Longtime NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said that, unlike the impeachment effort of President Richard Nixon, Democrats lack “the goods” on President Donald Trump.
Brokaw was speaking while promoting his new book, “The Fall of Richard Nixon.”
“The big difference is ... if they still don’t have what you would call ’the goods’ on this president in terms of breaking the law and being an impeachable target for them,“ Brokaw said during an appearance on MSNBC this week, ”they’re going to start the process but they don’t have the same kind of clarity that the people who were opposed to Richard Nixon had because it was so clear that these were criminal acts he was involved in.”
Host Andrea Mitchell noted that the tapes from the Oval Office helped bring Nixon down.
“There are no more taping systems in the Oval Office,” Brokaw said.
“That we know of,” Mitchell said. Brokaw agreed.
House Democrats have for weeks been conducting an impeachment inquiry, trying to establish grounds for impeaching Trump.
The House was slated on Thursday to vote for a resolution laying out the next phase of the inquiry, including the possibility of public hearings, while changing key rules from the impeachment inquiries of Nixon and President Bill Clinton to give Republicans and Trump fewer rights.
Democrats have hyped the transparency they say the resolution would bring to the process while Republicans have railed against the majority party for the rule changes.
The session was slated to start at approximately 10:30 a.m., with a vote coming after debate and procedural motions.
During his appearance, Brokaw said a big takeaway from his book is the different environment the current inquiry is happening in versus the era of Nixon.
“I think the big lesson I took away from the book, at that time, everybody took it very seriously, it was not something that played out like a television game show, which we have a lot of that now with the President, you know, having comments about everything. Everybody has access to an opinion of one kind or another,” he said.
“Social media has changed everything, frankly. I mean, I think it’s a great, great instrument, but you don’t know what you can believe and what you can’t believe. That’s a huge, huge difference between then and now.”
