John Dean, the former White House counsel who became a star witness against President Richard Nixon over Watergate, said his former boss would tell President Trump “he’s going too far” in possibly asking the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.
“If I had to channel a little of Richard Nixon, I think he’d tell this president he’s going too far,” Dean, 80, who was jailed on one felony count after a plea bargain that involved him testifying against others, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. “This is what an autocrat does.”
Trump told his White House counsel earlier this year that he wanted to direct the Justice Department to prosecute his 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton and fired FBI Director James Comey, according to the New York Times.
But Don McGahn, who served as White House counsel at the time, told the president that he had no authority to order the prosecution of Clinton and Comey and warned Trump that doing so could lead to his possible impeachment.
[Opinion: Trump can do better than these Schitty insults]
Trump threatened to prosecute Clinton if he was elected president during the 2016 campaign. Trump has repeatedly criticized Clinton over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, as well as her role in the controversial “Uranium One” deal.
“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” Trump told Clinton during a debate, later telling her she “would be in jail” if he was in charge of the country.
Trump has accused Comey of leaking classified information after the memos the former FBI director wrote about his interactions with the president were shared with the media. The memos reportedly contained no classified information.
“It’s rather frightening and it’s kind of startling, because he was told about this during the campaign when he started mentioning these sort of things. But he’s never backed off. It looks like he won’t back off until he’s forced to,” Dean said.
“This is a level that Richard Nixon never went to, where you went after somebody’s personal well-being by a criminal prosecution. I’ve listened to all the tapes that are relevant. While I heard him break the law on some of the tapes, I never heard him do it by turning on his enemies and trying to put them in jail,” he added.
