A poorly executed break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC in June 1972 and the subsequent destruction of 18 minutes of taped evidence forced President Richard Nixon to resign in August 1974.
The contrast of August 8, 2022 could not have been starker, when special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) visited former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, with a lawful search warrant and found top secret and sensitive documents. The search and seizure were unprecedented. In a tone of injured innocence, Mr. Trump said later, “All that they had to do was just ask” — even though that is precisely what the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Justice Department have been doing for over a year.
