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| (Hillary Clinton's post, Facebook) |
Late last week, Americans were hit with a headline that seemed like something writer and comedian Andy Borowitz might have made up. Borowitz, who shares much of his work at Facebook, plus his independent newsletter "The Borowitz Report" at Substack, has become one of the most insightful political observers of this lawless and dysfunctional age. In fact, it seems the more 'out there" Donald J. Trump and his allies become, the funnier Borowitz gets. That's a good thing because I suspect many anti-Trumpers, including yours truly, could use a daily dose of belly laughs to head off "Trump Derangement Syndrome," known clinically as TDS.
As for the headline in question, I'm not sure even Borowitz could have dreamed it up. Get a load of this from a jointly published report at MS NOW and Yahoo! News: "Decades later, Trump DOJ to review whether Nixon was mistreated during Watergate. Taken literally, those words suggest the Trump Department of Justice has nothing better to do than to reopen a criminal case that launched almost 55 years ago (June 17, 1972) and became such a cultural phenomenon that a book on the subject, All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is widely considered a masterpiece of investigative journalism, earning a spot among TIME magazine's 100 best nonfiction books of all time (list published in 2011.) A film version of the book, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, won four Academy Awards and is seen by more than a few critics and viewers as one of the great movies of all time. To top it off, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting, helping to make the term "Watergate" a catchphrase any time a political scandal hits the news.
What does the Trump administration hope to accomplish by resurrecting Watergate? Most Trump insiders probably can't answer that question, so it's got to be a struggle for any sane person to take on. But Steve Benen gives it a shot with his original piece at MS NOW. Let's take a look:
It's outrageous enough that Donald Trump's Justice Department has targeted the prosecutors who investigated the scandal-plagued Republican president. Though it seems hard to believe, it adds insult to injury to learn that the hyperpoliticized DOJ is also taking a fresh look at the prosecutors who investigated a different scandal-plagued Republican president.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
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."
Let's note a few problems with the thesis that Shepard is pitching:
(1) Watergate as Lawfare -- "Lawfare is defined as "the misuse of legal systems, courts, and laws . . . to harm, weaken, or delegitimize an adversary." In other words, Shepard claims Watergate was an illegitimate criminal case brought to weaken Richard Nixon. To borrow one of Donald Trump's favorite terms, Shepard wants us to believe that Watergate was a "hoax."
(2) How do knowledgeable critics and mainstream historians view Shepard's claims? They aren't buying it, and this is not new material from Shepard:
Shepard has for years advanced a revisionist account of the prosecution, using internal documents he says show Nixon and his associates were treated unfairly.
His claims differ from the prevailing historical account, which holds that Watergate was a constitutional crisis driven by abuses of presidential power. Nixon resigned in 1974 as impeachment proceedings advanced.
Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former Nixon Presidential Library director, has rejected efforts to portray Nixon primarily as a victim, calling evidence of abuses of presidential power "overwhelming" and pointing to White House tapes showing Nixon discussing efforts to obstruct investigations.
The review comes as President Donald Trump and some of his allies have drawn parallels between Nixon's experience and investigations into Trump.
(3) Even the National Review isn't buying it -- As the leading conservative magazine in the U.S., the National Review might be expected to side with the Trump administration and and Nixon revisionists on this one. But it does not; Andrew C. McCarthy writes:
What I want to say in this post is that I am an admirer of Geoff Shepard, the Nixon administration official who reportedly made the big presentation to the Trump Justice Department. Geoff is a great lawyer who worked on Nixon’s defense of the special prosecutor(s)’ investigation, and I recommend his book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President (Bombardier Books, 2021). He makes a compelling case that the investigation of Nixon was abusive.
I’m not surprised that this theory has gotten a warm reception in the Trump administration, which makes the same fallacious contention made by Nixon’s more ardent apologists: The probe was patently politicized; ergo, he was innocent. As with Trump, Democrats politicized the Nixon probe, yet he was still guilty, at least of impeachable offenses.
Let's return to Steve Benen's article at MS NOW for insight on how Shepard's pro-Nixon propaganda found an ear with the Trump DOJ:
According to The Journal's article, it was just last month when a senior Justice Department official invited Shepard to come to Main Justice and make his case before the Office of Professional Responsibility. A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed on the record that this actually happened.
"The review is preliminary," The Journal said, "and it isn't clear whether it will lead to a full-fledged probe."
If this sounds at all familiar, it's because Team Trump has been focused on Nixon and Watergate quite a bit lately.
Just a few months ago, for example, Ed Martin, before he stepped down as the highly controversial U.S. pardon attorney, published a bizarre item to social media, arguing that the Watergate scandal was a "hoax" orchestrated in part by the CIA. (Gee, those words sound like they came straight from Trump's demented brain.)
Martin added, "The only thing worse than the lying CIA is the two-faced liar John Dean [who served as Nixon's White House counsel] and the fiction-writer [Bob] Woodward. May they suffer in eternity."
The idea that Richard Nixon was the victims of a CIA-driven hoax seems to be taking hold in Republican circles. That should not be a surprise, given that no one in the postmodern GOP seems capable of independent thought. Benen notes that it did not take long for some prominent Republicans to state that Martin had a worthwhile point:
The Republican activist's claims were ridiculous, but hours later they were nevertheless endorsed by Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who currently serves as the Trump administration's chief of protocol. "President Nixon was the target of a Deep State hoax," Crowley wrote online while referencing Martin's tweet. "He will be vindicated."
Days later, JD Vance appeared at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, where the vice president kept the rhetorical campaign going.
After arguing that Nixon's legacy is "enjoying a bit of a renaissance," the Ohio Republican said, "As I joked … backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."
Most folks who have been paying attention to current events likely know that JD Vance's words on most any topic should be viewed with a massive dose of skepticism. True to form, it did not take Vance long to go "there," equating Nixon's experience in Watergate with Trump's treatment at the hands of the supposedly evil Biden administration. Benen writes:
As part of the same comments, Vance argued in apparent seriousness, "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."
There were all kinds of problems with Vance's pitch, including the simple fact that it's bonkers to think Nixon was brought down by nefarious government insiders who plotted against him. We have, after all, heard the tapes. Nixon chose to engage in systemic abuses. His crimes were his own, not the fault of "the deep state," whether Republicans choose to acknowledge reality or not.
Experts who actually have studied Wategate seem to be listening to Vance's words with mouths agape, Benen reports:
Historian and journalist Garrett Graff, who wrote one of the defining books about Watergate, described Vance's comments as "shockingly" ahistorical and an "immature understanding of what Watergate was and wasn't."
Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Library, told The Washington Post soon after that Vance "should know better as a well-educated lawyer."
Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University, went on to refer to recordings that contain thousands of hours of Nixon's Oval Office conversations.
"You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes. He's telling an intermediary what to tell someone who's about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say," the historian explained. "You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire Teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That's all illegal."
"It's not as if it's a matter of partisan interpretation. The evidence is overwhelming," Naftali concluded during his interview with The Post while offering additional examples of Nixon's efforts to subvert legal protections.
Three months later, Trump's Justice Department is nevertheless prepared to take a fresh look at whether Nixon was some kind of victim of prosecutorial abuse — developments that would've seemed unthinkable a half-century ago.
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