Watergate Lawyer: FBI Firing ‘Darkly Reminiscent’ Of ‘Saturday Night Massacre’
Richard Ben-Veniste Image by Getty Images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis May 10, 2017
Former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste called President Trump’s firing of James Comey “darkly reminiscent” of the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” the evening in October 1973 when President Nixon fired the man investigating him.
Ben-Veniste, who drew the comparison in an interview with the Forward, is far from the first to connect President Trump’s firing of Comey to Nixon’s dismissal of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. But Ben-Veniste, whose continued investigation of the Watergate coverup after Cox’s firing helped lead to Nixon’s resignation, highlighted not the firing itself, but the public outrage that followed.
Nixon “managed to focus attention on the Watergate coverup investigation, in a way in which the American public had not itself focused prior to firing Archie Cox,” Ben-Veniste said. “The firing of [Nixon’s] principal investigator was shown to be another act of obstruction of justice, one that backfired miserably against President Nixon, since a new special prosecutor was soon appointed as a result of a firestorm of adverse public opinion.”
That new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, continued Cox’s work.
At the time of the “Massacre,” when both the Attorney General and his deputy resigned in protest of Cox’s firing, Ben-Veniste was second-in-command of Cox’s task force working on investigating the Watergate coverup. In a 2010 interview, he described the immediate aftermath of Cox’s firing as “the closest thing to a coup I have ever seen in this country.”
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at nathankazis@forward.com
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
