Comparing Michael Cohen To Watergate Lawyer John Dean Isn’t Entirely Off Base
John Dean, a prominent figure from the Watergate hearings, has gotten mentioned a couple times already in today’s hearing. Why is Dean being compared to Cohen, and how accurate are those comparisons? There are some obvious parallels — Dean was a White House lawyer under Nixon, and he turned on Nixon fairly early in the Watergate scandal, testifying before Congress in June 1973 that the president knew about the Watergate cover-up. Dean’s testimony ended up being important because it was backed up by the White House tapes that were finally released in the summer of 1974 despite Nixon’s attempts to keep them under wraps.
Comparisons to Dean are helpful for Cohen, because history has been kind to Dean — he was one of the first Nixon administration figures to speak out about Watergate, and he famously tried to warn Nixon about Watergate, telling him in a taped conversation that Watergate was a “cancer growing on the presidency.” Cohen, by contrast, didn’t really turn on Trump until he became the subject of a criminal investigation, which may make him less trustworthy.
But the really important thing to remember is that Dean’s allegations stuck because they were corroborated by the tapes. Cohen has brought physical evidence with him to support some of his claims — but we still don’t know whether there’s some other dramatic form of evidence that will emerge to support Cohen’s testimony today.