Instead of Doing Anything Valuable, the DOJ Is Trying to Recast Richard Nixon as the Victim of Watergate

3 min readWhen you get in these people, when you … get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that” ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah, because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case,” period!—Richard Nixon to H.R. Haldeman, June 23, 1972That is obstructing justice and conspiracy, in the words of the obstructor and one of the conspirators. Just so we're all still on the same page. From the Wall Street Journal:The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation. Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: “Watergate As Lawfare.” The review comes at a moment ofrenewed interest in the Nixon legacy. Republicans see in the combative former president, who was loathed by the press and besieged by investigations, a historical analogue for Trump. During remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, this summer, Vice President JD Vance made the comparison explicit.Of course, he did. J. Divan Vance will say anything he's programmed to say.“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people—the same institutions—tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration,” Vance said. “There is a parallel.”There has been a school of conservative Watergate revisionism almost from the moment Nixon got on the helicopter on the South Lawn. Some of the theories were Unsolved Mysteries caliber. (One of them involves the wife of a key Watergate witness and a brothel.) But the Enemies Within theories have proven to be the most stubborn. They were supercharged when it was revealed that Mark Felt, a high FBI official, was revealed to have been Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's super-secret Watergate source. But using Nixon's crimes as an alibi and camouflage for the current president opens a whole new universe of pretzeled history.Trump has asked former Nixon aides on several occasions why Nixon resigned rather than fight it out. The current president also has moved to roll back many post-Watergate overhauls, challenging limits on presidential authority to fire inspectors general and career civil servants. ...Shepard alleges that [special prosecutors Archibald] Cox and [Leon] Jaworski violated the due process rights of defendants caught up in the Watergate probe by meeting secretly with the judges overseeing their trial and suppressing evidence from the defense.In 2022, the Justice Department under the Biden administration rebuffed Shepard’s request for an investigation, citing the many years that have passed since the events in question. Current officials wanted to hear him out, the people familiar with the matter said. The review is preliminary, and it isn’t clear whether it will lead to a full-fledged probe, the people said. “Given his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, he was recently invited to give a presentation,” a Justice Department spokeswoman said, “but that presentation does not constitute an investigation. OPR remains focused on ensuring that Department attorneys meet the highest professional standards.”Besides demonstrating that the DOJ should have better things to do, and that attorney general Todd Blanche would appear in court wearing a ball gown if the White House demanded he do so, this is yet another front in the conservative effort to recast what actually happened into some sort of victim-rich fantasy version of history. Shepard's first book claimed that the Watergate investigation was part of a secret plot to make Ted Kennedy president. (Boy, did that ever not work.) This is the stuff of late-night Discovery Channel hokum. They must be desperate around the old DOJ.