Perhaps you’re familiar with this event from American history. The President of the United States, near the end of his term, anticipates the coming election. Everyone expects a landslide victory in his direction. The president and his advisers are not so sure. A scheme is devised to ensure the election ends their way. It involves clandestine operations and private documents of a sensitive nature. Their clandestine operation is not secret very long. They engage in illegal activities to keep this from the public. The president is aware of these illegal actions and becomes personally involved. Eventually, other documents are given to reporters, and a frenzy occurs. The president’s invincibility is lessened, and previous crimes of the president become public. Citizens are disappointed that the president had also illegally ordered a government agency, the Internal Revenue Service, to harass specific groups, perceived by the president to be his political enemies.

Here is where the plot diverges from where you were anticipating. Political cronyism ensures that the president, and most of his closest allies, never pays for his crimes against the public. Historians later call this Barack Obama’s Watergate.

Above The Law

What if the investigation of the Watergate Hotel burglary were ordered by a different Department of justice?

What if the president hadn’t just been told of the plan afterwards and been involved in the coverup, but instead was involved from the planning stage and insisted on briefings of every aspect of the plan in collaboration with his favored campaign?

What if, instead of Archibald Cox, the investigation were coordinated and conducted by G. Gordon Liddy, , H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman?

It would then become the Russia-gate scandal of the Obama administration-Hillary Clinton campaign conspiracy to rig the election of 2016, featuring unlimited Special Counsel Robert Mueller, appointed bu Rod Rosenstein, after James Comey set the stage.

Photograph:  The Scandal Room;  the Watergate Hotel, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.