John Dean, White House counsel under President Richard Nixon, rebuffed efforts to tie President Barack Obama to his former boss. However, Dean was a vocal critic of similar behaviors in the Bush administration that he deemed to be "Nixonian."
The president has faced increasing scrutiny over revelations that the IRS held up the approval of nonprofit conservative groups, the Department of Justice wiretapped Associate Press journalists, and the manipulation of talking points about Benghazi, which has led to some lawmakers to wonder if this is anything akin to Nixon’s presidency.
Dean does not see the similarity. Dean told the Daily Beast that none of this information warrants a comparison to Watergate.
Reached by phone on the West Coast and asked if the events unfolding in Washington were giving him déjà vu, John Dean, who testified before Congress about "the cancer" on the Nixon presidency, told The Daily Beast, "No, not yet, it’s not even close to Watergate at this point."
"When you have a good scandal, one that has legs, you know what the underlying problem is," Dean said. Benghazi fails that test, "and with no clear charge, the public is confused and bored and not terribly interested," he says […] The IRS is another matter, says Dean, and it will capture the public’s interest, though he adds the facts bear no resemblance to what he saw when he was in the Nixon White House.
This line of thinking seems to be a divergence from Dean’s past criticisms of the Bush administration.
The Obama administration has been accused of stonewalling by both GOP lawmakers and media outlets. Benghazi whistleblower Gregory Hicks testified that he was "effectively demoted from deputy chief of mission to desk officer" after criticizing Ambassador Susan Rice's appearance on the Sunday morning shows, and both White House press secretary Jay Carney and Obama have responded to questions from the press corps with indignation.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) recently requested that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton return to testify about Benghazi. She testified earlier this year, but was reportedly not under oath.
Dean has pointed to similar instances throughout Bush’s presidency as evidence that his administration’s "underlying conduct was worse than Watergate," even if it had not "erupted into a scandal like Watergate."
Dean said in a 2004 interview with Salon that the Bush administration was worse than Nixon, in part because they "refus[ed] to provide documents about executive activities."
This was one reason, according to Dean, that "While Nixon’s presidency gave currency to the term ‘stonewalling,’ Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney have made stonewalling their standard procedure, far in excess of Nixon."
In the same interview, Dean claimed the firing of then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was retribution after O’Neill "[told] the truth and [expressed] … well-founded concern about Bush’s excessive tax cuts for the upper incomes."
Dean wrote numerous articles on the website Findlaw drawing parallels between the two administrations. In one article he noted that Nixon did not "like Congress asking him a lot of questions about how he was performing as the head of the Executive Branch."
"Congressional oversight annoyed the hell out of him. Accordingly, he was dead set against his aides testifying on Capitol Hill. Today, the world knows why. It's called abuse of power. […] George Bush's latest Nixonian type maneuver is refusing to send former Governor Tom Ridge, his homeland security adviser, to Capitol Hill to testify about the $38 billion appropriation request," Dean wrote.
Bush’s refusal to have Ridge testify was an abuse of power, according to Dean, and Democratic members complained about it.
Dean pointed to one key difference between the Bush and Nixon administration that made one of their "abuses" worse: "no one died because of the abuses of power known as Watergate."