Summary
President Donald Trump’s snap firing of acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Monday night has observers recalling President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when White House attacks on an independent investigation caused the resignation of the then-attorney general and his deputy.
Decades later, the incident is remembered as a pivotal moment because it exposed how petty, vindictive and unethical Nixon was willing to be.
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Nixon’s action “was different and considerably more serious,” said Robert Gordon, a Stanford law professor and past president of the American Society for Legal History.
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“This just seems to me another example of the impetuous thoughtlessness of this administration,” Gordon continued.
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“The attorney general has an independent obligation to the law as well as to her boss in the White House,” Gordon said. “It’s not a clear hierarchy.”
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