I helped investigate Watergate. The DOJ’s attempt to reframe Nixon as the victim is extremely dangerous.: 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.… https://www.ms.now/opinion/watergate-nixon-deep-state-trump-doj-conspiracy-theory