John Dean: Trump's inner circle has no idea what’s about to hit them

POLITICO's Off Message

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics

4.5 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel, has a memo for White House lawyer Ty Cobb and the rest of President Donald Trump’s defenders as they enter 2018: believing the investigation and prosecutions will be over any time soon is “wishful thinking.” And, says the man who famously flipped and became the Watergate prosecution’s star witness in the process that helped take down Richard Nixon, no one in the president’s orbit should assume they’re prepared for everything that cooperating witnesses George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn might be telling Bob Mueller, as they’ve done out of confidence from their own review or just out of public bluster. That’s the mistake Dean saw Nixon, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman make about him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. So much of Watergate, I can't tell you, was just pure blunder and stupidity. And we're seeing the same thing happen again. Today's guest, John Dean, the former Nixon White House Council, who was involved in Watergate, turned into a witness, went to jail, and has since reinvented himself
0:21.2	as an investment banker and author living in Los Angeles. Investigations have obviously been a
0:26.5	big part of the first year of the Trump presidency, starting from almost day one. What did the Russians
0:31.8	do? What role did Trump campaign officials play? Who knew what? When? What was Paul Manafort up to?
0:39.7	Why did Michael Flynn lie to the FBI?
0:46.2	How much was President Trump himself involved? Why do you really fire Comey? What else is going on?
0:52.8	Or is this all just a case of mess-ups, coincidences, bad luck, and fueled by sour grapes over losing an election?
0:54.5	Or is it conspiracy?
0:55.6	Collusion.
0:56.2	Cover up.
1:02.1	Not a lot of people have lived through what people in the White House are living through as this investigation continues.
1:09.5	And by the way, we're talking about a House investigation and a Senate investigation on top of the special counsel investigation by Bob Mueller.
1:11.6	But John Dean has.
1:16.7	He was the lawyer, asked to get involved in the Watergate cover-up from the outset, then asked by Nixon to prepare a report on what happened until he flipped and started cooperating
1:20.7	with the investigators.
1:22.1	And he did it while he was still working in the White House.
1:25.1	So he went to jail and he's been writing about what happened and obviously thinking about it ever since.
1:29.4	Obviously, his view of whatever's going on with the investigation into the Trump campaign and White House is from the outside.
1:36.1	But his sense of what people there are going through from his own experiences is one I'm really glad he was willing to share, even though we couldn't catch up in person.
1:43.3	We did it over the phone.
1:44.9	We can lose perspective on these things.
1:46.5	I remember a couple weeks ago, after Flynn pled guilty, I was asked in a TV interview
	...

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