Trump's Justice Department Reviews Claims Watergate Prosecutors Wronged Nixon's Men
A former Nixon aide pitched the Office of Professional Responsibility on 'Watergate as Lawfare.' The department says it is not an investigation, but the review is open.
The Justice Department is reviewing whether the special prosecutors who investigated Watergate mistreated defendants tied to President Richard Nixon, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. The review stems from a presentation that Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon White House aide turned Watergate historian, gave to the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal watchdog that examines attorney misconduct.
Shepard's two-hour talk was titled "Watergate as Lawfare." He argued that Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, the two men who ran the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, violated the due process rights of defendants by meeting secretly with judges who were overseeing their trials and by withholding evidence from the defense. He showed department officials internal documents from the prosecution force to support the claim.
A Justice Department spokeswoman stressed that the session was not a formal inquiry. She said Shepard was invited because of his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, and that his "presentation does not constitute an investigation." It is unclear whether the preliminary review will lead to anything more. The Office of Professional Responsibility is the unit that normally looks at the conduct of sitting department lawyers, and the Watergate prosecutors left government roughly half a century ago.
This is not the first time Shepard has made the request. In 2022, the Justice Department under then-President Joe Biden declined his bid for an investigation, citing the amount of time that had passed since the events. The decision to hear him out now marks a change in posture under the Trump administration.
Historians who study the era reject the revisionist account. Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian, has said the evidence of Nixon's "abuses of presidential power" is "overwhelming," pointing to the White House tapes that recorded efforts to obstruct the investigation. Nixon resigned in August 1974 after the tapes showed he had tried to use federal agencies to block the inquiry into the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex.
The review lands as President Donald Trump and his allies increasingly compare Nixon's experience with the investigations Trump himself has faced. Trump has repeatedly described those inquiries as political persecution, and the Nixon comparison fits a broader argument from his side that prosecutors have been used as weapons against political opponents.
Cox, who was appointed in 1973, was fired by Nixon in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre after he sought the White House tapes. Jaworski replaced him and pursued the same tapes all the way to the Supreme Court, which ordered Nixon to turn them over in 1974. Dozens of people were eventually charged in connection with Watergate, and several of Nixon's top aides went to prison.
For now, the department has said only that the Office of Professional Responsibility remains focused on professional standards. No target has been named, no formal inquiry has been announced, and most of the people involved in the original prosecutions are dead. The practical effect of the review, if it has one, is likely to be political, giving the administration an official-sounding hook for its argument that the prosecution of a president can itself be an abuse of power.
