According to Nixon White House insider Geoff Shepard, it may be time to re-examine the Watergate scandal.
Shepard, author of The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, told the Washington Examiner‘s Paul Bedard in a recent interview that he turned against the then-President Richard M. Nixon “after hearing one of the most critical secret tape recordings in the Watergate case.”
Shepard was later “credited with dubbing the tape the ‘smoking gun’ because he believed it tied Nixon to the Watergate cover-up,” Bedard noted.
Now, however, Shepard believes prosecutors produced a “road map” that was used “to indict key Watergate figures and egg on the impeachment inquiry that turned out to be a hoax, somewhat similar to the ‘dossier‘ used to spark the FBI investigation of former President Donald Trump.”
“They knew it was a lie, and they made it up,” Shepard told Bedard.
In a Sept. 15, 2020 article at The Federalist, Shepard accused Washington Post Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, author of 1974’s All the President’s Men, of “journalistic malpractice in his drive to bring [Nixon] down through Watergate.”
“It wasn’t just that Woodward loathed Richard Nixon,” writes Shepard, “it was that he committed journalistic malpractice in his drive to bring him down through Watergate” by, among other things, concocting the infamous nickname “Deep Throat” in order “to spice up their narrative.”
The once enigmatic figure was later revealed to be Mark Felt, an associate FBI director during a tumultuous span that saw three acting directors come and go in the period after J. Edgar Hoover’s May 1972 death.
Felt answered directly to acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray during much of the Watergate investigation, which ultimately forced Gray’s resignation along with many others.
Despite his personal motives and possible political biases, Felt was allowed to maintain his anonymity, to be glamorized by Hollywood, and to be hailed as an altruistic hero for his seditious leaking of state secrets and violations of his own security clearance.
That approach also worked to Woodward’s benefit—and has served as a model for generations of leftist media to ingrain such sloppy reporting into their so-called best practices.
“Woodward’s decades-long approach to reporting … is never to identify to the public his supposedly unassailable sources,” said Shepard.
“This secrecy allows him to make sensational claims that can’t be fact-checked, concerning sources whose true motivations can’t be examined,” Shepard continued. “It also allows him to have a series of too-good-to-be-true anecdotes that conveniently fit his storylines.”
Sound familiar?
