Geoff Shepard was a lawyer who worked for President Nixon during Watergate. Two years ago, he wrote The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. Only now is it becoming a consequential book. It helped reopen the case against President Richard Nixon in what could be the first Presidential coup. All but one of the Watergate burglars was tied to the CIA, but it’s not likely we will ever know their role in the downfall of the popular President. What we do know is the tape that destroyed his presidency was completely misconstrued.
The Wall Street Journal reports that, decades after Watergate, the Justice Department was reviewing whether Nixon as the victim of a grave injustice.
They met secretly with judges, suppressed exculpatory information, and lied…
“For the first time in 50 years, we’re going to have an unbiased review of the conduct of the prosecuting attorneys. Now, I spent 20 years gathering internal records that showed they were just out and out cheating, anything to bring down the most popularly elected president. They met secretly with the judges. They suppressed Exculpatory information; they misrepresented things to the grand jury and to the House Judiciary Committee, and they left a paper trail. And you can argue, and you can bloat, and you can say, “Oh no, he’s a crook, he’s a crook, but you can’t refute what I’ve uncovered. They sit there like John Brown’s body smoldering because those memos don’t lie.”
The Watergate burglars were guilty, but the prosecuting attorney, Judge John Sirica, was overzealous, and his behavior was “outrageous.” He was a blowhard with the biggest stage in the world, and Time Magazine made him Man of the Year. The case went from a small, inconsequential burglary to a massive conspiracy.
The tape that was key to implicating President Richard Nixon was dubbed by Shepard at the time as “The Smoking Gun.” He now admits it was misunderstood. They were all wrong. It wasn’t referring to Watergate.
June 23, 1972, The “Smoking Gun” Tape: President Nixon is talking with the chief of staff, Bob Alderman.
Geoff Shepard:
“We were wrong. …I’m the third person to hear the tape. I’m the one who prepared the transcript, and I’m the one that named it the Smoking Gun. And I was keying off my boss, the lead defense lawyer, Fred Bizarre, but he and I misunderstood the tape completely. The new direction that Bob Haldeman is referring to is how the money found on the Watergate burglars got to Crete.
“The Nixon’s re-election campaign that we knew clearly from the beginning that the campaign had paid off these burglars. The pictures there, the four Cubans and James McCord. But they were wondering how the money got to the re-election committee in the first place, and that was going to expose the names of very, very prominent Democrats who were playing both sides of the election.
They made the FBI probe disappear to protect prominent Democrats.
“They knew Nixon was going to win, so they were secretly giving him money, under the absolute assurance it would never become public, and these two guys, these people, called Maurice Stans, who’d been finance chairman, and said, ‘ The FBI wants to talk to us. If they ask us about that money, the names of these guys are going to come out, and we’ll ruin them. And Maurice told that story to John Dean, and John Dean said, “Oh, I’ve got an idea. Let’s get the CIA to tell the FBI not to interview these two people. And they didn’t. They held off interviewing them for just a little over a week.
“So, and then when they interviewed them, when the FBI interviewed them, they determined they had nothing to do with Watergate, and they moved on.
Even John Dean knew the Smoking Gun was shooting blanks.
“But when that was heard years later, after the Supreme Court opinion saying the tapes had to be turned over, and Fred heard that for the first time, he concluded wrongly that it was involving the full investigation, but even John Dean, the president’s worst enemy, in his 2014 book *The Nixon Defense* has a footnote at page 55 that I’m very familiar with, and he says, “You know, this tape was misunderstood from the outset, it had to do with everything other than Watergate, and if Nixon at the end, if Nixon had known that, he might have lived to fight another day.
“In short, this is quoting John Dean: the smoking gun was shooting blanks. Sure. Now nobody wants to agree with that. Nobody wants to follow that. It’s easier to say, “Oh, he’s a crook. He’s a crook. But the papers don’t show that. If you look at the facts, if you look at the transcript, John Dean and I, two of two people who don’t agree on much, are in full agreement. The smoking gun tape was misunderstood.”
Greg Kelly:
“So, number one, Richard Nixon and Haldeman, in that moment, were actually talking about protecting Democrats, prominent unnamed Democrats. Is that correct? Dwayne Andrews, and Robert Allen. We know exactly who they were. It’s totally, it’s totally amazing. And I guess my other question was Kenneth Dahlberg. He’s not the Democrat…he’s a bundler. He’s a middleman.”
In conclusion…
The career lawyers don’t want to do this 52 years later because the department will be accused of being political. Shepard said he presented documents that can’t be refuted. Facts don’t lie.
Greg Kelly asked Shepard about the CIA involvement. “Richard Nixon said publicly he would not rule out that the CIA orchestrated this entire thing.”
Shepard said, “I think there are significant unanswered questions with regard to the CIA’s involvement, and unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever know. But it was almost every burglar, except one, had CIA connections.”
