characteristic lack of subtlety, on June 20 or 21, 1972, Nixon told White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldemann (General Kelly’s exact counterpart) that the burglars “are going to need money.”
Trump, who has fewer brains in his outsized head than Nixon had in his little finger, has made a moronic move. It will be seen as hush-money, whether he intends to really pay it or not. Much more moronic yet would be any White House Staff members and Trump associates who may accept Trump’s help. Consider the fate of their Watergate counterparts.
An ensuing scheme to pay off the Watergate burglars, part hush-money and part payment of blackmail by a Watergate burglar Howard Hunt, implicated Haldemann, Assistant to the President John Erlichman (see www.nytimes.com/…) , White House Counsel John Dean, Nixon personal lawyer Herbert Kalmbach (see www.nytimes.com/...), Attorney General John Mitchell, and others. All of those named here were convicted of felonies and went to prison. Those who were lawyers lost their law licenses.
“Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.”