Justice Department Reviews Whether 'Deep State' Took Down Nixon

The Justice Department is examining whether federal prosecutors stacked the case against Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, a question raised inside the agency by a former Nixon aide who has spent decades arguing that the prosecution of the 37th president rested on a broken process.

The review has not become a formal investigation. The department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), the internal watchdog that reviews the conduct of federal attorneys, invited Geoff Shepard to present his research at headquarters in a talk titled "Watergate as Lawfare."

That session is drawing fresh attention to a case that reshaped American politics five decades ago, and to the argument -- now common on the right -- that the same levers of federal power once used against Nixon were later turned on President Donald Trump.

A Former Nixon Aide Takes His Case to Justice Department Headquarters

Shepard served on Nixon's White House staff and has since built a second career as a Watergate revisionist, poring over trial transcripts, prosecutor files and internal memos that he says most historians have never examined closely.

His central claim is procedural rather than factual. Shepard alleges that the special prosecutors who pursued the Watergate defendants met privately with the judges overseeing the case -- a practice that would have violated due process protections -- and that they withheld evidence that could have helped the defense.

Those allegations set the stage for a Watergate-was-lawfare narrative that has circulated in conservative legal circles for years but rarely reached the government's own internal ethics office.

The department has been careful to frame the session as an academic exercise rather than a reopening of the case. A department spokesman said OPR declined Shepard's request to open an investigation in 2022, during the previous administration, and that his recent invitation to speak does not constitute a probe.

The spokesman added that OPR remains focused on ensuring that department attorneys meet the highest professional standards, a mandate that applies to the lawyers serving today as much as to those who worked half a century ago.

What Happened at the Watergate -- and Why the Details Still Matter

The scandal began in June 1972, when five men were arrested after breaking into and attempting to bug the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Nixon went on to win re-election that November in one of the largest landslides in American history.

The cover-up, not the break-in, destroyed his presidency. The White House's voice-activated taping system captured Nixon discussing the use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) inquiry -- the so-called "smoking gun" recording that erased what little support remained in Congress.

The documentary record has been pored over by historians, journalists and congressional investigators for more than 50 years, which is why Shepard's claims about private meetings between prosecutors and judges have drawn both interest and skepticism. The dispute is less about what the tapes captured than about whether the process surrounding the trial was fair.

Nixon resigned in August 1974 rather than face near-certain impeachment and removal from office. Three years later he told interviewer David Frost that he had let down his friends, his country and the young people who once dreamed of entering government, and that he would carry that burden for the rest of his life.

Careful accounts of the record note that there is no evidence Nixon personally ordered the break-in or knew of it in advance. His downfall flowed from the effort to bury it -- a distinction that sits at the center of Shepard's complaint about how the prosecution was conducted.

The 'Deep State' Argument Moves From Talk Radio to the Justice Department

Vice President JD Vance gave the revisionist theory a national platform earlier this year when he argued that the "deep state took down" Nixon and suggested Trump had been subjected to the same unfair treatment.

For Nixon's defenders, the parallel is direct: a president elected by a wide margin, hounded from office by officials they say were determined to get him, and a press corps that treated the outcome as settled justice. For his critics, the comparison ignores the tapes, the obstruction and a resignation that Nixon himself framed as an admission.

That framing has become a rallying point on the right, where the Watergate special prosecutors are studied less as guardians of the rule of law and more as a template for how career officials can be deployed against a sitting president.

The Watergate session lands as the department presses other institutional-accountability efforts, including a separate inquiry into a suspected grand conspiracy among career officials that has already produced subpoenas.

Supporters of the administration see the willingness to revisit old cases as proof that no institution sits above scrutiny, and that the department is willing to turn its ethics machinery on its own history. Critics call it an attempt to relitigate the past in service of a present-day political fight, and warn that second-guessing the Watergate prosecution invites a broader assault on the norms of federal law enforcement.

Both readings agree on one thing: the question of who polices the prosecutors has never been fully settled, and it is now being tested in the building where those decisions are made.

What Happens Next -- and What to Watch For

For now, nothing formal has been opened. OPR can recommend discipline against attorneys who violate professional standards, but its reviews rarely surface publicly and can take months or years to resolve.

The more immediate effect is political. Every mention of Watergate now doubles as a proxy argument about the Trump-era Justice Department, the special counsels who investigated him, and whether career prosecutors can be trusted to police their own conduct.

Shepard's presentation gives those arguments a fresh hook and a new venue -- the same headquarters where the modern department decides which cases to bring and which to leave closed. Whether the talk stays a lecture or grows into something more will depend on whether OPR finds enough substance in his files to act.

If the department opens even a preliminary review, it would mark the first time the federal government has formally examined whether the Watergate prosecutions themselves broke the rules. That outcome would hand the deep-state critique its most concrete test yet, and it would force a new generation of federal lawyers to answer a question their predecessors never had to face.