Shepard’s ‘Watergate As Lawfare’ thesis prompted the review
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting a preliminary review of whether the special prosecutors who investigated the Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter. The review comes more than half a century after the Watergate scandal led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the review, characterized it as part of a broader pattern at the Justice Department, writing that “for nearly two years, the Justice Department has made it a priority to investigate people who previously investigated President Trump” and is “now reaching back in history to consider whether prosecutors mistreated an earlier Republican president.”
The review was prompted by a presentation last month at Justice Department headquarters by Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist. Shepard presented his theory that the deep state took Nixon down in a two-hour lecture supported by a 78-page slide deck titled “Watergate As Lawfare.”
A senior Justice Department official invited Shepard to make his case before OPR, an internal watchdog that investigates allegations of misconduct by Justice Department attorneys. The office is itself a product of the Watergate era, one of a number of post-Watergate changes aimed at shielding criminal investigations from White House influence.
During his presentation, Shepard showed officials internal documents from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, first led by special prosecutor Archibald Cox and then by Leon Jaworski after Nixon ordered Cox’s firing in the Saturday Night Massacre. Shepard has served as a sort of godfather for the Watergate revisionists, and his scholarship has surfaced primary-source documents he says show Nixon and his associates were not treated fairly.
Shepard alleged that Cox and Jaworski violated the due process rights of Watergate defendants by meeting secretly with the judges overseeing their trials and by suppressing evidence from the defense.
A Justice Department spokeswoman described Shepard’s invitation as routine, saying he “was recently invited to give a presentation” given his “expertise and scholarship on Watergate,” but that the presentation “does not constitute an investigation.” OPR, the spokeswoman added, “remains focused on ensuring that Department attorneys meet the highest professional standards.” People familiar with the matter cautioned that the review is preliminary and that it is not clear whether it will lead to a full-fledged probe.
In 2022, the Justice Department under the Biden administration rebuffed Shepard’s request for an investigation into the Watergate prosecutors, citing the many years that have passed since the events in question. Current officials wanted to hear him out, according to people familiar with the matter.
The review comes at a moment of renewed interest in the Nixon legacy. Republicans see in the combative former president, who was loathed by the press and besieged by investigations, a historical analogue for Trump. During remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, this summer, Vice President JD Vance made the comparison explicit.
“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,” Vance said. “There is a parallel.”
Trump has asked former Nixon aides on several occasions why Nixon resigned rather than fight it out. His administration has also moved to roll back a series of post-Watergate reforms, challenging limits on presidential authority to fire inspectors general and career civil servants.
Mainstream scholars have long concluded that Watergate generated a genuine constitutional crisis and that Nixon, rather than his prosecutors, was responsible for the malfeasance that forced his resignation. The Watergate affair led to overhauls that significantly curtailed executive power, including the creation of mechanisms such as OPR itself.