DOJ Is Now Reviewing Whether Watergate Was 'Lawfare'

Washington may be dusting off one of its most famous scandals—this time to scrutinize the prosecutors, not the president at the center of it, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has heard out Geoff Shepard, a onetime Nixon aide and leading Watergate revisionist, who argues that the special prosecutors who investigated Richard Nixon engaged in "lawfare" and violated defendants' rights. At the DOJ headquarters recently, Shepard delivered a two-hour presentation and a 78-page slide deck titled "Watergate As Lawfare," alleging secret meetings with judges and suppressed evidence by special prosecutor Archibald Cox and his successor, Leon Jaworski. DOJ officials say the move is only a preliminary review and "does not constitute an investigation."

The outreach follows a renewed conservative effort to recast Watergate, drawing parallels between Nixon and President Trump, who has questioned why Nixon resigned and has pushed back against post-Watergate limits on presidential power. Vice President JD Vance recently argued that "the deep state" undermined both Nixon and Trump. A Republican congressman, Riley Moore of West Virginia, also recently claimed at an event that Nixon was "framed" and "couped out of office," Mediaite reports. Mainstream historians, however, still hold that Watergate was a genuine constitutional crisis triggered by Nixon's own misconduct, not by overreach from prosecutors. National Review writer Jim Geraghty's take? "No, We Don't Need to Spend Taxpayer Dollars to Review Whether Nixon Got a Raw Deal."