Trump is never mentioned in the piece. But it seems safe to say that Baker’s interest in the road map is not purely historical, and that he perceived some eerie parallels between 1973 and 2017. Baker was one of three top FBI officials who knew about Trump’s conversations with Comey between January and May of last year, in which Trump requested Comey’s loyalty, attempted to shield his then–National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn from FBI scrutiny, and asked Comey to reassure him, and even state publicly, that he was not a subject of the ongoing Russia investigation.

One episode cited by the author, which Petersen described in 1973 grand-jury testimony that was later included in the road map, is particularly striking in its similarities to the events of last year. On May 19, 1973, Petersen testified that he had visited the White House a few months earlier to alert Nixon to the fact that his chief of staff and assistant for domestic affairs were both under federal investigation. Petersen suggested that Nixon fire them to protect the presidency from any legal exposure. But Nixon demurred. “He said he couldn’t believe it,” Petersen testified to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, referring to Nixon. The president called his staffers “fine, upstanding guys,” according to Petersen, and said he didn’t think he should fire them. (Nixon, of course, knew at the time that both staffers were key figures in the events leading up to the Watergate break-in, which Nixon had orchestrated.)

Fast-forward to January and February 2017, when the White House was alerted to Flynn’s legal exposure stemming from conversations he had during the presidential transition period with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

In late January, White House counsel Don McGahn was warned by Sally Yates, then acting attorney general, that Flynn had lied to the FBI about those conversations. “We told him we were concerned that the American people had been misled about what General Flynn had done, and that we weren’t the only ones who knew about this,” Yates testified last year, a few months after she was fired by Trump. “We told them we were giving them this information so they could take action.” Despite Yates’s warnings, the White House waited nearly three weeks to ask Flynn to resign. And the day after Flynn was ousted, Trump asked Comey to consider letting Flynn “go” because “he is a good guy,” according to a contemporaneous memo Comey wrote, documenting the meeting.

Read: The question Sally Yates couldn’t answer

Whether Trump ordered Flynn, who has been cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to discuss the issue of sanctions with Kislyak and then lie to federal investigators about it is still an open question. But in 1974, Nixon’s interactions with Petersen, which involved misleading Petersen about what he and his staffers knew and when they knew it, were considered an impeachable offense. As Baker noted, Article II, paragraph 5, of the House Judiciary Committee’s Articles of Impeachment for Nixon stated that he “knowingly misused the executive power by interfering” with the FBI and the DOJ Criminal Division throughout the investigation.