The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility recently hosted a former Nixon White House fellow as part of the administration’s effort to “[review]whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct,” The Wall Street Journal has reported.
The fellow in question, Geoff Shepard, who has become something of an evangelist for this bonkers revisionist conspiracy theory, recently published a book, “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down.”
Like Vance, Shepard claimed to OPR that “the deep state took Nixon down.” The opposite is true.
Shepard was not personally involved in any of the Watergate criminality and says he relies on documents he found in the National Archives to support his theory.
I was an assistant special Watergate prosecutor from 1973 to 1976. A review of my files turned up only one innocuous reference to Shepard: He was present with an aide to Chuck Colson, special counsel to the president, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.
Shepard reportedly presented his theory to OPR for more than two hours in a “78-page slide deck,” per the Journal. Shepard’s conspiracy theory appears to support Vice President JD Vance’s comments to the Nixon Library this past summer, that there is a parallel to what “the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
Like Vance, Shepard claimed to OPR 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.
Nixon orchestrated the Watergate cover-up that was recorded on his Oval Office taping system. The “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972, which led to Nixon’s resignation, shows beyond any doubt that Nixon tried to use the deep state to cover up his and his White House’s involvement in the burglary at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex.
Nixon was recorded on his taping system less than a week after the arrest of the Watergate burglars at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters where the burglars were caught bugging the phone of Democratic National Committee Chair Lawrence O’Brien. On that tape, Nixon is overheard directing his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to call the CIA director and deputy director and have them contact the FBI to halt its investigation of the break-in, ostensibly for national security reasons related to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
Shepard claims the purpose of the calls to the CIA were only to prevent the names of Democratic donors to the Nixon 1972 presidential campaign from becoming public. But there is no evidence to support his theory.
Nixon certainly never raised it as a defense when Republican senators used the “smoking gun” tape to urge him to resign. Moreover, that same tape shows that Nixon likely had advance knowledge of the break-in because he and Haldeman discussed it in the context of Operation Gemstone, a secret Nixon campaign operation led by Attorney General John Mitchell that included break-ins and the bugging of Democrats in unspecified locations.
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.
Shepard’s theory is also totally inconsistent with a March 21, 1973, tape recording, nine months after Haldeman’s call to the CIA. In that recording, Nixon is heard meeting with his closest advisers, including Haldeman and White House counsel John Dean. The tape records Nixon approving the payment of $1 million in hush money to the Watergate burglars who were demanding funds to pay their lawyers.
When there was any close question, we always erred on the side of the defendant — something that cannot be said about the current DOJ.
Nixon and Dean agreed that Mitchell, then Nixon’s campaign manager, should raise the funds. The concern discussed at that meeting was that if they did not pay the hush money, the burglars would cooperate with prosecutors and reveal that the White House ordered the burglary — in other words, nothing about revealing Democratic donors.
Shepard also does not in his theory address evidence of Nixon’s other crimes, such as tax evasion. We had overwhelming evidence that Nixon backdated a gift of his vice-presidential papers to the National Archives to create a tax deduction on his returns for those papers. The 1969 Tax Reform Act eliminated that deduction. No one in the so-called deep state forced Nixon to fail to make the gift before the effective date of the change in law and evade taxes.
Shepard, as the Journal reports, also claims to have “unearthed a number of primary-source documents which he says show Nixon and his associates weren’t treated fairly.” He makes the sweeping allegations that special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski met “secretly with the judges overseeing” the Watergate trials and were “suppressing evidence from the defense.”
That allegation has no basis in fact.
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.
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