DOJ Reviews Allegations in Nixon-Era Watergate Probe

The Justice Department heard arguments that prosecutors in the Watergate investigation mistreated defendants connected to former President Richard Nixon, though the department says the review has not become a formal investigation.

Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide and Watergate historian, recently made his case in a two-hour presentation titled "Watergate as Lawfare" to the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal watchdog, at Justice Department headquarters, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said Shepard was invited because of his expertise and scholarship on Watergate but stressed that his "presentation does not constitute an investigation" and added that the office remains focused on ensuring department attorneys meet professional standards.

The review is preliminary, and it is unclear whether it will lead to a formal inquiry, according to people familiar with the matter.

In 2022, the department under then-President Joe Biden declined Shepard's request for an investigation, citing the time that had passed since the events.

Shepard argues that special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski violated Watergate defendants' due process rights by meeting secretly with judges overseeing their trials and withholding evidence from the defense.

Cox led the prosecution before Nixon ordered him fired in 1973 in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre." Jaworski succeeded him.

The department's Office of Professional Responsibility was established in 1975 after revelations of ethical abuses and misconduct by senior officials during the Watergate scandal.

Shepard has for years advanced a revisionist account of the prosecution, using internal documents he says show Nixon and his associates were treated unfairly.

His claims differ from the prevailing historical account, which holds that Watergate was a constitutional crisis driven by abuses of presidential power. Nixon resigned in 1974 as impeachment proceedings advanced.

Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former Nixon Presidential Library director, has rejected efforts to portray Nixon primarily as a victim, calling evidence of abuses of presidential power "overwhelming" and pointing to White House tapes showing Nixon discussing efforts to obstruct investigations.

The review comes as President Donald Trump and some of his allies have drawn parallels between Nixon's experience and investigations into Trump.

Vice President JD Vance made that comparison during remarks this summer at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California.

"If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it's not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration," Vance said, according to The Washington Post . "There is a parallel."

Trump has asked former Nixon aides why the former president resigned rather than fight to remain in office and has moved to roll back some post-Watergate limits on presidential authority, including restrictions on removing inspectors general and career civil servants.

Separately, the Hoover Institution announced Wednesday that it will launch a project combining AI-assisted audio processing with manual checks of original materials to transcribe and annotate more than 3,000 hours of Nixon White House recordings held by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The tapes were secretly recorded from February 1971 to July 1973 in locations including the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, Camp David, the Executive Office Building, and the Lincoln Sitting Room.

Luke A. Nichter, a Hoover Griffin Fellow and presidential historian at Chapman University, will lead the project.

The Hoover Institution said early results have reached 98% accuracy on clean audio.

"Our goal is to give historians, and eventually the public, documentation they can trust down to the sentence," Nichter said.

The Hoover Institution said the work has already surfaced material it describes as previously undisclosed surveillance of a sitting congressman, Nixon's management of the opening to China, and his role in a Wall Street messaging campaign.

The project focuses on documenting the tapes and is separate from the Justice Department's preliminary review of Shepard's allegations.

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