Insulting ... To Nixon

Mid-afternoon update: Just when I thought I'd had enough "memories of Nixon" for one day, look who stopped by the White House to visit the POTUS:

Henry Kissinger’s White House visit is a haunting.  https://t.co/DCMsS38SuF

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 10, 2017

New Republic calls it "a haunting" and says the meeting was "rich with historical echoes." Read it here.

And one more thing: Wouldn't you have loved to be a fly on the wall when Kissinger passed Jared Kushner in the hallway?

Original post:
The president's firing of FBI Director James Comey is being compared, by some, to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate crisis. So much so that the Nixon Presidential Library felt compelled to defend their man:

FUN FACT: President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI #FBIDirector #notNixonian pic.twitter.com/PatArKOZlk

— RichardNixonLibrary (@NixonLibrary) May 9, 2017

And here's what The Guardian, a British newspaper, had to say about that:

Comey was investigating the Trump campaign over alleged collusion with Russia – and Trump has fired him.

To the naked eye, that looks like obstruction of justice. It is quite true that a US president has the power to fire an FBI director. But it has only happened once before. (Bill Clinton dismissed William Sessions in 1993 for using a government plane for private business.) That’s because, as Harvard’s Prof Noah Feldman argues, the secure tenure of the FBI director has been understood as an inviolable norm, part of America’s unwritten constitution – designed to safeguard the independence of law enforcement from political interference. 

That is what Trump has trampled on. It’s why scholars and others are saying that, if the day ever comes when articles of impeachment are tabled against Trump, the first will be a charge of obstruction of justice. That was article 1 of the rap sheet against Richard Nixon too – though it’s striking that the library of the disgraced former president swiftly tweeted that their man had never actually sunk as low as firing an FBI director. Trump’s position is now so perilous that comparisons to Nixon are deemed insulting … to Nixon. (Read the story here.)