by WorldTribune Staff, October 1, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
The Justice Department is reportedly reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the legendary Watergate break-in violated the rights of former President Richard Nixon.
Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide who became a Watergate historian and revisionist, was recently invited to give a two-hour presentation at the Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the Deep State pushed Nixon out of the White House.
The title of his slide deck was “Watergate As Lawfare,” according to a Wall Street Journal report
In a speech at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., this summer, Vice President JD Vance compared Nixon’s treatment to that of President Donald Trump:
“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 is a parallel.”
The Journal reported that a “senior Justice Department official last month invited Shepard to come to Justice Department headquarters and make his case before the Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, an internal watchdog that investigates allegations of misconduct. The office itself is a product of the Watergate era, one of a number of changes aimed at shielding criminal investigations from White House influence.”
Shepherd had requested an investigation in 2022, but the Biden DOJ refused. The current review is preliminary and not an investigation, the department said in a statement:
“Given his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, he was recently invited to give a presentation but that presentation does not constitute an investigation. OPR remains focused on ensuring that Department attorneys meet the highest professional standards.”
The scandal was triggered by a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. The resulting investigation and the coverup forced Nixon to resign in August 1974.
During his presentation, Shepard showed internal documents from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force first led by special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Leon Jaworski replace him after Nixon ordered Cox’s firing in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.”
Related: Done in by the Deep State? Book by former Nixon aide likens secret DOJ ‘road map’ to ‘dossier’, November 23, 2021
“Shepard alleges that Cox and Jaworski violated the due process rights of defendants caught up in the Watergate probe by meeting secretly with the judges overseeing their trial and suppressing evidence from the defense,” the Journal reported.
“Trump has asked former Nixon aides on several occasions why Nixon resigned rather than fight it out. The current president also has moved to roll back many post-Watergate overhauls, challenging limits on presidential authority to fire inspectors general and career civil servants.”
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