According to the Wall Street Journal, a senior Justice Department official invited an 81-year-old Dick Nixon deadender to headquarters to spend two hours walking the Office of Professional Responsibility through a lengthy slidedeck he created called “Watergate As Lawfare.” Geoff Shepard, who worked on Nixon’s defense team, continues to bang a drum more than a half century hence that the deep state took down Richard Nixon. Justice Department historically rolled their eyes at his theories, but the crackerjack team that Todd Blanche oversees is now conducting a preliminary review into whether the Watergate special prosecutors committed misconduct.
The Trump DOJ… laser-focused on the issues impacting America in 2026.
Officially, the Justice Department says Shepard was invited for his scholarship — a term used highly loosely — and “that presentation does not constitute an investigation.” On the other hand, the DOJ historically isn’t in the business of granting two-hour interviews on matters where they aren’t already deeply invested.
The statement also misspelled Shepard’s name, befitting the attention to detail that we’ve come to expect out of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight over at Justice.
Launching a bid to exonerate Nixon — at least indirectly via besmirching the reputation of the special prosecutors involved — runs somewhat afoul of the fact that Nixon never got charged. A grand jury named him an unindicted co-conspirator and impeachment proceedings loomed on the horizon, but Nixon resigned and ran away from office rather than take his chances with whatever defense Shepard and his team cooked up. A month later, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, which the former president accepted knowing that, per Burdick v. United States, that pardon “carries an imputation of guilt.”
So whatever review the DOJ embarks upon can’t clear Nixon, only cast aspersions upon the special prosecutors, Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, who died in 2004 and 1982. At the same time that the DOJ asserts authority to short-circuit all ethical inquiries into government lawyers, they may be firing up a crusade to go after dead prosecutors over a case from the early 70s. Ironically, the Office of Professional Responsibility — the somewhat ironically named body at the center of this story — only exists because of Watergate, having been set up in 1975 as part of a wide-swath of reforms designed to keep any future president from doing what Nixon did.
Shepard argues that special prosecutors met secretly with judges and sat on evidence the defense should have seen. Due process matters, but on June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in, Nixon taped himself signing off on a plan to have the CIA wave the FBI off the investigation, and you can’t blame any ex parte meeting for that. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to turn those recordings over. Shepard, as it happens, helped supervise the transcription of those tapes, with their notorious lengthy audio gaps.
To be clear, as the definitive Nixon obituary put it, “he was scum.” There is no question of his guilt. In a move that would shame Stringer Bell, he even recorded himself doing crimes.
And yet, the administration’s revisionist history machine is in full swing. We should have seen this coming in June, when JD Vance went to the Nixon Library and joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, “it would be like a 12-hour news story.” He followed it up by invoking the “deep state” and comparing Nixon’s downfall to what this deep state tried to do to Trump. Just as this DOJ story broke, Rep. Riley Moore told a Nixon Foundation audience that Nixon was “absolutely couped out of office and was framed,” and that Nixon knew it the whole time, but kept quiet to protect public confidence in American institutions.
That noble silence was probably what got deleted in that 18-minute audio gap.
Why Nixon? Why now? On one level, this caps off a long-time mission of the conservative legal movement. While it presents as an intellectual project draped in originalism and unitary executive theory, it’s just the byproduct of a bunch of late 70s Republicans fluffing up a pseudo legal justification to bring back segregation and clear Richard Nixon. It’s not an accident that Antonin Scalia’s first big assignment running the Office of Legal Counsel in 1974 was concluding that the tapes were Nixon’s personal property. Unitary executive theory touches on a wide array of executive functions, but at its root it’s just “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” run through an English-to-Legalese dictionary.
On another level, though, this is about throwing $6.00 gasoline on the Trump v. United States fire. It’s one thing to clear Trump of his first term crimes, and another to build the scaffolding for getting him out of the next wave of special prosecutions. If the DOJ goes forward with half century delinquent thought experiment, whatever report they belch out will be a roman à clef that will make Animal Farm look subtle. Just cross out Cox and Jaworski, and write in whichever lawyer becomes the next poor sap who has to deal with America’s dumbest charlatans asking about Iowa games.
If Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American dream, then the conservative legal movement and its Trumpian distillation track the toxic masculine response to heartbreak. The aggressive refusal to accept responsibility that hardens into a manicured worldview designed to justify their contemptuous revenge tour against anyone they can blame for their own failures. They are America’s most despicable ex-boyfriend, having traded bodyspray for a Federalist Society membership card.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
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