By Colleen O’Connor
Wow! What a week. The world spun off its axis and nobody noticed, except two GOP leaders, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.
Their private polls and insider info must have startled them. That news, under the radar, has produced a sizeable political earthquake just now being calculated.
Both McConnell and McCarthy loudly and forcefully exclaimed to the press that the January 6th assault on the Capital was “a violent insurrection,” after wobbling or denying the fact for over a year.
A serious, public break with their once GOP best friend, former President Donald Trump.
Targeted, disciplined, and orchestrated, given the now public news about the “Plumbers.”
Let me explain.
But first, the January 6th committee needs to quickly call the White House Plumbers.
No, not the Nixon Watergate Plumbers. Those men were part of a benignly named “special Investigations unit,” but actually constituted a covert group of Nixon “fixers,” tasked to stop the leaking of damning classified information to the press, aka the Pentagon Papers.
It was Nixon’s own covert in-house lackies and the GOP Committee to Re-elect the President, that eventually brought down the President.
Defined as the “Watergate scandal,” so named, after a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, these plumbers exposed the massive corruption that ended that Nixon’s tenure. (See: The White House Plumbers.)
How did the original pejorative, “Plumbers,” come to be?
One of the Nixon “operatives,” home for Thanksgiving, (1971) was greeted by his grandmother with the question about what he was doing at the White House. The grandson’s truthful answer, “I am helping the president stop some leaks.”
“Oh, you’re a plumber,” she innocently responded.
Finding the humor in the story, the more notorious “dirty tricksters, E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy, posted a sign outside their office, “The Plumbers.”
The name stuck and repeats itself today. This time in the Trump White House.
At least four different news sites have confirmed that Trump obsessively tore up documents, even classified documents while President. A habit he perfected in private business as well.
Specifically, this is fine in business, but illegal under the Presidential Records Act.
Yet, numerous witnesses have testified to the January 6th committee that such behavior was routine in the Trump White House.
In fact, aides had to pick up the pages from the floor, tape back torn pages, or even place some items in “burn bags” to go to the Pentagon. Recently, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of presidential records stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.
All illegal attempts at destruction or removal of presidential papers and artifacts.
Now, comes the new “Plumbers.” Literally.
As just reported in White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman’s new book, Confidence Man, Trump administration staff “occasionally discovered wads of torn, printed paper clogging a toilet, “leading some to believe former President Donald Trump was flushing documents.”
“Plumbers” to unclog. January 6th Committee needs to call these Plumbers.
How much fun is history repeating itself?!
Trump, as usual, denying all. There is a provision in the Presidential Records Act to deny any return to elective office if found guilty of what Trump is alleged to have done!
All coming too fast to capture.
More tomorrow.
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