Trump may absolve America's biggest crook — as a favor to his convicted friend

What happened

RawStory reports that Donald Trump’s Justice Department is reviewing claims that Watergate prosecutors committed misconduct, though the department told The Wall Street Journal that no formal investigation is underway. The review followed a two-hour Justice Department presentation by former Nixon aide Geoff Shepard, who alleged that special prosecutors secretly met with judges and withheld evidence.

The headline’s suggested favor involves Roger Stone, who worked on Richard Nixon’s campaign and later became a Trump ally. But the article supplies no evidence that Stone requested the review, influenced the department, or is being repaid. Nor has Trump “absolved” Nixon: the reported action is an informal departmental review of allegations against Watergate prosecutors.

The power is at Justice

The decisive actor is not Shepard, an 82-year-old Nixon defender offering a revisionist argument. It is the Justice Department, which granted that argument two hours at headquarters and chose to review it.

That distinction matters. Anyone can try to rehabilitate Nixon. Only an institution backed by federal authority can give the effort official weight. Even without a formal investigation, Justice can transform a partisan grievance into a government matter merely by treating it as worthy of departmental attention.

Revisionism with an official seal

Watergate did not end because prosecutors imposed a fashionable political narrative. As RawStory recounts, the scandal involved the Democratic National Committee burglary, the ensuing cover-up, Nixon’s attempt to stop the pursuit of his White House tapes, an unexplained 18½-minute tape gap, and an 8-0 Supreme Court ruling requiring him to surrender recordings. Republican senators ultimately warned Nixon that the Senate would convict him if he remained in office.

Shepard’s allegations may be examined on their evidence. But “Watergate as Lawfare” does more than allege procedural misconduct: it imports a contemporary political slogan into an extensively documented abuse-of-power scandal. The point is not necessarily to disprove every underlying event. It is to place prosecutors in the dock and recast the powerful official who obstructed scrutiny as the injured party.

The article overreaches too

RawStory is right to focus on institutional degradation, but its headline outruns its own reporting. It presents absolution and a favor to Stone as though they were established developments. The body establishes neither.

That kind of embellishment weakens the stronger indictment already available. Justice officials chose to entertain a Nixon aide’s prosecutorial-misconduct theory while, according to RawStory, career prosecutors were departing and lawyers were resigning in protest over the department’s direction. The documented decision is troubling enough without inventing a hidden transaction.

Rewriting accountability

The larger pattern is the conversion of accountability into persecution. When prosecutions, court orders and congressional pressure constrain presidential power, revisionists rename the constraint “lawfare.” The misconduct of the officeholder then becomes secondary to alleged unfairness by those who investigated it.

That inversion serves present power. A Justice Department willing to reconsider Watergate through the language of presidential victimhood does not need to erase the historical record. It need only teach the public that even the clearest case of executive abuse was really a case of prosecutors going too far.

Thanks to Raw Story

Source: Trump may absolve America’s biggest crook — as a favor to his convicted friend