Theory 2 Action Podcast
Theory 2 Action Podcast
MM#438--Fifty Years After Watergate: Crime, Lawfare, and the Battle for Due Process
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Forget the tidy Watergate script. We dive into a sharp, good‑faith debate that tests whether Nixon’s fall was inevitable because of crimes and a collapsing cover‑up—or whether a biased legal apparatus and quiet coordination with the bench turned a scandal into a manufactured constitutional crisis. We walk step by step through the break‑in, the inner‑circle misconduct, and the public narrative that took hold, then hold it up against internal memos, ex parte contacts, and appellate maneuvers that suggest the field wasn’t level.
You’ll hear why John Dean’s credibility mattered so much—and how his one‑to‑four‑year “sentence” functioned more like theater than punishment before a D.C. jury. We explore the claim that key exculpatory shifts in Dean’s statements were kept from the defense, and why reported meetings between prosecutors and judges Sirica and Gesell still raise eyebrows. The picture that emerges isn’t exoneration; it’s complexity: serious crimes at the top, and a prosecution willing to shape process to guarantee outcomes.
We also revisit the so‑called “smoking gun” tape with fresh context. Was the push to use the CIA to deter FBI interviews an attempt to protect the burglary conspiracy—or to shield prominent Democratic donors who secretly backed Nixon’s 1972 campaign? Motive doesn’t excuse misuse of power, but it changes the legal calculus and the counsel Nixon received from his own team. Along the way, we highlight Geoff Shepard’s insider research across three books, including newly surfaced documents that challenge what many of us assumed was settled.
If you care about accountability, due process, and how narratives harden into history, this conversation will push you to think harder. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves political history, and leave a review with your take: inevitable fall—or engineered outcome?
Key Points from the Episode:
• framing the core question: crime inevitability vs lawfare
• the break‑in facts and early cover‑up mechanics
• John Dean’s admitted crimes and curated credibility
• ex parte contacts and due process concerns with judges
• en banc appeals strategy and forum fixing claims
• reinterpreting the “smoking gun” tape motive
• abuse of power versus misconstrued intent
• dual truths: real crimes and compromised process
• Geoff Shepard’s three books and new archival memos
Be sure to check out the Nixon Conspiracy, Watergate, and the Plot to Remove the President by Geoff Shepard
Other resources:
Geoff Shepard's incredible website
Want to leave a review? Click here, and if we earned a five-star review from you **high five and knuckle bumps**, we appreciate it greatly!
Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.
SPEAKER_03:Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. In our last mojo minute, at the end, I teased that we would revisit one of the most troubling times in our nation's history, especially in the last 50 years. The Watergate conspiracy and break-in cover-up and ultimate prosecution of White House officials, and then the ultimate, ultimate, the resignation of Richard Nixon in August of 1974, was unprecedented at the time and ever since. Some say politics and our nation has never been the same since August of 1974. Now, unlike any other mojo minute to help us critically think through this whole sword whole sordid affair. We're going to cover this in a unique fashion. For the first time ever, we're going to listen to a debate on this subject. And at certain points, I will interject my my key nuggets of wisdom throughout this debate. Now, hopefully, I'm going to give you some good nuggets of wisdom through the process. And in the end, we'll still talk about books, but that will come a little bit later. So without further ado, let's jump into this debate. Watergate revisited fifty years later.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the debate. Today we are revisiting one of the most studied political downfalls in American history: the resignation of President Richard Nixon 50 years ago following the Watergate scandal. Now, for decades, the conventional wisdom has been pretty simple. Nixon's removal was the inevitable, self-inflicted consequence of his administration's inherent criminality and the subsequent cover-up. But, you know, recent deep dives into archival material, specifically the internal memos of the prosecution team, they introduce a, well, a troubling counter-narrative. So the central question before us is now dramatically reframed. Was Nixon's political demise the unavoidable consequence of core criminality within the White House, or was it actually the result of a fundamentally biased, collusive political prosecution, a form of lawfare designed to engineer his removal? I maintain that the crimes and the subsequent obstruction made Nixon's political collapse and resignation unavoidable.
SPEAKER_02:And I come at it from a different perspective. I'm just not convinced by that narrative of inevitability anymore. The material we have access to now, it forces us to question the entire legal apparatus that was involved. I argue that the scandal was really manufactured into a full-blown constitutional crisis, largely through systemic prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, what yeah, what we now call lawfare, aimed directly at voiding the 1972 election results. To really understand the downfall, I think we have to shift our focus, maybe not entirely away from the administration's malseasons, which was certainly real, but towards the uh the radical denial of due process orchestrated by the very legal system tasked with accountability.
SPEAKER_03:Now I agree with the woman in this debate. The amount of evidence that has been released in the last 15 years, based on some great books, which we will talk about at the end, sheds vastly new light on this whole topic. It certainly was lawfare at the highest reaches in a very corrupt city, nation's capital. But let's hear more from this debate.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, let's start exactly where the crisis started then, with the facts of the crime and the subsequent obstruction. The fundamental cause of Nixon's downfall, I believe, rests squarely on the actions of his inner circle. And it began immediately. Consider the actions surrounding the initial break-in. We know Gordon Liddy, hired by the Committee for the Re-election of the President, or Cree, he presented a campaign intelligence plan that frankly revealed an internal moral depravity at the highest levels of the campaign. I mean, a plan that included provisions for mugging, bugging, kidnapping, and prostitution.
SPEAKER_02:That's that's a compelling opening, I grant you. But I might frame it slightly differently. While Liddy's plans were indeed grotesque, they were largely rejected, right? And the break-in itself, while illegal, was hardly the direct cause of the constitutional crisis. The true weight, I think, falls on the massive cover-up that followed, which John Dean, the president's counsel, himself admitted he ran as the chief desk officer. And it's Dean's admissions that immediately bring us back to the criminality, which I certainly agree was present. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, without a doubt, the break-in was a crime. I'm not disputing that, and I don't think any serious person would be disputing that in any sense. The folks that committed the crime, G. Gordon Liddy and the rest of the characters who were actually involved in the break-in. Many think G. Gordon Liddy was the person who planned it. But and obviously he never talked, so we don't know, but all indications are he was the one who planned the break-in. But the rest of the characters who actually did the burglarly should be prosecuted, and they were. There's no dispute there.
SPEAKER_01:And that cover-up involved admitted illegal acts, which, in my view, doomed the administration long before the special prosecutor's involvement became, shall we say, contentious. Dean's participation involved subordination of perjury, the destruction of evidence taken from Howard Hunt's safe, and even the embezzlement of, what,$4,000 in campaign funds, which he then used for his own honeymoon. This moral and criminal rot exposed itself organically. The cover-up began collapsing internally when one of the burglars, James McCord, wrote to Judge Sirica in March 1973, alleging perjury. Now that was months before the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the WSPF, was even fully up and running. The administration's own corruption was fundamentally the mechanism of its demise.
SPEAKER_02:See, I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that the internal collapse was the primary mechanism that forced the president's resignation. The internal collapse, yeah, it provided the opportunity, maybe the fuel, but the mechanism of removal, the engine driving it, was the WSPF. Let me tell you why. The denial of due process orchestrated by the WSPF, run by Jaworski and his team, essentially rigged the legal outcome. The evidence, specifically the internal WSPF confidential files that have come to light, prove systemic ethical misconduct.
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely. When you get into the weeds of the Watergate conspiracy and slowly begin to understand that this was lawfare at the highest reaches before we even knew what lawfare was, that is what is most disturbing about the Watergate conspiracy. Because the way it unfolded was not judicially sound and it was absolutely corrupt. But let's keep unpacking it.
SPEAKER_01:Rigging the outcome is uh that's a significant charge. But what evidence do you see as as really dispositive there?
SPEAKER_02:Well, the bias was systemic and structural. Look at the staffing. The WSPF had over 60 lawyers, and the source material indicates the top 17 lawyers were former colleagues from the Kennedy and Johnson Justice Departments. So you had a completely partisan investigation aimed, arguably, at undoing the 1972 election results. But even more critically, we now have documentation of secret, undocumented meetings. At least 10 instances are mentioned between WSPF staff, including Leon Jaworski himself, and Judges Serica and Gessel. This level of ex parte communication, this collusion, it fundamentally compromised judicial fairness.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I see why you emphasize those procedural challenges, and I agree that partisan staffing and improper communication with the bench are deeply concerning. However, those issues they arose after the initial undeniable criminality, the obstruction of justice, was already exposed, largely by the administration's own actions and mistakes. Remember, Nixon's own taping system, the Oval Office tapes, they recorded conversations confirming a pattern of obstruction, including those discussions about blackmail demands from Hunt and crucially using the CIA to interfere with the FBI investigation. Those tapes confirmed the administration's criminal pattern, justifying removal regardless of, you know, the WSPF's later composition or actions.
SPEAKER_02:But the tapes only became legally relevant because of that deeply corrupted process. We can't just ignore the bias inherent in the investigation. Jaworski himself wrote a memo, didn't he, complaining that his own staff was consumed by this subjective conviction that the president must be reached at all cost. That mindset, fueled by the partisan staffing, it contaminated the entire process and I think explains those secret meetings. When the prosecution is more concerned with the ultimate outcome than with impartial justice, the system fails.
SPEAKER_01:While that collusion, particularly the documented request for a secret meeting on December 14th between top prosecutors and judges Sirica and Gasell, is, yes, profoundly disturbing, it doesn't just erase the underlying criminal facts, does it? The subsequent convictions of top aides like Haldeman and Ehrlichman, they were based on testimony about crimes that actually happened. The cover-up, subordination of perjury, obstruction of justice, the procedural missteps, many of which, let's be honest, were only discovered decades later. They don't change the fact that serious crimes requiring accountability were committed by men serving right there at the president's pleasure.
SPEAKER_02:Yet the procedural missteps were the engine that guaranteed those convictions and ultimately forced the resignation. Let's look specifically at Judge Sirica for a moment.
SPEAKER_03:And here's our first key nugget of wisdom.
SPEAKER_02:Now Sirica was turning 70 and would soon lose the ability, under the rules then, to assign himself cases. This coordination, the timing of the indictments, specifically planned to allow Sirica to preside over the cover-up trial, that's a per se violation of due process. That isn't just a procedural misstep. That is active collaboration between the judge and the prosecution to fix the trial forum.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, that detail about Sirica's timing is it's alarming, yes. And it certainly does confirm a bias toward reaching a specific outcome. I'll grant that.
SPEAKER_02:And it gets worse. The WSPF leadership allegedly advised Chief Judge Basilin of the DC circuit to hear all Watergate appeals and bank, meaning all nine judges heard the case, not the standard three judge panel. Why? Well, apparently, this was done to guarantee that Sirica's pro-prosecution rulings, despite him being the most frequently reversed judge in the entire circuit, would be upheld every single time. This looks like the monstrable evidence of fixing the appeals process itself. So if the legal process is structurally rigged from trial assignment through appeal, how can we possibly say the outcome was inevitable based only on the initial crimes?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, okay. If we grant that the judicial and prosecutorial conduct was deeply flawed, let's maybe pivot from the judiciary back to the key witnesses themselves. I want to talk about John Dean. Now, I fully acknowledge Dean's extensive criminality. Embezzlement, subordination of perjury, destruction of evidence, we've covered that. However, his testimony, flawed as he was, provided the only really viable pathway to expose the higher-ups. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell. Using Dean, a known criminal, was perhaps a tough, maybe even distasteful, but necessary concession to gain clarity about the scope of the conspiracy. Furthermore, his credibility at the time was seemingly bolstered by the fact that he was sentenced to one to four years before he testified, confirming his admitted guilt had apparently been punished.
SPEAKER_03:Right, but here comes our second key nugget of wisdom.
SPEAKER_02:That's where the procedural manipulation becomes truly scandalous. You mentioned his sentence, one to four years, but the source material we have now shows that the sentence was effectively a fraud, that's a term used, engineered by the judge and prosecutors specifically to sell that narrative of accountability to the public, and crucially to the jury. Dean never spent a single night in jail. He was placed in a witness holding facility at Fort Holobird, Maryland.
SPEAKER_01:A witness holding facility? I mean, that's not entirely unprecedented for witness protection, perhaps, but what makes it fraudulent in your view?
SPEAKER_02:The arrangement at Fort Holobird apparently included conjugal visits. And here is the kicker. One week, just one week after the cover-up convictions came down against Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the others, Judge Sirica quietly reduced Dean's sentence to time served. The whole punishment narrative presented to the jury was essentially a fabrication.
SPEAKER_01:Wait, hold on. You're telling me he was basically in a special facility, allowed visits with his wife, effectively under a form of house arrest, and then his sentence was immediately commuted right after the convictions he helped secure? That that certainly undermines the narrative of him being a punished, repentant insider providing truthful testimony.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. The WSPF in Syrica, it appears, actively conspired to give Dean a measurably greater impression on the D.C. jury, a jury pool that, let's remember, was upwards of 90% Democrat in D.C. at the time. They knew or must have known the jury would be more inclined to believe a witness who had already supposedly paid a price for his admitted guilt, even though that price was, well, nominal at best. They prioritized securing those high-profile political convictions over perhaps truthful justice. And this manipulation is further evidenced by the exculpatory evidence memos detailing Dean's dramatic change in stance, where he suddenly implicated Haldeman and Ehrlichman more directly, information the WSPF knowingly withheld from the defense attorneys. They needed Dean to stick the landing, so to speak, and they appear to have managed his testimony and his punishment to ensure exactly that.
SPEAKER_03:Certainly explosive allegations, but as the young kids like to say these days, we brought the receipts. And those receipts are in the form of three books, which we will talk about at the end. But let's finish this debate.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. That brings us to our final and perhaps most critical point, the causation of the resignation itself. The smoking gun tape, the one from June 23, 1972. That was the ultimate trigger, right? Nixon's own lawyers, chief among them James St. Clair, wrongly concluded, I argue, that the conversation showed the president was involved in the cover-up from day one and advised him he had no choice but to resign.
SPEAKER_01:But how could they possibly misinterpret a conversation where Nixon clearly directs his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to use the CIA to tell the FBI to lay off the investigation into the money trail connected to the break-in.
SPEAKER_03:And here's where the official Watergate narrative collapses. We all learned that the most damning thing for Nixon was the tape, the missing 18-minute and a half gap on the tape. You know, they erased it to cover up whatever he said. This was Nixon in his own words. You know, why would Nixon delete and remove those words on the tape if he wasn't guilty?
SPEAKER_01:Let's go back to the debate. That seems by definition like obstruction of justice and a clear abuse of power. Well, I'm not convinced by that line of reasoning based on the material that's emerged since. We think we now know the true intent behind that specific conversation. It was about using the CIA to tell the FBI not to interview two specific individuals. Why? Because those individuals were prominent Democratic donors who had secretly funneled major contributions to CREEP, Nixon's committee, under the absolute assurance they would never ever be disclosed. Nixon's intent, the argument goes, was to protect those Democratic donors from public embarrassment by keeping the FBI away from their names, not primarily to obstruct the core burglary investigation into Liddy and Hunt themselves. So, wait, you're arguing the obstruction wasn't about protecting his own people, but about protecting Democrats who had secretly given him money?
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. Nixon was trying to manage political fallout that would embarrass the opposition party, not cover up the burglary itself. There was arguably no criminal intent to cover up that specific crime, the break-in plot. Nixon resigned based on a narrative of obstruction that was essentially false, the narrative that he was covering up the core plat from the beginning, a narrative tragically promoted by his own legal team, who misunderstood the context and then amplified massively by the media. Had the actual motive been properly understood at the time, the political and crucially the legal implications would have been radically different.
SPEAKER_01:That's a that's certainly a compelling counter-argument regarding the specific motive on that tape. But have you considered the simple fact of abuse of power, regardless of motive? Whether the true motive was protecting Democratic donors or protecting Lydian Hunt, the fact remains that President Nixon directed the use of the CIA, a foreign intelligence agency, to interfere with a criminal FBI investigation of his own campaign committee. This is surely an abuse of presidential power that transcends the specific motive, doesn't it? When that conversation was revealed, it provided Congress and the public with what seemed like undeniable proof of an administration willing to deploy the nation's intelligence apparatus against its own law enforcement for political ends. That behavior, I'd argue, made his administration seem illegitimate, thus making his resignation politically unavoidable and maybe even necessary to preserve constitutional order.
SPEAKER_02:I see that more as a political calculation, a judgment driven by the manufactured legal crisis and the intense pressure, not a legal or factual inevitability. He resigned because of the cumulative effect of the law fair, the relentless media narrative, and critically, the mistaken belief shared by his lawyers that the smoking gun proved criminal conspiracy related to the break-in itself. Had the defense known the truth about the motive on that tape, and crucially, had they been privy at the time to the full extent of the WSPF's collusion with the judiciary and the evidence withheld about Dean, the impeachment proceedings would have had a vastly different foundation, perhaps a much weaker one.
SPEAKER_03:So the smoking gun wasn't really a smoking gun. Why? Because we have the guy who actually transcribed the tapes and has put the context into that whole conversation before and after the 18 and a half minute gap. This is the guy who actually calls the smoking gun the smoking gun tape. But after having that context, we actually found out what happened and with the newly released documents from the special prosecutors team. This makes a very, very compelling case about the administration really was trying to cover up financial Democrat donors who specifically asked not to be publicly acknowledged to have given to Nixon's 72 re-election campaign. The gap then didn't have anything to do with the cover-up of Watergate. Yes, Watergate was a break-in, absolutely. But the cover-up reaching all the way up to Nixon, I see no way with all this new evidence. Let's go back to the debate.
SPEAKER_01:My point remains that the sheer volume of admitted criminality, the subordination of perjury, the destruction of evidence, the direct abuse of power involving the FBI and CIA committed by the president's own lawyer and top aides means culpability for the scandal rests squarely with the Nixon administration, regardless of the process abuses we've discussed today. Crimes were committed, serious ones, that demanded accountability.
SPEAKER_02:And my position, fundamentally, is that the discovery of this documented secret collusion between the prosecution and the judges fundamentally changes the accepted history we've had for 50 years. The WSPF, it appears, actively denied the defense due process, manipulated the jury through what seems like fraudulent sentencing, and withheld exculpatory evidence, all seemingly to secure political convictions. This points towards a perversion of justice that casts, I think, serious doubt on the legitimacy of all the subsequent convictions and the ultimate outcome of the crisis. When the system tasked with accountability itself abandons impartiality, the outcome, even if perhaps politically expedient or even desired by many, cannot be considered a truly fair legal result.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the value of revisiting this material now is that it really forces us to confront both elements simultaneously, doesn't it? Both the profound criminal activities within the executive branch that certainly initiated the crisis, and also the deeply troubling ethical compromises, perhaps even misconduct within the legal system that was designed to hold it accountable.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. I think the full truth of Watergate demands consideration of both the administration's significant offenses and the WSPF's apparent campaign of lawfare. There is clearly much more to explore in the complexity of this critical moment in American history.
SPEAKER_03:Amen. I thought this debate was quite compelling and revealing, provided us a different twist, different perspective on how to learn and discover the real truth of so vital a topic as Watergate and the conspiracy and cover-up around it. And for me, at least the law affair that happened before we even knew what lawfare was back then. I would suggest arguably one of the worst pieces of lawfare in the last 50 years, especially a presidential coup that forced Richard Nixon to resign. So before we go, I had mentioned three books I wanted to share. Those books are by one author, Jeff Shepard, who happened to be a very young lawyer on the Nixon White House team and the guy who transcribed the smoking gun tape itself. And here's the three brief summaries of Jeff's books. They're all good. Each book focuses on a critical re-examination of Watergate and its scandal, both the legal and political aftermath. First is the secret plot to make Ted Kennedy president inside the real Watergate Conspiracy, written in 2008. This is where Jeff proposes that Watergate was prolonged and exploited by the then senior senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, and his political allies to realign power after Nixon's landslide victory. He argues abuses by the Kennedy Circle outstripped those by Nixon's administration with behind the scenes political maneuvering to determine Richard Nixon's fate. Certainly presents insider information and previously unreleased documents to support this partisan narrative. I had read that book, but I wasn't completely convinced that the Watergate scandal was really that much of lawfare. But then you get to the second book titled The Real Watergate Scandal, Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Down Nixon, written in 2019. This is where Jeff argues the true scandal lay in the unethical conduct by prosecutors and judges who secretly colluded to drive Nixon from office and convict his aides. Now, this newly uncovered documents, especially the National Archives, is the critical evidence that misrepresented and did not allow for due process for Nixon's team. And frankly, it was just systematically denied. I mean, when you have the prosecutor and the judge, Sarika, having upwards of nine different priving private meetings without defense counsel present, huge judicial misconduct. Huge. I'm not even a lawyer and I know that. So certainly it's going to challenge the conventional Watergate account, contending that their legal system had many breakdowns, which was the original wrongdoing. And then the third book and the final book from Shepherd's from Shepard's library is the Nixon Conspiracy, Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. That was written in 2021. All these are on Audible, by the way, so you can crush them. This last book reveals more internal prosecutor documents, exposes the alleged collusion among the prosecutors, the judges, even congressional staff to overturn Nixon's 72 re-election campaign. He argues that Nixon's resignation was not inevitable if all the evidence had surfaced. And Shepard claims that Nixon would have survived a Senate impeachment trial. It's just the fact that so much was coming over the White House staff and they had a bunker mentality. Plus, John Dean was playing both sides of the fence trying to save his own neck. And that was the real that was the real tragedy. He's the one that sold out Richard Nixon. And in this last book, that's where that's where Shepard brings the goods on the smoking gun tape, and how much of the accepted Watergate narrative is just frankly misinterpreted. He gives a wonderful defense of Nixon's record and his motivations, especially before that 18-minute gap and after that 18-minute gap. It's fascinating reading. And how it's just frankly completely misinterpreted. And really, Nixon's legal defense was just in shambles. Those guys should have been well, well versed on all the transcripts, and they they just were not up to they did not give good legal counsel to the to the president. So this last book, The Nixon Conspiracy, like I said, it's on audible, only 10 hours, a little bit over 10 hours. I crushed it in a matter of a week or two. So today's mojo minute. I hope you enjoyed this debate to help us get closer to the truth on one of the most pivotal periods in our U.S. politics. And I certainly hope you feel that you've come closer to the truth of what really happened in the Watergate conspiracy. Again, be sure to check out the Nixon Conspiracy, Watergate, and the Plot to Remove the President by Jeff Shepherd. Fantastic book. And as always, keep fighting the good fight.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.