President Donald Trump’s administration has a new plan in motion to potentially rewrite history on one of the GOP’s biggest ever scandals, with one former Watergate prosecutor warning on MS NOW that their intentions are “extremely dangerous.”
The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility was looking into “whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct.” The Watergate scandal, starting in 1972, saw former President Richard Nixon caught attempting to spy on the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, ahead of his reelection campaign. The ensuing scandal ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation and has been widely credited with permanently damaging public trust in government.
The storm of scandal that engulfed Nixon has also been credited with spurring Republicans to craft their own alternative media ecosystem, to help insulate future GOP leaders from similar consequences. Now, the Trump administration seems to be taking this crusade to its logical extreme by attempting to find proof that the investigation that forced Nixon out of office was, in some way, corrupt.
Attorney Nick Akerman worked on the Watergate investigation from 1973 to 1976, as an Assistant Special Prosecutor with the Watergate Special Prosecution Force under Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski. In a new piece for MS NOW published Saturday, he sounded the alarm about the dangers this plan within the Trump DOJ poses to the country.
Akerman put particular focus on Geoff Shepard, “something of an evangelist for this bonkers revisionist conspiracy theory” that Nixon got a raw deal on Watergate. Shepard, he noted, presented an extensive slide deck laying out his theory of the case to the DOJ, ultimately claiming that “the deep state took Nixon down.”
“The opposite is true. Nixon took himself down and tried to use the deep state to cover up his crimes,” Akerman wrote, later adding, “In short, the well-documented evidence incriminating Nixon on the central issues surrounding the Watergate break-in was overwhelming, was based on Nixon’s own words and involved Nixon trying to use deep-state actors to cover up his crimes.”
He concluded: “I served under both Cox and Jaworski. We were constantly vigilant to adhere to all ethical rules governing lawyers and our obligation as prosecutors under Supreme Court law to turnover exculpatory evidence. When there was any close question, we always erred on the side of the defendant — something that cannot be said about the current DOJ. For the DOJ to endorse Shepard’s conspiracy theory will amount to another flagrant effort by the Trump administration to undermine our established rule of law.”