Which is worse: Bidengate or Watergate?  Because the most engaged citizens do not yet understand the full extent of the media’s corruption in the Biden scandal, or, for that matter, in Watergate, the vast majority would select Watergate.  But a thorough examination of each might change thoughtful minds.

The national media in Watergate, mainly the Washington Post, distorted the insights of its source, Deep Throat, inflating the bumblings of the unattractive Nixon White House team into the world’s most impactful political scandal.  In Watergate, the main harm to the country was media-driven, a “national nightmare,” perhaps weakening the resolve of a Democrat Congress to aid a stranded South Vietnam, but otherwise not directly and materially harmful to the nation.

Bidengate, on the other hand, saw a criminal-rich and financially straining border invasion; American surrender of $80 billion in advanced military equipment in Afghanistan, along with the world’s most strategically valuable military location, the Bagram Air Base; rampant inflation; an engraved invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine; a gratuitous strengthening of theretofore struggling Iran, thus financing barbarity throughout the Mideast; and much more.  All of this was arguably the result of a demented president.

Putting aside comparative harm, isn’t it obvious that Watergate showed an endemically immoral White House, exposed, fortunately, by an energetic, incorruptible media?  On the other hand, isn’t Bidengate simply the story of an aging president?  How could Bidengate be considered more politically immoral than Watergate, and thus more harmful to our democracy?

To answer, we should first compare the cover-up involved in each. 

Watergate involved an Oval Office coverup, but it was by charisma-challenged men, guilty skulkers by nature, who did not truly understand what they were covering up.  They secretly paid legal fees for the burglary defendants, gratuitously suggesting “hush money.”  At the same time, any good lawyer would have advised them that they owed legal fees to the burglars under traditional indemnity principles.  (For example, the criminally fraudulent Elizabeth Holmes was indemnified, appropriately, by her company, Theranos.)  Until March 1973, nine months after the burglary, Nixon’s team had incorrectly assumed that former attorney general and campaign chairman John Mitchell had ordered it.  No one had thought to question him about his nonexistent role until then.

Richard Nixon’s only misstep was to follow John Dean’s inept advice in June 1972 to have the CIA call the FBI off the “Mexican Money Trail” investigation, which, even if thwarted, would do nothing to prevent proof of Republican campaign money financing the burglary.  Why, then, did Nixon comply with a stratagem so unhelpful in his defense?  Because he wished to avoid exposing his Democrat supporter, Dwayne Andreas, as a Nixon contributor.  This was an inconsequential and unnecessary cover-up — not a bit effective in hiding a crime that the conspirators did not commit and of which had no prior clue. 

The Mexican investigation was delayed, perhaps by a few days, until the FBI’s Mark Felt ordered the investigation to continue.  That was the only wrongdoing that could be proven against Nixon.  But even that minor cover-up would have been unnecessary if the heralded Washington Post had reported all of what it knew of the story, whereupon Nixon’s men would not have felt the need to cover up anything.

Even from the start, the Post reporters and editors knew that this was not a campaign operation, which the Oval Office (putting aside lowly aide John Dean) did not know.  They soon knew that the CIA was behind the operation, which was aimed at listening to out-of-town Democrats calling their “dates” for the evening’s activities. 

Even with the cover-up by the Post and the commonsense inference that the burglary was likely authorized by someone in the White House, the whole affair did not move the public needle.  Here is where the assistance of the FBI’s Mark Felt, AKA “Deep Throat,” morphs this petty wrongdoing into a major, media-invented scandal.

Felt had become frustrated that he was not allowed to use the grand jury to investigate whether the burglary was, on one hand, a “one-off” aberration or, on the other hand, part of the carefully organized “Dirty Tricks” program of juvenile campaign pranks run out of the White House by young Donald Segretti. 

To arouse public pressure, Felt met with the Post’s Bob Woodward for an all-night garage confab, where Felt carefully explained his hypothesis that the burglary could have been part of Segretti’s “campaign of spying and sabotage” directed against Nixon’s electoral opponents.  Segretti’s normal “tricks” were petty annoyances, such as misdirecting opposing campaign rallies.  But if the program was seriously criminal, including burglary and wiretapping, then the White House was part of a heinous electoral conspiracy.

As it turned out, the hypothesis was disproven, but not publicly.  The Post continued citing the hypothesis as if it were fact while concealing the undercover CIA provenance of a program connected to the election only by use of campaign cash.   

Unfortunately, because the Post so effectively covered up its cover-up, while becoming an honored, wealthy political force, the other major media soon got over its skis.  Reporters, seeking to claim the mantle of “investigative journalism,” began reporting political preference as proven fact, while concealing or minimizing that which they deemed “misinformation” under the assumption that Democrats were always good guys. 

It is precisely this unchecked power that caused the legacy media to develop, fifty years later, into a conspiracy consisting largely of partisan fraudsters. 

Over the past five decades, the country has witnessed the development of a group-thinking herd of left-leaning lemmings, never confronting Democrat policies, but instead mindlessly promoting them in hopes of gaining a perch inside the left’s velvet rope.  For the same reason, the media have developed a reflexive oppositional stance to all things deemed conservative.  The harm to our society from this is often palpable and grave.  For just one example, our country endured three years of government-paralyzing “Russian collusion” narratives, which intelligent, unbiased journalists could have easily debunked. 

This brings us to the present Bidengate imbroglio.  Unlike the effective, competent president whom the media skewered in the 1970s, for the last four years, the country had a bobble-head, Weekend at Bernie’s president.  An unelected politburo of corrupt apparatchiks instead ran our country, while, ironically, portraying Donald Trump as a “danger to democracy.”  As one example, White House aide Tom Donilon recently walked away from his job with at least $4 million in his pocket, likely from campaign contributions.

Given this hidden process, can Bidengate be accurately viewed, in essence, as “merely” a White House “cover-up”, like Watergate?  A cover-up is a necessary part of every crime, gross or petty, so it is meaningful to assess how serious the crime covered up was.  Bernie Madoff “covered up,” but his crimes were of appalling massive fraud — far worse than his “process” crime of cover-up.   So yes, using the Madoff analogy, one can say the Biden administration “covered up,” but “cover-up” is too soft a charge in this case, just as in Madoff’s.  We were all defrauded out of a duly elected president, just as Madoff’s victims were defrauded out of their wealth.

As horrid as this crime was, it was media complicity that compounded Biden’s crimes against democracy.  We have a First Amendment, the media remind us, to check on our elected representatives.  But what if those media are complicit in governmental  crime?  In other words, if the Biden White House was organized crime, were the media dirty cops enabling it?

Jake Tapper was not simply “wrong“ when he meanly chastised Lara Trump in October 2020 for suggesting that Biden’s speech patterns indicated dementia.  Instead, in aggressively demeaning her, Tapper was implicitly warranting to the audience that he, an esteemed journalist, knew the truth, and he could testify that there was nothing, not a thing, wrong with Biden.  He was not discussing or even arguing, but was establishing, based on his implied superior knowledge, a falsehood.

There are many more instances like Tapper’s. These are the crimes of co-conspirators, not true journalists.

Now we have proof, ironically through Tapper’s book, that there was a fraudulent election conspiracy, not only within the White House, but implicitly engaging the entire mainstream media.  Since 40,000 votes in three states decided the 2020 election, Tapper’s false claims of Biden’s competence may qualify him as not only a conspiratorial election fraudster, but also a successful one.

There is a straight line from Tapper’s apparent fraud in 2020 to Joe Scarborough’s in March 2024, again warranting inside knowledge of Biden’s competence, connected by thousands of media examples in the intervening four years.  The country, then, was defrauded not just by the White House, but by an entire media industry, for four years, to great and irreparable harm to America and also, for just a few examples, Israel, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

So, yes, Bidengate is far worse than Watergate.  But will its media accomplices truthfully report this story?  

John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005.  O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.