Politics & Power Quote by Fred F. Fielding

Fielding’s sentence is a lawyerly flare shot: calm on the surface, meant to be read as alarm. “It became evident to me” is not just autobiography; it’s a credibility move. He’s staging the moment of realization like testimony, implicitly telling the listener that he didn’t arrive with partisan priors, he arrived with evidence. The phrase “a very serious political element at work” does double duty. It frames the controversy as something more than routine oversight while carefully avoiding naming actors or motives, the kind of studied vagueness that protects a witness from overclaiming while still pointing the audience toward a conclusion.

The subtext sharpens around “impeachment was bandied about.” “Bandied” is dismissive: impeachment as gossip, as cocktail-party talk leaking into governance. Yet Fielding doesn’t deny the term existed; he normalizes it, then measures its temperature. “Ferocity” is doing heavy lifting, casting later eras as more ravenous, more absolutist. He’s drawing a timeline of escalation: impeachment moving from a speculative tool to a political weapon with teeth.

Context matters because Fielding’s career sits close to the machinery of executive power, including the long shadow of Watergate. Invoking “the Nixon years” is a benchmark and a warning. He’s signaling that even in the period most associated with impeachment-level crisis, the rhetoric didn’t carry today’s intensity. The intent is less to relitigate a single episode than to diagnose a cultural shift: politics as permanent prosecution, with “impeachment” migrating from constitutional remedy to reflexive threat.