June 17, 2025, the recent 53rd anniversary of the Watergate break-in, should remind us of the scandal’s scurrilous aftermath. What was promised to be a new millennium of aggressive, yet punctilious, journalism turned out to be a continuation of the Washington Post‘s reckless, essentially untruthful, Watergate reporting, clearly biased in favor of Democrats.
While Republicans in the wake of Watergate vowed to be beyond reproach, like Caesar’s wife, they were indeed generally rectitudinous but yet continued the same stupidity that ruined the Nixon administration. Because neither side addressed these failures, they persist today.
We have written extensively about the Post‘s fraud during Watergate, but not enough about the Nixon Administration’s idiocy in dealing with what should have been nothing more than an embarrassing dustup.
While the FBI was diligently investigating the Watergate burglary and the Post was sleuthing (however conspiratorially with the DNC), the White House reacted by rigorously keeping itself in the dark. The occupants of the Oval Office assumed that someone within their associated group had done something wrong, but were afraid to pinpoint exactly what it was and who did it.
The White House inner circle could not have been more wrong-footed in its own deliberately restrained inquiry. For instance, it immediately assumed it should go into cover-up mode without knowing what it was covering up. It unwisely chose White House counsel John Dean to be its hub, even though Dean had no relevant experience, and any modest inquiry would have cast a suspicious eye toward him. To be fair, the entire group assumed from the outset that all involved must keep quiet, including among themselves.
One avenue of knowledge the White House, through Dean, shut off was G. Gordon Liddy, the burglary supervisor who, seemingly heroically, refused to talk for six years. But more harmful was the CRP lawyers’ decision not to provide legal representation for wiretap monitor Alfred Baldwin, III. In so doing, the reputedly savvy Republicans lost the opportunity to determine what he was listening to and what burglary team leader James McCord had said and done in Baldwin’s presence. So two key witnesses, who could have provided exculpatory information absolving higher officials, were lost to the Oval Office.
The Nixon Administration would have learned what Democrats later suppressed: that the project was aimed at listening to out-of-town Democrats talking to young ladies about their upcoming tawdry assignations. They would have gained clues that this may well have been a CIA operation run by infiltrating agents, the “retired” CIA agent James McCord working as his cover for the campaign (“CRP”), and White House consultant and “retired” CIA agent Howard Hunt.
The key pieces of evidence—girls, Democrat customers, and the CIA—never got on the White House radar, mainly because of the Oval Office group’s default setting of churlish opacity. They were hiding the truth from themselves.
Later that fall, it became known to the administration’s prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office that burglary defendant Howard Hunt was planning a “CIA defense” for his criminal trial. He believed the burglaries were legitimate CIA operations made legal due to presidential authority, as facilitated by John Dean, the White House counsel. If the DOJ saw that this defense essentially exculpated their ultimate bosses in the White House and communicated it as such up the chain, this would and should have been a source of jubilation in the Oval Office. Combined with Baldwin’s knowledge of the girly-talk overhearings, Hunt would have shown first that the burglary was not a supposed campaign operation and second that it was not aimed at DNC bigwigs like Chairman Larry O’Brien or another political target. In short, this defense would have shown this to have been a CIA operation, not a campaign initiative. Game, set, and match for Nixon, clearly a victim.
Hunt’s testimony would have been sensational and exculpatory. But, seemingly reflexively, the United States Attorneys fought the defense as phony. And advised by a compromised John Dean, who did know what had happened, the hunkered-down White never discussed the possibility of exculpation and may not have learned of Hunt’s plans. Acting Attorney General Henry Peterson, who did talk to Nixon, never got the clue, and the sneaky John Dean urged Hunt to plead guilty, likely to cover his tracks. It may well have been that Peterson’s lack of support for Hunt’s defense was rooted in Dean’s opposition, representing, seemingly, the interests of the White House. So, the prosecution fought Hunt, rather than embracing him, until Hunt, under Dean’s pressure, pleaded guilty.
At the criminal trial of G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord, the government was stymied by an intervening DNC lawyer who scuttled Baldwin’s testimony that he was listening to “explicitly intimate” conversations, which to most would have suggested prostitution. However, had the Republican lawyers not abandoned him following the burglary, they could have learned his story and widely disseminated that story outside of the courtroom.
The final major act of abject stupidity occurred in April 1973, as the Nixon administration was reeling from the defection of John Dean and Jeb Magruder, the latter falsely implicating John Mitchell. It was then that Nixon dismissed his close associates, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, as well as the belatedly suspected Dean. In what should go down as one of the most self-destructive political acts in our history, Nixon then forced the resignation of loyal Attorney General Richard Kleindienst over Kleindienst’s strenuous and wise objections. His “clean Gene” replacement, Elliott Richardson, to gain confirmation by the Senate, agreed willingly to appoint a special prosecutor, which he did with the naming of Harvard professor Archibald Cox, a loyal Kennedy family camp follower. The special prosecutor thereafter became a legal hammer, and every fact became a Nixon nail. Cox’s office ignored a raft of exculpatory evidence noted above, which would only have diverted them from their mission. Thereafter, all evidence of CIA involvement, which became quite abundant, was seen as confounding its anti-Nixon mission and never acknowledged.
Now to the media. The Washington Post team knew immediately upon the arrests that the burglary was focused on the desk of the secretary arranging the trysts, and indeed, burglar Eugenio Martinez had possessed her desk key at the time of his arrest, almost getting shot by the arresting officer when he tried to rid himself of it. The paper knew from Democrat lawyers representing Baldwin of the girls and the CIA implications, which the Republican lawyers had unwittingly squandered. They had learned of Hunt’s CIA defense; they eventually realized that McCord was a CIA plant; and they had reason to doubt Magruder’s implication of Mitchell. However, the golden opportunity for fraudulent reporting, counterintuitively, came from their confidential gold-plated source, Deep Throat, who was later revealed to be the head of the FBI’s Watergate investigation, Deputy Director of the FBI W. Mark Felt.
On October 9, 1972, at an all-night garage meeting, Felt told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward of a hypothetical scenario in which the burglary was part of a “dirty tricks” program run out of the Oval Office. If true, this would implicate Nixon and give a campaign motive for the burglary and wiretapping. Felt wanted a grand jury to determine if this hypothesis was proven to be a fact.
Alas, the burglary was never proven to be part of the low-level, childish pranks of Donald Segretti’s Dirty Tricks program, but the Washington Post never disclosed to the country that it was continuing to misleadingly report otherwise.
There are, to be sure, many other instances of fraud committed by the Washington Post, including concealment of CIA death threats to avoid exposure (which Felt had leaked to Woodward, but Woodward never published). Please recall a frantic Deep Throat warning that “Everyone’s life is in danger!”, specifically noting the CIA’s fear of exposure.
It should not surprise us that the clueless Republicans have, since Watergate, just as in that scandal, made these same mistakes. Republicans allowed, for instance, the Patrick Fitzgerald Special Counsel investigation of “Plame Affair” leaks, leading to the conviction of vice-presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, almost ensnaring President Bush’s advisor Karl Rove. This empty, entrapping investigation had no predicate crime, and the non-criminal leaker had been identified before the special counsel appointment. But President George W. Bush’s team never figured this out.
Later, in “Russiagate,” the legacy media ignored and distorted overwhelming evidence that “Russian Collusion” was a dirty trick of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the innocent but clueless Trump team did not figure it out. And, once again, dim Republicans allowed a special counsel investigation run by Democrats.
In an interesting postscript, after leaving office, Trump desperately wanted to review and have access to crucial “Russian Collusion” documents that would prove Clinton’s Russian Collusion hoax and his sickening entrapment by James Comey. But the Biden Administration craftily withdrew Trump’s security clearance so that Trump could not review his own presidential documents. Rather than suing to gain access, Trump withheld various classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, falling into the criminal trap set for him. Only the overcharging by overzealous Special Counsel Jack Smith allowed a sufficient delay in the case, which eventually led to its dismissal due to Smith’s improper appointment. Once again, clueless Republicans had been entrapped by wily Democrats and their complicit media.
However, the good news is that this era of over five decades of canards may finally be coming to a close, as media dishonesty is being so starkly depicted regarding the cover-up of Joe Biden’s dangerous incompetence. Exposed as partisan liars and not the principled truth-tellers of Watergate lore, an improved media may be the felicitous result. But let’s not hold our collective breath just yet.
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.