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President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has entertained the idea of reframing former President Richard Nixon as a victim of “deep state” persecution in the Watergate scandal, with allies likening Nixon to Trump as an unfairly maligned figure.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility — an internal watchdog that was created in response to Watergate — recently heard a presentation from a revisionist Watergate historian, Geoff Shepard, on his theory that the nation’s most infamous presidential corruption scandal was actually a result of “deep state” actors conspiring to take Nixon down.
Shepard conducted a two-hour talk, accompanied by a 78-page slide deck entitled “Watergate As Lawfare.” Shepard, a former Nixon aide, has been trying to promote this theory for decades with little buy-in by mainstream historians. He thinks that Watergate was a ploy to install Edward “Teddy” Kennedy as president, and has likened the wide-ranging Nixon plot — which was uncovered by a mixture of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and investigative journalism — to a “legal pogrom.”
Among other things, Shepard argues that the special prosecutor who investigated the 1972 Watergate break-in committed misconduct in relation to the case. One of his primary complaints is that Nixon is “loathed” and that his detractors “want to give him no credit for anything,” he told the publication for Harvard Law School, of which he is an alumnus, in 2016.
In 2022, Shepard asked to present his findings to the Biden administration, but the DOJ refused. Last month, however, he was invited to speak at the department’s headquarters by a senior DOJ official, according to the Journal.
“Given his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, he was recently invited to give a presentation, but that presentation does not constitute an investigation,” a DOJ spokesperson said.
Even if Shepard’s arguments were legitimate — and legal scholars have debunked many of them — there is a massive amount of evidence incriminating Nixon in Watergate, between testimonies of his involvement in the Democratic National Committee break-in and his thousands of hours of secret audio recordings.
However, Nixon has experienced somewhat of a renaissance on the right in recent years. Many conservatives view the famously anti-communist figure as a historical proxy to Trump, who they also view as unfairly maligned by “deep state” actors trying to take him down.
In June, Vice President JD Vance likened the two figures.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Evidently, Trump himself has repeatedly asked former Nixon aides why he resigned instead of staying in office, even though he was facing robust impeachment proceedings against him at the time.
Indeed, there are similarities between Nixon and Trump, with both presidents facing prosecutions in massive corruption plots, fiercely attacking the media and perceived opponents, perpetuating brutal wars replete with shady side deals, attempting to obstruct public access to information, and issuing or receiving politically-motivated presidential pardons. Trump, like Nixon, constantly expresses paranoia that the media establishment and members of Congress are trying to take him down.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has undermined protections put in after Watergate in order to allow an even wider breadth of corrupt activity, with less oversight, in the executive branch amid his second term.
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