Presidents who take on the Bureau rarely win.


On Friday, April 27, 1973, a dozen armed FBI agents left their headquarters in the Old Post Office building — today a gilded Trump hotel — and marched up Pennsylvania Avenue. Waving their badges, they walked into the White House.

Their orders were to stand guard in the West Wing, wherein lay evidence of high crimes. “They’re going to lock down and secure the business offices, including the president’s,” the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Jack McDermott, told an astonished Secret Service man.

Caught in the web of Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon returned from Camp David and found a skinny young FBI man standing at attention down the hall from the Oval Office. Screaming in rage, he grabbed the agent by the lapels. “What the hell is this?” he shouted.

It was the rule of law challenging the power of the commander in chief—and the beginning of the end for Nixon. He knew that he was doomed. Within a year, the president would be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an iron-clad criminal case. His impeachment inevitable, he resigned the presidency in the summer of 1974.

We now stand on the verge of the same kind of confrontation.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, backed by the full force of the FBI, has one foot inside the White House. He will have another if President Donald Trump makes good on his promise to talk with Mueller in a matter of weeks, a pledge the president made on Wednesday to the evident horror of his lawyers. “You fight back,” Trump complained, and the reaction is, “‘Oh, it’s obstruction.’”

Trump tried to fight back last summer. He wanted to fire Mueller, as he had fired FBI Director James Comey. That would have created a constitutional crisis like no other since Watergate—and a clear count of obstructing justice. Any rookie prosecutor could have brought that case to court. And Bob Mueller is no rookie.

Trump wants to go to war with Mueller? A man who faced down George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to protect the Constitution from becoming a casualty in the war on terror, a Marine veteran with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star? Trump wants to attack the Justice Department and the FBI when he and his administration are the focus of the most politically charged criminal investigation in half a century?

These would be suicide missions. Ever since Nixon, no president has won a face-to-face battle with the FBI or a special counsel investigating the White House. And Richard Nixon, for all his deviousness and duplicity, was an infinitely more sophisticated political operator than Donald Trump.

Nixon never would have fallen had not FBI agents pursued their investigation despite the fact that their leaders were hopelessly compromised or criminally entangled by Watergate. We would never know how President Ronald Reagan sold arms to Iran as ransom for American hostages had not the FBI used state-of-the-art forensics to salvage slam-dunk evidence from purged White House computer files in 1987. President Bill Clinton never would have faced impeachment for perjury had not the FBI drawn his blood — and secured DNA evidence of his sexual dalliances—in the Map Room of the White House in 1998.

Only the FBI can walk into the White House and compel a president to comply with the law. Only the FBI can build a criminal case against a chief executive. And Trump may not realize he is up against three present and former FBI directors who have proved fearless and fiercely independent when it comes to confronting presidents.

In 2004, Mueller and Comey (then the acting attorney general) stood up to President Bush when he bent the law and the Constitution to their breaking point with his secret eavesdropping on Americans. They were prepared to resign on principle. That story is well known. But many forget that the present FBI director, Christopher Wray, then chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department, was prepared to resign with them. He’ll have to be ready to quit in protest again if Trump keeps attacking the hard-won integrity of the Bureau.

Bush was savvy enough to see that the resignations would have destroyed his presidency. He wrote in his memoirs: “I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973,” when Nixon demanded the firing of the Watergate special counsel, forced out the attorney general and the deputy attorney general, sparking a firestorm that consumed him. “That was not a historical crisis I wished to replicate.”

Now that we know Trump was a tweet away from starring in Saturday Night Massacre: The Sequel, we need to look at why the G-men have the power and independence to take down the president.

Watergate never would have happened if J. Edgar Hoover had not died six weeks before the break-in. In his 48 years as the head of the Bureau, Hoover had protected presidents he tolerated (like Lyndon B. Johnson) and undermined those he scorned (like John F. Kennedy). He disregarded higher authority—the White House, the Justice Department, the Congress and the Supreme Court—when he saw fit.

“Attorneys general seldom directed Mr. Hoover,” Nixon said in 1980. “It was difficult even for presidents.” He was testifying at the trial of Mark Felt, a.k.a. “Deep Throat,” who had been indicted for warrantless FBI burglaries committed in the Watergate era.

Hoover oversaw hundreds if not thousands of such black-bag jobs in his time. He would not have approved a hare-brained operation like the Watergate caper—but he damned well would have protected his men had they been caught. He had that kind of power. He was the law.

In the fall of 1974, a few weeks after Nixon fled, Congress set out to recalibrate the imbalances of power created by the imperious Hoover and the imperial presidency. Following a no-holds-barred inquiry that bared three decades of crimes Hoover and his men committed in the name of national security—often with the tacit approval of presidents—the Senate made a seemingly modest move to give the FBI director a statutory 10-year term.

The aim was twofold. The 10-year sinecure would protect the director from pressure exerted by presidents. He would no longer be a point man in acts of political warfare commanded by the chief executive. At the same time, no director could become another Hoover, an unaccountable autocrat with infinite tenure and unlimited power. This was a balancing test of the kind that Congress no longer seems capable.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, in a 1976 report, also made it clear the FBI’s chief was not like a member of the Cabinet. He was not a political actor. No president could justify the removal of an FBI director merely because he wanted his own man in the job—and certainly not because the FBI was investigating the White House.

Thus Clinton was incapable of firing the FBI’s fifth director, Louis J. Freeh, a man who was investigating him from the day he was sworn in. Freeh’s deep distrust of the president blinded him—but keelhauling him was “a political impossibility,” the National Security Council’s chief counterterrorism aides, Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, wrote in 2002. “A chief executive who was being investigated by the FBI could not fire the FBI director: it would be another Saturday Night Massacre, the second coming of Richard Nixon.” It would also be an obstruction of justice—a high crime, constituting an impeachable offense.

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We’ll see if Trump keeps following Nixon’s footsteps down the road to hell.

One year ago Friday, FBI agents interviewed Trump’s national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, about his contacts with Russian officials during the presidential transition. Flynn lied. A counterintelligence probe into Team Trump’s ties to Team Putin became a criminal case.

In February, Trump pressured Comey to drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. In March, Trump leaned on CIA Director Mike Pompeo to find a way to make Comey back off—exactly as Nixon leaned on the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate case, an act caught on the “smoking gun tape” that proved to be Nixon’s downfall. And then Trump went ahead and fired Comey—and recorded his own smoking gun tape, an interview with NBC News in which he said he’d done so with the intent of making the FBI’s Russia investigation disappear.

On March 22, 1973, as the breath of the FBI’s bloodhounds grew hot, Nixon had a heart-to-heart with John Mitchell, the man who’d been his campaign manager, attorney general and criminal co-conspirator. The president concluded that a continuing obstruction of justice was his only recourse. The White House tapes spun silently: “I don’t give a shit what happens,” Nixon said. “I want you all to stonewall it … plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up. ... We’re going to protect our people, if we can.”