DOJ's Internal Watchdog Reviews 50-Year-Old Watergate Misconduct Claims

The Justice Department confirmed this week that its Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing whether the special prosecutor's office that investigated the 1972 Watergate break-in committed misconduct. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the review on Thursday, October 1.

The man behind the push is Geoff Shepard, an 81-year-old former Nixon aide who has spent decades as what the Journal calls a "godfather" of Watergate revisionism. Shepard gave a two-hour presentation at DOJ headquarters, built around a slide deck titled "Watergate As Lawfare" that ran either 72 slides (per the Daily Beast) or 78 (per multiple other outlets citing the Journal). Either way, the pitch was the same: that special prosecutors broke the rules going after Nixon.

What DOJ actually says

A DOJ spokeswoman confirmed the presentation happened but pushed back on the idea that it amounts to a new probe. "OPR declined Mr. Shepard's request to open an investigation in 2022 under the previous administration," she said. "Given his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, he was recently invited to give a presentation to OPR, but that presentation does not constitute an investigation."

That's a meaningful distinction. Shepard asked the Biden-era OPR to open an investigation in 2022 and got turned down. Now, under an OPR operating inside a DOJ led by Attorney General Pam Bondi and shaped by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal defense lawyer, Shepard got a hearing. The Journal reports the review is preliminary and it's unclear whether it leads to a full-fledged investigation.

The irony here is worth noting, which the Journal itself flags: OPR is a product of the Watergate era. It was created specifically to shield DOJ investigations from White House influence. Using it to re-litigate Watergate is a strange loop.

The Vance-Nixon parallel

This isn't happening in a vacuum. Vice President JD Vance made the Nixon-Trump comparison explicit in remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California this summer. "If you look at the story of 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 in the first Trump administration," Vance said. "There is a parallel." He also joked that if Watergate happened today it would be "a 12-hour news story."

That argument deserves a fair hearing on its own terms. Shepard and his allies contend that the Watergate Special Prosecution Force operated with insufficient oversight, that some tactics used against Nixon and his aides crossed lines that would draw scrutiny today, and that the historical record was written almost entirely by people hostile to Nixon. Whether that argument holds up is a genuine historical dispute, not a settled one just because the consensus view has held for fifty years.

But the timing is also part of the story. Ed Martin, before stepping down as U.S. pardon attorney, posted on social media that Watergate was a "hoax" partly orchestrated by the CIA, attacking former Nixon counsel John Dean and journalist Bob Woodward by name. Monica Crowley, now the administration's chief of protocol, endorsed that post, writing that Nixon "was the target of a Deep State hoax" and "will be vindicated." Those are not measured historical claims. No source in this review cites new evidence undercutting the established record: Nixon resigned in August 1974 after admitting his own role in the cover-up of a break-in carried out by people tied to his re-election campaign.

Not everyone on the right is on board

National Review, a conservative outlet, called the review a waste of taxpayer money, arguing the Nixon question "was resolved in 1974" and that historians have argued the finer points for two generations without needing a DOJ re-investigation. That's a useful reminder that this isn't a uniform left-right split. It's a dispute between historical revisionists and mainstream scholars, with the current DOJ leadership choosing to give the revisionist side an official platform it didn't have under the prior administration.

The bigger pattern

The Nixon review doesn't exist on its own. For nearly two years, DOJ has made investigating people who previously investigated Trump a stated priority, per the Journal. Special Counsel Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, where Senator Eric Schmitt's attempt to box him into a perjury trap fell apart on the record. Reopening Watergate fits a pattern of reframing past prosecutions of Republican presidents as prosecutorial abuse, rather than a one-off historical curiosity.

What happens next is unclear. DOJ says no formal investigation exists yet, and OPR has not said when, or whether, it will decide to open one. If it does, it would be reviewing conduct from a special prosecutor's office that no longer exists, examining decisions made more than fifty years ago, by people almost all of whom are dead.