Where oh where are Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of All the President’s Men fame now that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have publicly accused — with supporting emails and other information — certain high-level officials of the Obama administration, including the president himself, of involvement in what Gabbard characterized as a “treasonous conspiracy” and a “years-long coup” to unseat the duly elected President of the United States Donald Trump.
This new Obama-ordered assessment included the unreliable Steele Dossier … which the mainstream media treated as gospel in the effort to unseat Trump.
Woodward and Bernstein, after all, turned a third-rate political burglary, which President Nixon had no involvement in, into what the great British historian Paul Johnson called a “media putsch” that drove Nixon from office after he had won a 49-state landslide election, and that led to the investigation and prosecution of Nixon campaign officials and high-level White House officials, including the former Attorney General of the United States. So far in this developing scandal, there is silence from Woodward, Bernstein, and other Watergate profiteers.
Of course, the Woodward-Bernstein story of Watergate has been demolished by a series of writers, including Jim Hougan (Secret Agenda), Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin (Silent Coup), James Rosen (The Strong Man), and most recently by the indefatigable Geoff Shepard (The Nixon Conspiracy, The Real Watergate Scandal, and The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President), and Dwight Chapin (The President’s Man). But the myth of Watergate lives on, impervious to new revelations that undermine the Woodward-Bernstein version, including, as Geoff Shepard has noted, the so-called “smoking gun” tape that sealed Nixon’s doom.
But Watergate is old, if sketchy, history, while Obamagate is brand new thanks to Gabbard and Ratcliffe. The mainstream media, of course, is largely playing defense for all of Obama’s men and women implicated by Gabbard’s and Ratcliffe’s revelations, which is no surprise since they were willing accomplices to the Russia Hoax that is the basis of Obamagate.
Obama never would have become president had it not been for a fawning media exemplified by former MSNBC political commentator Chris Matthews who once admitted that he felt a “thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke. They won’t turn on him now. Nor will they turn on Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, James Comey, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe, Loretta Lynch, James Clapper, and other officials whom Obama reportedly directed to create a new intelligence assessment that implicated Russia in helping Trump win the presidency in 2016 — because the original intelligence assessment did not support the Trump-Russia collusion story.
This new Obama-ordered assessment included the unreliable Steele Dossier, which the Clinton campaign funded and which the mainstream media treated as gospel in the effort to unseat Trump after the 2016 election.
Gabbard said that she was referring the new revelations to the Justice Department because “every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.”
Geoff Shepard will tell you that it has happened before. Watergate, he argues, was a conspiracy to remove President Nixon from office — a conspiracy, he says, that involved the Special Counsel’s office staffed with Nixon’s political opponents, judges like John Sirica who met secretly with Watergate prosecutors, Democratic congressmen and their staffers, and an unopposed liberal media who wanted to overturn the 1972 election in which their favored candidate (George McGovern) lost. And the Watergate saga also included a high-ranking FBI official (who Woodward and Bernstein protected as “Deep Throat) who hated Nixon for not making him FBI Director.
Perhaps someday real investigative reporters will write about all of Obama’s men and women who Gabbard says abused their offices and power in a “blatant rejection of our Constitution” which “threaten[ed] the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic.” Woodward and Bernstein apparently aren’t interested.
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