Jason Sattler

Opinion columnist

If you aren’t wondering what’s going on between President Trump and Russia, maybe you aren’t paying attention. Maybe you’re a Republican member of Congress. Or maybe there’s nothing to wonder about, because we've seen it all on TV.

We have already watched Trump tell NBC News he was thinking about the FBI's Russia investigation when he fired FBI James Comey. We've seen him beg Vladimir Putin's government to “hack” Hillary Clinton's emails “jokingly.” We saw him repeatedly embrace what former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts called Russian “active measures” at televised rallies. Now he confirms that yes, he did indeed share sensitive intelligence information with Russian officials in the Oval Office.

Despite his peacock’s strut of Russian connections, Trump still seems desperate to squelch the investigations into his campaign. And he just may do it, because he currently has something President Nixon never did — immunity by congressional majority.

Five months into the Trump presidency, “the swamp” is still bubbling over. But we’ve already drained our strategic reserve of Watergate analogies.

In this history replayed as farce, 18 missing minutes of recordings becomes 18 days of the president knowing his national security adviser might be “compromised” by the Russians before firing him, a Saturday Night Massacre moves to Tuesday (where it presumably got better TV ratings) and the madman in Oval Office brags about having secret “tapes” on Twitter instead of hiding them.

Of course, there are still profound differences between Nixon’s follies and Trump’s potentially far worse foibles.

For instance, Watergate was about a “third-rate burglary” of little practical consequence in one of the biggest landslides in American history. And our current catastrophe involves foreign meddling with possible collusion by the campaign of the current commander in chief in one of the closest elections ever, swung by about 60,000 votes in just three states.

And don't forget the hugest difference between Watergate and now: Nixon faced a Democratic Congress. Even so, the whole calamity took forever to ripen. More than two years passed from the burglary at the Watergate hotel on June 17, 1972 to Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.

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You could argue that Russiagate is moving faster than the greatest scandal in presidential history. Consider what happened in just a three-day period last week. First Trump fired Comey. Then he met with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office and not only let in a Russian photographer while keeping out the U.S. press, he gave his guests that highly classified information.

Trump capped it off by turning May 11, 2017 into a date that could go down in American history as the new June 23, 1972, the day Nixon insisted CIA officials tell the FBI to kill the Watergate investigation.

On that day, NBC broadcast an interview in which Trump directly contradicted his administration’s reasoning for firing Comey. He said he "decided to just do it" regardless of a recommendation from the deputy attorney general and added, “I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” He also said that after learning national security adviser Mike Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians, he waited 18 days to fire him because it “did not sound like an emergency.”

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, in a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the “assembled leadership in the intelligence community” answered with a collective "yes" when asked if they stood by their conclusions that “Russian intelligence agencies were responsible for the hacking and leaking and using misinformation to influence our election."

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For some reason, this president not only does not share his intelligence community’s alarm about a country determined to undermine our democracy, he mocks it. This kind of disdain for his experts suggests a divide in executive branch unlike anything we’ve seen in recent history.

And with few exceptions, at least for now, Republicans in Congress are going along. This is how we got a bungled investigation of Russia’s meddling in the House trailing another in the Senate that is led by a member of Trump’s transition team, and a House speaker who prioritizes tax breaks for the rich over everything — including basic oversight.

By firing Comey, Trump has stunted the closest thing to a trusted investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. According to an NBC/Wall St. Journal poll, 65% had confidence in the FBI investigation compared to 40% for efforts by Congress. That same poll found 78% of Americans want an independent probe of the meddling.

To get that, we need what Nixon had — a Democratic Congress.

Republicans stuck with Trump after the Access Hollywood tape revealed him beating his chest over things Mike Pence's wife wouldn't let Pence read about. And they won big. They won't learn their lesson unless they feel the pain at the ballot box.

Jason Sattler, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a columnist for The National Memo. Follow him on Twitter @LOLGOP.

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