Justice Department Is Reportedly Probing Conduct of Special Counsel Who Took Down Nixon

President Trump’s Justice Department is reportedly looking into the conduct of a long-defunct organization — the office of special counsel that helped take down President Nixon. According to a Wall Street Journal report, senior DOJ leaders have already met with a former Nixon aide who has become a hero to a new generation of conservatives by pushing a revisionist history of the Watergate scandal. Nixon and Mr. Trump have long been compared. Both men were reviled by the political establishment; both hated their press coverage; and both exercised a level of influence over the morass of federal bureaucracy in ways that many other presidents did not. When Mr. Trump asked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 to dig up dirt on President Biden, the Watergate comparisons came about instantly. Even John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel who later turned on the president during testimony before Congress, has drawn the comparison. The DOJ’s newfound interest in investigating the investigators of the Watergate scandal reportedly came about thanks to Geoff Shepard, who worked in Nixon’s White House. Mr. Shepard, a Harvard law graduate, got his start at the White House working on domestic policy for John Ehrlichman. During his time working on domestic issues, Mr. Shepard was also deputized to aid J. Fred Buzhardt, Nixon’s White House defense attorney who handled all legal matters related to the investigation into the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up. Mr. Shepard’s responsibility was transcribing White House tapes and storing them away.Mr. Shepard has written three books arguing that the agreed-upon narrative of the Watergate scandal is actually wrong, and that Nixon was framed by elements of the government who did not support his agenda. In 2024, Mr. Shepard appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where the two spent several hours discussing his theories about the Watergate scandal. Mr. Shepard’s theories have now reportedly reached the highest levels of the Justice Department. He recently gave a presentation to officials at the DOJ referring to the Watergate affair as “lawfare” — a favorite term of Mr. Trump and his allies who argue that they have been unfairly targeted and harassed by the legal system over the course of Mr. Trump’s political career. The presentation occurred after Mr. Shepard was invited to the DOJ, according to the Journal, to talk about his theories around the scandal. He made his argument before officials at the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal watchdog that works to guarantee that government lawyers act with “the high professional standards expected of the nation’s principal law enforcement agency.”The renewed interest in Nixon’s case comes as the 38th president is finding new fans in younger generations. Vice President JD Vance himself has admitted to being a Nixon admirer, and has argued that if Watergate were to play out today, it would not be a headline-dominating story. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Mr. Vance said during an appearance at Nixon’s presidential library earlier this year. He went so far as to compare himself to Mr. Nixon, whose path to the White House was similar to that of Mr. Vance. “Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media,” Mr. Vance said at the time. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”One especially ardent fan of Nixon is a freshman conservative lawmaker from West Virginia — Congressman Riley Moore. On the same day the Journal published its story, Mr. Moore announced at an event with the Richard Nixon foundation that he had written a letter to the acting secretary of the Navy asking that the next available aircraft carrier be named after Nixon.“Richard Nixon was absolutely ‘couped’ out of office and was framed. All of this was fake,” Mr. Moore said at the event. “He knew all of this. He knew it and he stayed quiet about it because he didn’t want to erode the confidence of the American people in our system of governance.”

Justice Department Is Reportedly Probing Conduct of Special Counsel Who Took Down Nixon

Justice Department Is Reportedly Probing Conduct of Special Counsel Who Took Down Nixon

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