It’s outrageous enough that Donald Trump’s Justice Department has targeted the prosecutors who investigated the scandal-plagued Republican president. Though it seems hard to believe, it adds insult to injury to learn that the hyper-politicized DOJ is also taking a fresh look at the prosecutors who investigated a different scandal-plagued Republican president.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.

Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: “Watergate As Lawfare.”

According to the Journal’s article, it was just last month when a senior Justice Department official invited Shepard to come to Main Justice and make his case before the Office of Professional Responsibility. A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed on the record that this actually happened.

“The review is preliminary,” the Journal added, “and it isn’t clear whether it will lead to a full-fledged probe.”

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Team Trump has been focused on Nixon and Watergate quite a bit lately.

Just a few months ago, for example, Ed Martin, before he stepped down as the highly controversial U.S. pardon attorney, published a bizarre item to social media, arguing that the Watergate scandal was a “hoax” orchestrated in part by the CIA.

Martin added, “The only thing worse than the lying CIA is the two-faced liar John Dean [who served as Nixon’s White House counsel] and the fiction-writer [Bob] Woodward. May they suffer in eternity.”

The Republican activist’s claims were ridiculous, but hours later they were nevertheless endorsed by Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who currently serves as the Trump administration’s chief of protocol. “President Nixon was the target of a Deep State hoax,” Crowley wrote online while referencing Martin’s tweet. “He will be vindicated.”

Days later, JD Vance appeared at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, where the vice president kept the rhetorical campaign going.

After arguing that Nixon’s legacy is “enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” the Ohio Republican said, “As I joked … backstage, 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.”

As part of the same comments, Vance argued in apparent seriousness, “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.”

There were all kinds of problems with Vance’s pitch, including the simple fact that it’s plainly bonkers to think Nixon was brought down by nefarious government insiders who plotted against him. We have, after all, heard the tapes. Nixon chose to engage in systemic abuses. His crimes were his own, not the fault of “the deep state,” whether Republicans choose to acknowledge reality or not.

Historian and journalist Garrett Graff, who wrote one of the defining books about Watergate, described Vance’s comments as “shockingly” ahistorical and an “immature understanding of what Watergate was and wasn’t.”

Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Library, told The Washington Post soon after that Vance “should know better as a well-educated lawyer.”

Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University, went on to refer to recordings that contain thousands of hours of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations.

“You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes. He’s telling an intermediary what to tell someone who’s about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say,” the historian explained. “You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire Teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That’s all illegal.”

“It’s not as if it’s a matter of partisan interpretation. The evidence is overwhelming,” Naftali concluded during his interview with the Post while offering additional examples of Nixon’s efforts to subvert legal protections.

Three months later, Trump’s Justice Department is nevertheless prepared to take a fresh look at whether Nixon was some kind of victim of prosecutorial abuse — developments that would’ve seemed unthinkable a half-century ago.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Decades later, Trump’s DOJ to review whether Nixon was mistreated during Watergate scandal appeared first on MS NOW.

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