Watch How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon | The American Spectator

The next time you can spare an hour and a half of your time, watch How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon, which is streaming free for a short time period at warroom.film. The documentary is hosted by journalist Michael Patrick Leahy, and it is based on extensive research by Geoff Shepard, a Harvard-educated lawyer who worked on the Nixon administration’s Domestic Policy Council and was later part of Nixon’s Watergate defense team.

Shepard has written three excellent books revealing the plot to destroy the Nixon presidency, and in the film he and Leahy lay out 12 due process violations that doomed the Watergate defendants and Nixon’s presidency. And they compare what happened to Nixon more than 50 years ago to what happened to Donald Trump between 2016 and 2024. Nixon lacked the financial resources, alternative media, and political support in Washington to defeat what Leahy and Shepard characterize as a legal coup d’ etat. Trump needed all three to stay out of jail and return to the White House.

Most Americans have been taught in school and by the media the version of Watergate as told by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their stories for the Washington Post, their book All the President’s Men, and Hollywood’s dramatic movie starring Robert Reford and Dustin Hoffman as a pair of courageous journalists who uncover a sinister conspiracy allegedly covered-up by President Nixon and his closest advisers.

In the movie version, Hal Holbrook plays the mysterious figure that Woodward and Bernstein called “Deep Throat,” who provides clues for the intrepid journalists to follow in uncovering the “scandal.” We have since learned that “Deep Throat” was Mark Felt, then the deputy director of the FBI who was angry that he was passed over by Nixon to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as FBI Director.

The gospel according to Woodward and Bernstein received its first blow with the appearance of Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. It received a second blow with the publication of Len Colodney’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup. Both books made a temporary splash in the media, but neither managed to displace the official Watergate story. Neither Hougan nor the authors of Silent Coup, however, had access to the material that Geoff Shepard painstakingly uncovered during several decades of research — all of which can be found on Shepard’s website.

But for those too busy to dive into the evidentiary weeds that Shepard has mined, this new documentary neatly and compellingly summarizes Shepard’s findings, and places them in the context of 12 due process violations that involved members of the special prosecutors office; congressmen, senators and their staffs; U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica; D.C. Circuit Chief Judge David Bazelon; and an anti-Nixon media that circled the White House like sharks.

The due process violations alleged by Leahy and Shepard included: ex parte meetings between top special prosecutors and Judge Sirica and Judge Gerhard Gesell; the staffing of the special counsel’s office with pro-Kennedy, anti-Nixon lawyers; communications between Carl Bernstein and a Watergate grand juror during the grand jury’s investigation of Watergate; so-called Brady violations by special prosecutors related to ex parte meetings between prosecutors and Judge Sirica; a fake sentence imposed on John Dean to enhance his credibility as a witness; a D.C. jury pool that was tainted by extensive Watergate publicity and overwhelmingly Democrat Party voters; and Chief Judge Bazelon’s decision, suggested by the special counsel, to have en banc appeals (instead of the usual three-judge panels) that guaranteed a majority of pro-Democratic judges that affirmed all of Judge Sirica’s rulings.

Leahy and Shepard also throw cold water on the so-called “smoking gun” tape that allegedly proved that Nixon agreed to a cover-up. Shepard claims that Nixon in the tape was referring not to a cover-up of the Watergate break-in, but rather a suggestion to Bob Haldeman to have the CIA tell the FBI not to interview two Democratic financial supporters of Nixon so their donations could be kept secret. Shepard notes that even John Dean later admitted that the smoking gun tape was misinterpreted by Nixon’s lawyers, special prosecutors, Republicans in Congress, and the media. That tape led to the Democrat-controlled House beginning the process of impeachment of the president.  Republicans in Congress refused to defend Nixon. Nixon resigned.

The legacy media will ignore this documentary because Watergate is their bible; the “scandal” that they uncovered that “saved the nation” from Richard Nixon, who had been elected by one of the greatest landslides in presidential election history, affirms for them their importance to our constitutional system. But Watergate was, in the words of historian Paul Johnson, a “media putsch,” what Shepard calls a “coup.” The media and their accomplices, according to this documentary, overturned the will of the American people. Just as they have been trying to do again since 2016.

But don’t take my word for it. Watch the documentary and decide for yourself.

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