A former lawmaker who helped spearhead the impeachment of Richard Nixon decried on Sunday as “just beyond stupid” a Trump administration effort to rehabilitate the late disgraced president’s conduct.

Former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y., told MS NOW that the Justice Department’s reported interest in whether prosecutors who investigated Nixon over the Watergate break-in committed misconduct “makes no sense.”

When she first read about the review, she said, one thing ran through her head.

“They can’t be that stupid,” Holtzman said on “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”

The Trump Department of Justice is reportedly examining the special prosecutor’s investigation that led to Nixon’s resignation, according to The Wall Street Journal. The review comes over 50 years after the scandal, as Trump and his administration have shown a renewed focus on Nixon and Watergate.

On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social a split photo of former President Barack Obama and Nixon side by side. The caption read: “One of these men is the most corrupt president in the history of the United States. The other is Richard Nixon.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, a senior Justice Department official invited former Nixon White House fellow and Watergate revisionist Geoff Shepard to DOJ headquarters last month. Shepard reportedly gave a two-hour presentation on his theory that the “deep state” took Nixon down.

Vice President JD Vance has compared Trump to Nixon.

During an appearance at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in June, Vance said, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

“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 added. “There is a parallel.”

Holtzman, who sat on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon in 1974, said she thinks the administration is using the review to draw parallels between Trump and Nixon. She suggested the administration is somehow trying to show that investigations into Trump were fake, with prosecutors “trying to get him just the way they tried to get Nixon.”

“For someone to say that somehow Richard Nixon was railroaded, it’s just beyond stupid and beyond absurd,” Holtzman said. “Because you’d have to say that everybody was duped — that the Republicans were duped, that the Supreme Court was duped, that everybody was duped except this guy and Trump.”

A former Watergate prosecutor agrees with her, as he wrote in an MS NOW opinion piece published Saturday.

Aligning himself with Nixon won’t help Trump at the polls next month, Holtzman said. 

“President Trump likes to talk about the worst of the worst,” Holtzman said. “Richard Nixon was — until him — the worst of all of our presidents. And now why would Trump, in the middle of a midterm election, try to align himself with the worst of the worst?”

She said she took pride in the House Judiciary Committee’s bipartisan work during the impeachment process, which led Nixon to resign when it became apparent that the House of Representatives was prepared to impeach him.

“It was a high moment in American history that we held a powerful person, a president, accountable,” Holtzman said. “And Trump wants to take that down and say to the American people, ‘That didn’t really work, that was dishonest.’ But he’s being dishonest about it, and his people are being dishonest about it.”

The post ‘Beyond stupid’: Watergate-era lawmaker on Trump’s Nixon fixation appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.