Department of Justice officials are reviewing whether Richard Nixon received a raw deal over the Watergate scandal, a bombshell new report alleges.
Sources tell The Wall Street Journal that the DOJ, now run by President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Todd Blanche, is looking into whether special prosecutors committed misconduct as they probed the disgraced former president and his cronies in the 1970s.
Justice officials reportedly invited Geoff Shepard, an 81-year-old former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, to the DOJ to present his theory of what really happened 50 years earlier. He gave a two-hour presentation, according to the Journal.
The paper reports that Shepard’s 72-slide presentation for the Office of Professional Responsibility was titled, “Watergate As Lawfare.”
A DOJ spokeswoman confirmed the presentation in an email to the Daily Beast, but said it does not mean the department has opened a new probe into Watergate.
“OPR declined Mr. Shepherd’s [sic] request to open an investigation in 2022 under the previous administration,” the spokeswoman said. “Given his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, he was recently invited to give a presentation to OPR, but that presentation does not constitute an investigation. OPR remains focused on ensuring that Department attorneys meet the highest professional standards.”
Scrutinizing a special prosecutor’s probe into the president is eerily familiar to MAGA attacks on Jack Smith, the special counsel who probed Trump’s alleged crimes in the period between his presidential terms.
Smith testified this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where one of the president’s attack-dog senators, Eric Schmitt, embarrassed himself in a flubbed gotcha moment. Schmitt appeared to be trying to get Smith to commit perjury in an effort to discredit the prosecutor, who MAGA wants jailed for daring to investigate the president.
The Journal reports that Shepard “has served as a sort of godfather for the Watergate revisionists.”
The longtime consensus among historians has been that Nixon, a Republican, rightfully resigned after people associated with his re-election campaign were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters—something he was then busted trying to cover up.
There is a new push from those in the MAGA sphere, including Vice President JD Vance, that Nixon’s resignation was a deep-state ploy to oust a Republican—something they parallel with the prosecution of Trump.
“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 this summer. “There is a parallel.”
The Journal reports that Trump has also shown interest in Nixon, questioning the late president’s former aides about why he resigned instead of fighting his impeachment.
