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On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that spelled the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. In a landmark ruling, the court ordered Nixon to release secret Oval Office tape recordings that proved he had been part of the Watergate cover-up. With irrefutable evidence of his guilt out in the open, Nixon’s support among Republicans in Congress collapsed, and he resigned on August 9 rather than face impeachment. That court ruling came more than two years after the June 1972 Democratic National Committee Headquarters break-in that triggered the scandal. Today, people remember Watergate as a scandal that quickly sank Nixon, but in reality, it took a long time to unspool. In fact, Watergate didn’t really take off as a scandal that seriously threatened Nixon’s presidency until March 1973, nearly a year after the break-in. That was when James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, wrote a private letter to the judge handling the burglars’ criminal case revealing that he and his co-defendants had been under political pressure to plead guilty and remain silent as part of the cover-up. The Senate Watergate Committee hearings began two months later, and in June 1973, former White House counsel John Dean captivated the nation when he testified that he had told Nixon the Watergate cover-up was a “cancer on the presidency.” The one-two punch of McCord’s letter and Dean’s testimony finally transformed Watergate into an all-consuming national crisis. The fundamental lesson? Regicide takes time. Unfortunately, this revelation was lost on the Democrats who have been leading the rushed impeachment of Donald Trump. House Democrats went into the impeachment process last year with a strong hand. Thanks to an anonymous whistleblower and other courageous government officials who were willing to tell the truth, there was rock solid evidence that Trump had abused his presidential power in the Ukraine case. Immediately after special counsel Robert Mueller declined to prosecute him for colluding with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election, Trump sought to pressure Ukraine to interfere on his behalf in the 2020 presidential election. Trump withheld badly needed aid from Ukraine in a bid to force newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who had been on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. It didn’t matter to Trump that there was no evidence of corruption by Joe Biden or his son; he wanted Zelensky to announce an investigation into false charges that would hurt Biden’s candidacy.

Trump’s efforts to embroil Ukraine in his corrupt election scheme outraged the career government officials who knew about it, and many of them were willing to testify before the House. But Trump quickly sought to stonewall the House investigation, and, following his lead, many of the political appointees around him also refused to testify. The White House issued lie after lie about the Ukraine case, while smearing the career officials who had testified under oath. Trump and his enablers tried to discredit the investigation by claiming it was the product of a vengeful “deep state.” By December, House Democrats had built a case based on the testimony of several career officials, but they had reached an impasse with the White House as top political appointees still refused to cooperate. So House Democrats had a choice: Take more time to investigate or move straight to an impeachment vote. Forcing the testimony of the uncooperative Trump administration officials might have required House Democrats to take the bold step of holding Cabinet-level officials in contempt for ignoring congressional requests and subpoenas. The House Democrats could then have gone to federal court to enforce their actions. House Democrats could also have sent a delegation to Ukraine to try to gather facts and negotiate for the testimony of Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders. Or they could have slowed down in order to hire dozens of additional congressional investigators, who could have scoured Washington looking for more of the Trump-Ukraine story. To stoke public interest, House Democrats might have continued to hold public hearings on the Ukraine scandal while waiting for their investigative efforts and legal challenges to bear fruit, much as the Senate Watergate Committee hearings did in 1973. Those hearings attracted celebrities like John Lennon and Yoko Ono and became appointment television for millions of Americans.

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