Sen. Lindsey Graham is typically a reliable cheerleader for the White House at home and abroad. So it was notable to hear him say yesterday, fresh off a trip to the Middle East, that the peace deal between Israel and Hamas might be working less well than the administration has hoped: “What did I learn on this trip? That Hamas is not disarming,” Graham told NBC’s Meet the Press. “They’re rearming. Hamas is not abandoning power. They’re consolidating power.” Happy Monday.

Trump’s Modified Limited Coverup

by William Kristol

President Richard Nixon: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the—let it hang out, so to speak?

White House Counsel John Dean: Well, it’s, it isn’t really that—
White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman: It’s a limited hangout.
Dean: It’s a limited hangout.
Assistant to the President John Ehrlichman: It’s a modified limited hangout.

—Audiotape of Oval Office meeting, March 22, 1973

Half a century later, we’re in the early stages of another modified limited hangout. And as in Watergate, a modified limited hangout really means a modified limited coverup. A partial truth is a partial lie. The Nixon Oval Office exchange quoted above immediately followed a discussion of John Dean creating a false report of the White House’s role in the Watergate break-in. Nixon’s modified limited hangout wasn’t some kind of an attempt to come clean.

Nor is Donald Trump’s. The problem with the Justice Department’s modified, limited release of the Jeffrey Epstein files since Friday afternoon isn’t that there have been some mistaken redactions and some mistaken non-redactions. The problem is that the administration has decided simply not to release key documents, like the original victim statements and the 60-count draft indictment of Epstein.

We’re in the midst of a coverup. A modified coverup, perhaps, but a coverup nonetheless.

One implication of this is that we need to shed all our old, post-Watergate assumptions about the Department of Justice. Trump’s “Department of Justice” is Trump’s defense team. There should be no presumption they’re acting in good faith. One has to think of them as one thought of a Soviet bloc “Department of Justice”—as dedicated to pro-regime propaganda, not justice or the truth.

The good news, as I’ve suggested before, is that partial coverups are difficult to pull off. Once you have to abandon the initial attempt to stonewall—Nixon’s original blanket denial of White House involvement in the Watergate burglary, the Trump administration’s attempt to shut the door to any action on the Epstein matter with the “nothing to see here” statement from the Justice Department and FBI on July 6—you’re sailing in dark and choppy waters. Visibility is limited. It’s hard to keep your balance. A coverup is hard to navigate. Especially if you don’t have Soviet-like control of the other institutions of society.

Why the decision to cover-up? Well, in the case of Watergate, there were things Nixon and his lieutenants didn’t want Congress and the public to know. With regards to the Epstein files, it certainly seems that there are things that Trump and his lieutenants don’t want Congress and the public to know. Presumably these are things that, to put it gently, don’t reflect well on Trump. Since he has been pretty successful in his ability to survive embarrassing revelations, it’s a reasonable assumption these secrets really don’t reflect well on him.

A little more than a month after the March 22, 1973, Oval Office meeting, Nixon fired its participants—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean—along with Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. That bought him a little time, perhaps, but didn’t really change the trajectory of the scandal. The public understood that Watergate was Nixon’s crime and coverup, not that of his aides. A little over a year later, President Nixon was forced to resign. The other participants in the Oval Office meeting ended up in jail.

I offer the obvious disclaimer: For a million reasons, history is unlikely simply to repeat itself a half century later. Alas! On the other hand, this scandal has unraveled far more than most thought possible several months ago. Few observers of American politics expected Robert Garcia and Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie to be among the most consequential members of the House in 2025.

It’s probably too much to hope that today’s modified limited coverup will end in a failure as resounding as Nixon’s. I suppose such a ringing vindication of justice is too much to expect today.

But politics is full of surprises. One heartening surprise of this past year is that the Epstein victims have finally been accorded the standing and respect they deserve. Their ongoing effect on unraveling this coverup shouldn’t be underestimated. And in any case, we owe them our continued and unsparing effort to uncover the truth and achieve justice.