John Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon who was once dubbed the “master manipulator” of the Watergate scandal by the FBI, predicts former President Donald Trump may finally be about to face some serious consequences.
“I think a criminal case is going to come out of it,” Dean predicted on CNN on Tuesday after hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, in comments posted by Mediaite.
Dean said that while the committee isn’t building a criminal case, Justice Department prosecutors are likely using evidence uncovered by the committee about Trump’s role in the day’s events to build such a case.
“And I don’t see how the line prosecutors at the Department of Justice can’t take a lot of this evidence and use it. A lot of these people who are involved in this are going to be in front of a grand jury if they’re not already,” Dean said. “And Trump is in trouble. Trump is in trouble.”
Dean, who ultimately turned on Nixon and cooperated with prosecutors, spoke after Tuesday’s testimony in which Jason Van Tatenhoven, former spokesperson for the right-wing paramilitary group Oath Keepers, said the organization wanted an “armed revolution” on Jan. 6, 2021.
That same day, former Trump supporter Stephen Ayres said he hadn’t planned to go into the Capitol ― until Trump spoke.
“The president got everybody riled up, told everybody to head on down,” Ayres said. “So we basically, we just followed what he said.”
Dean said he was impressed by the testimony before the House committee.
“I thought they were powerful witnesses because they were speaking from the heart. This is what they felt. This is how they had performed,” he said. “They know they had made a mistake. They’ve rethought their position now, and they realize the power of this man. They were really classic authoritarian followers, following the leader.”
See his full comments on Mediaite.