Nixon got boned

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of one of the darkest days in American politics — the day when the FBI and the rest of the deep state overthrew the duly elected government of President Nixon by forcing him to resign in a scandal designed by the FBI and promoted by the Washington Post.

The cover up was worse then the crime, because there really was no crime. Thus in less than two years, the deep state overturned the biggest Electoral College victory in 152 years.

Nixon’s 520-17 win in 1972 was bested only by James Monroe and George Washington; both were unanimous choices although one of Monroe’s electors in the Electoral College defected to allow Washington to be the only unanimous choice.

Nixon won the popular vote 60.7% to 37.5% over George McGovern. Only Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 61.1% to 38.5% win over Barry Goldwater eight years earlier topped that, and then only because of the Kennedy assassination a year earlier.

The deep state won by turning an insignificant incident in the campaign into a scandal. Mark Felt of the FBI and others fed information to the media, which agreed to never name them. That allowed them to never be held accountable for their actions. They never had to answer tough questions thus history can gloss over the motives of the deep state.

Felt and the rest fed mainly a couple of low-level reporters at the Washington Post, who were rewarded not only with the infamous Washington book deal, but an award-winning movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.

A year of flogging this story led to Senate hearing which led to the first presidential impeachment effort in the House in more than a century. Republicans went after President Andrew Johnson for firing the secretary of war. Johnson survived by one vote as enough RINOs flipped to save him.

Jack Kennedy would win a Pulitzer in 1957 for Profiles in Courage in which he praised the turncoats but historian David O. Stewart wrote, “None was a victim of post-impeachment retribution. Indeed, their careers were not wildly different from those of the thirty-five senators who voted to convict Andrew Johnson.”

What are facts to Democrats? The narrative about Watergate is that Nixon’s henchmen tried to wiretap the DNC.

On December 20, 2019, NYT dragged out the Myth of Watergate in an attempt to get Trump, whining, “Why Is Trump Finding More Protection Than Nixon Did?”

The story said:

President Nixon was accused of trying to unlawfully influence the 1972 election. On June 17, 1972, five burglars linked to the Committee to Re-elect the President broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex. Though there is still debate about what the burglars were seeking, Nixon’s role in trying to cover up his campaign’s involvement became central to efforts to impeach him.

Nixon faced three articles of impeachment but quit before the House voted on them. One was for abuse of power for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, thus subverting the constitutional scheme of government. He was also accused of obstructing justice by, among other things, paying off the burglars to encourage their silence and making false and misleading statements to investigators and to the public. Nixon also faced a third charge — that he misused the I.R.S., F.B.I., Secret Service and other government agencies to violate the constitutional rights of citizens.

Let us review.

Under Obama, the FBI spied on Donald Trump. Transcripts from that spying were the basis of a front page story NYT published on the day of Trump’s inauguration under the headline, “Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides.”

As for ignoring subpoenas, Democrat attorneys general (Eric Holder and Mad Man Merrick Garland) ignored subpoenas and faced no penalty.

As for abusing the IRS and FBI, the media supported Obama using the FBI to spy on a political adversary, didn’t it?

The NYT piece contained a paragraph so pro-government that I need to detoxify it.

Nixon came to office [was elected] prepared to do battle with the Civil Service bureaucracy, including the intelligence and foreign-policy establishments, which he felt had grown too independent of White House control [the Constitution — you know “that thing” that makes the president the chief of the executive branch of government]. In May 1972, when the longtime F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, died, Nixon replaced him with L. Patrick Gray, a Justice Department official who he hoped would be more responsive to the White House political agenda [the Constitution]. The appointment of a new director from outside the F.B.I. infuriated many career employees [entitled elitists], including W. Mark Felt, third in command under Mr. Hoover, who had hoped for the top job and also worried that Nixon’s attempt to politicize the bureau would undermine its independence [the bureau has no independence; no federal agency does]. In 1972, after the Watergate burglary, Mr. Felt, the mysterious Deep Throat, began leaking information about the investigation to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. Mr. Felt’s leaks helped to keep the early Watergate story alive at a moment when Congress and other media outlets were paying only limited attention.

By keeping the story alive, NYT meant conflating a third-rate burglary into a scandal that would bring down the president.

The deep state had help from the judiciary, a fact that took nearly 40 years to be disclosed to the public.

On November 30, 2012, CBS reported:

Watergate Judge John J. Sirica aided the prosecution in pursuing the White House connection to the Democratic headquarters break-in by providing the special prosecutor information from a probation report in which one of the burglars said he was acting under orders from top Nixon administration officials, according to once-secret documents released Friday by the National Archives.

One newly public transcript of an in-chambers meeting between Sirica, the U.S. District Court judge in charge of the case, and then-Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in July 1973 shows the judge revealed secret probation reports indicating that E. Howard Hunt had cited orders from officials high up in the Nixon administration. Several of Hunt's co-defendants had previously denied any White House involvement in court testimony, and Sirica told Cox and other prosecutors that he felt the new information “seemed to me significant.”

There was even more to the judge’s role in removing Nixon. On August 9, 2013, Geoff Shepard wrote in The Atlantic:

I saw it all unfold. I was a young lawyer working on the White House staff and assisting in Nixon’s defense efforts. It is true that we failed spectacularly. Of course, I’m disappointed we weren’t more successful. But whether the defendants were innocent or guilty, I’ve always worried on a more basic level that the heightened emotions of the times denied them the due process of law envisioned by our Constitution.

As a result of some recent discoveries I made while researching a book on the Watergate trials, my concern has been vindicated. It turns out that the notion that “no man is above the law” somehow didn’t apply to judges or prosecutors involved in the cover-up trial. Documents I have uncovered indicate that the efforts to punish the wrongdoings of Watergate led to further wrongdoing by the very officials given the task of bringing the Watergate defendants to justice.

The new documents suggest that defendants in the Watergate cover-up trial, held before Judge John Sirica, received anything but a fair trial. Indeed, they suggest prosecutorial and judicial misconduct so serious –- secret meetings, secret documents, secret collusion -- that their disclosure at the time either would have prevented Sirica from presiding over the trial or would have resulted in the reversal of the convictions and the cases being remanded for new trials.

It matters not whether you believe that a retrial, under a different judge and perhaps held outside of the District of Columbia, might have resulted in one or more acquittals. That could well have been the result. The strong possibility remains that the Watergate defendants did not receive the fair trial guaranteed by our Constitution. For a nation that prides itself on the rule of law, even in cases of intense publicity and partisanship, this should be cause for concern.

Look, I voted for McGovern in 1972. I was 19. A year later I began my exodus from the Democrat Party by joining the Army. We all have our different paths.

As an adult now nearing Birthday No. 71, I realize Nixon got boned.

Worse, the American people had their presidential election stolen from them by the very government they had created to protect their rights to, among other things, a fair election. In today’s parlance, Watergate was an insurrection — a coup d’etat by the state itself.

Trump came into adulthood in the Nixon years. He watched. He noted. He learned. I hope in a second term, President Trump can pull the plug on the intelligence community and the rest of a federal government that is too large, too expensive and too stupid to do anyone much good.