The Nixon Conspiracy: It’s much worse now, assassinate the individual to preserve the Beltway

After reading The Nixon Conspiracy, by Geoff Shepard, coming up on the 50^th anniversary of Watergate, it is evident that Richard Nixon was a very good man, an excellent president, and that the world owes him an apology. Shepard in 2018 was able to unseal documents that showed the prosecution’s roadmap against President Nixon, which was presented to the Grand Jury at the time, was 100% a political hit. It took him 50 years of research as an original defense team member to gather all the evidence to show it. You might recall that Hillary Clinton was part of the prosecution as a young person then. This case brewed in Shepard all these years as he has spent his life trying to prove that Nixon was innocent and what he found out was that the prosecution really had nothing in their prosecution road map that was the truth. It turned out to be very similar to the modern-day Russian Dossier that Democrats funded; it was wholly made up and withheld from the defense during the time of the trials that put several Watergate conspirators in jail for a bit, G. Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, some ex-CIA Cubans, and John Dean. He later flipped his story to the prosecution angle once he realized that the whole thing was a political hit on Nixon that none of them would survive. The cover-up always answered the pressure from the media and a prosecution that conspired with the judges in the case to abandon all due process, particularly the 5^th and 6^th amendments, and destroy a popularly picked president.  Nixon wasn’t one of them, he was an outsider, and even Republicans wanted him out. So, they used the system to get him out and bring untold destruction to our country, which has never really recovered. 

This is relevant to our present circumstances because we just watched all this happen to President Trump, except on steroids. We did with the Washington D.C. Beltway culture to empower all the malcontents in the same way Vladimir Putin was empowered after invading Crimea to invade Ukraine presently because nobody had responded to him with force when it happened the first time. Putin crossed the red line, and nobody punched him in the face. So, of course, he made more extensive plans for the future, which we see playing out today. I did read Bill Bar’s new book, One Damn Thing After Another, this week and found it wholly unremarkable except for the revelation of what a Beltway type of person thinks, which is how many of the prosecutors and judges got pulled into the conspiracy against Nixon, then Trump in the context of the three branches of government wanting to assassinate the presidency out of sheer resentment by the type of person the people of the country picked to sit there. Barr has a certain arrogance, a belief that the system is more significant than any individual, and a hatred for what the individual represents to the system they have served their whole lives. But more than that, they hate the people who are individuals out there in flyover country who don’t respect their power in Washington. That, in essence, was what Watergate was all about. After the killing of the Kennedys, a new kind of political hit became the latest fashion. And the playbook was tried out on Nixon. It was successful. So it was then applied for the next 50 years culminating in a four-year period of two impeachments, a phony Russia, Russia, Russia investigation against Trump using the exact same methods. And when none of that worked, they pulled the nuclear option with Covid to change laws and rig the election. Bill Barr clearly knows that’s what happened, but like John Dean before him, Barr altered his story to preserve the system at the expense of the individual. Trump needed to be brought down to protect their system at all costs. 

But that system doesn’t serve the people; it serves the Beltway. And when we elect presidents that they don’t like as the popular majority in the nation under the electoral system, the system has created ways to terminate that action because they control the rules and regulations of our land and in the case of the declassified documents from Watergate unsealed in 2018 finally, we see that the prosecution made up the entire narrative and that Judge John Sirica conspired with the prosecution ahead of all court dates to seal the deal before the deal was ever presented. Only so many years later, after some of these people have died away or retired into oblivion, can we see things clearly. And by now, the media has hammered this story into the public consciousness. When people think of Nixon and the Republicans, they think of corruption. The Washington Post reporters who broke this story with the help of Deep Throat, who drove the narrative in public, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, saw themselves as the fourth branch of government, co-equal. True or not, they would bring down President Nixon and change how the public felt about him. Nixon, a good guy, tried to play fair, but the game wasn’t fair. For him, it was like playing Battleship. The media and the prosecution would send a missile his way, and he blindly had to figure out where it was coming from on the board on the other side. Is it G1 or M24? Eventually, as the impeachment trial kicked into gear in the House, Nixon felt it would be better for America if he resigned. He wasn’t sure if his people had actually screwed up, so he didn’t see any way out of it. He had his share of Bill Barr lawyers telling him to preserve the system at the expense of the individual, so Nixon resigned. He shouldn’t have. He should have fought it out. But that is hindsight talking. He wouldn’t have known just how deeply corrupt the system had been against him. Only 50 years of investigation would reveal that. 

Geoff Shepard has written the most important book on Watergate that has ever been done. All the movies, other books, and countless hours of commentary have been wrong. Just as they turned out to be one-sided against Trump. We are seeing with Watergate assassinations against the people’s right to pick their Executive Office representative. They did it to Nixon. They actually tried to do it with Reagan. Still, after he actually took a bullet from Hinckley in his first term, the Beltway backed off, not wanting to be associated with further public relations issues. Reagan was a skillful actor, and they feared his ability to communicate. But they certainly did it to Bush, who complied like a loser. And Trump was not an option for them; he never was. They were going to teach us all a lesson for voting for him in the first place. And those people are still very much in power. And they won’t give that power up willingly. It will have to be forced from them in very uncomfortable ways. But at least now we know. Geoff Shepard has written the paramount book of the Watergate experience and showed the nation just what a good president Nixon had always been. But the system was too corrupt for him and for the people who picked him. And what we now know is that system is much worse now than it was in Nixon’s day. The corruption now is much, much worse. 

Rich Hoffman