The Trump Justice Department Is Relitigating Watergate — Opening a Review of Whether the Prosecutors Who Brought Down Richard Nixon Committed "Misconduct," and Recasting the Most Thoroughly Proven Presidential Crime in American History as a "Deep State" Plot Against an Innocent Man — in a Transparent Bid to Delegitimize Accountability Itself and Lay Groundwork to Excuse Trump; a Member of the Committee That Voted to Impeach Nixon Called It "Beyond Stupid"

Some facts are settled not because an authority declared them so, but because the evidence buried every alternative. Richard Nixon's guilt in Watergate is one of them: proven by his own secret recordings, affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court, and ratified by a bipartisan Congress and his own party, who told him to go. To reopen that is not to ask a historical question. It is to announce that you intend to replace the record with a more convenient one — and the Trump Justice Department has announced exactly that.

What the DOJ is doing

According to reporting, the Justice Department has opened a preliminary review of whether the Watergate special prosecutors committed misconduct — whether the people who investigated and prosecuted the Nixon scandal violated defendants' rights. The review reportedly follows a presentation by Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide who has spent decades as a Watergate revisionist, arguing that the prosecutors behaved improperly and that Nixon was railroaded. The framing is explicit: it is part of a broader administration effort to recast Nixon as a victim of the "deep state."

Why Watergate, why now

The tell is in the pairing. This is not idle historical curiosity about a scandal from the 1970s; it is a bridge being built to the present. Vice President JD Vance has drawn the line out loud: "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." That is the entire project in one sentence. If Watergate — the archetypal case of a president caught committing crimes — can be rebranded as a conspiracy against the president, then the template is set: every investigation of Trump becomes, by analogy, another "deep state" frame-up. Rewriting Nixon is a way of pre-writing Trump's exoneration. As Holtzman put it, the goal is to "work out some way" of excusing Trump, using Nixon as the precedent.

The record the rewrite has to erase

The reason the effort is, in Holtzman's word, "absurd" is the sheer weight of what it must pretend away. Watergate did not come down to one prosecutor's judgment call:

• Nixon was undone by his own White House tapes — the "smoking gun" recording in which he is heard ordering the cover-up
• The Supreme Court ruled 8-0, in United States v. Nixon, that he had to surrender those tapes — a unanimous decision joined by his own appointees
• The House Judiciary Committee, with Republican votes, approved articles of impeachment
• Senior Republicans went to the White House and told Nixon he had lost his party and had to resign — which he did, the only president ever to do so

To believe Nixon was framed, a person must believe that all of that was a coordinated deception — that the bipartisan Congress, the unanimous Court, and Nixon's own Republican allies were either in on it or fooled. "Everybody was duped," as Holtzman said, "except this guy and Trump." That is not a theory of history; it is the structure of a conspiracy belief, in which the overwhelming evidence against the hero is itself proof of how vast the plot must be.

The misuse of the Department

In fairness, examining whether prosecutors ever behaved improperly is, in the abstract, a legitimate thing for the Justice Department to do, and a "preliminary review" is not a verdict. Those caveats are real. But they cannot launder what this is. The subject is a fifty-year-old, exhaustively adjudicated scandal; the impetus is a career revisionist with a thesis to sell; and the transparent aim, stated by the Vice President, is to build a political narrative that serves the sitting president. That is not the Justice Department pursuing justice. It is the Justice Department being pointed at the historical record — at the memory of accountability itself — the same way this archive has documented it being pointed at Trump's living enemies in the diGenova "grand conspiracy" probe. The target is the idea that a president can be held to the law at all, and Watergate is being attacked because it is the clearest proof that he can.

Why it belongs here

Richard Nixon is beyond the reach of any review; he has been dead for decades, and nothing the Trump DOJ concludes will change what his tapes say. The point was never Nixon. The point is to erode, by precedent and repetition, the single most important lesson Watergate taught the country: that the presidency is not above the law, and that a bipartisan system can remove a president who breaks it. An administration that needs that lesson unlearned — that needs Americans to believe the most clear-cut presidential crime in their history was actually a hoax — is telling you what it fears, and what it is preparing to claim about its own. The woman who helped impeach Nixon recognized the move on sight. It is, she said, beyond stupid. It is also, more worryingly, on purpose.