Several months later, details of a whistle-blower complaint, reportedly from someone in the C.I.A., leaked out and set the stage for the impeachment inquiry. The complaint laid out a conversation between Mr. Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, in which Mr. Trump appeared to pressure him to investigate Mr. Biden and his son. The complaint set in motion the congressional investigation that led to impeachment.

Then: While the F.B.I. and Congress played key roles in the Watergate investigation, President Nixon also faced another investigative adversary: a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, appointed in May 1973 by Attorney General Elliot Richardson. After the former White House aide Alexander Butterfields surprise disclosure of a secret White House taping system that captured the presidents conversations, Mr. Cox issued a subpoena for the White House tapes in October 1973, provoking Nixon to order the attorney general to fire him. Mr. Richardson and his deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, both refused and resigned. It fell to Robert Bork, the solicitor general who suddenly found himself acting attorney general, to fire Mr. Cox. The episode became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Partly as a result of public outrage over those events, impeachment proceedings in the House began nearly seven months later. Nixon was also forced to approve the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who continued Mr. Coxs efforts to obtain the tapes. His willingness to challenge the president in court brought Watergate to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that Nixon would have to turn over the tapes.

Now: The Justice Department has helped Mr. Trump throughout the Ukraine affair. In March, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that he had concluded that Mr. Mueller had found insufficient evidence that the president obstructed justice. Mr. Trump immediately declared a complete and total exoneration, even though the attorney general noted that the report had not exonerated him. But Mr. Barr then waited more than three weeks before releasing the report to the public, enabling Mr. Trump and his allies to mount a counteroffensive that insulated the president from potentially worse fallout. Democrats chose not to include any of the conduct revealed in the report in the articles of impeachment.

In addition, the Justice Department declined to open a criminal investigation or appoint a special prosecutor in response to the whistle-blower complaint. And in the face of congressional investigations, department lawyers have made the argument that Congress cannot even go to court to enforce subpoenas calling administration officials to testify.

Finally, by opening what would become a criminal inquiry into the origins of the F.B.I.s investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, Mr. Barr has given credence to Mr. Trumps unfounded theory that people in American intelligence agencies worked against him. The attorney general has become perhaps Mr. Trumps most effective defender, a sharp contrast to those who ran the Nixon Justice Department.

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Why Is Trump Finding More Protection Than Nixon Did? - The New York Times