Geoff Shepard, Buttoned Down Watergate Demolition

Don’t trust the Government Administrative State bureaucracy -- and particularly the prosecutors, who too often are governed by ambition, and not careful with their often abusive and aggressive use of their tremendous power and resources.  They are scofflaws pretending to be law enforcement officers and officers of the court, no better than the henchmen of Stalin and other totalitarian regimes.

Mild-mannered Geoff Shepard, a Harvard Law graduate, Nixon administration functionary in the Council on Domestic Affairs, and then defense team member during the Watergate Prosecution and Congressional Watergate Hearing events, will chill your bones with his research on the misconduct of Federal Prosecutors, Federal Judges and the Watergate Congressional Investigation Committee.  Mr. Shepard is a freedom and justice advocate and, for purposes of this discussion, the Watergate scam demolition man.  For me at least, it’s about time. (Read about Shepard’s background here.)

Geoff Shepard is the guy the mainstream media and the perps of the Watergate scam want no part of because he has the goods on them about the prosecutorial and judicial misconduct that railroaded Richard Nixon out of office, to the applause of the Ivy League, Eastern, Mainstream media, Democrat partisans.

Reading Mr. Shepard’s books made me think automatically of the current coup by the Deep State Intell and Law Enforcement apparatus, backed by the Democrats in Congress and the Mainstream Media.  The parallels are obvious: aggressive prosecutors, law enforcement agency partisanship, coordination between the executive branch law enforcement entities and the legislative investigative committees -- all the players intent on reversing an election of a president.  Mr. Shepard tells the story of Nixon, who won the biggest blowout in electoral history, winning every electoral entity but Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia -- 2 years later driven out of office by partisans from Massachusetts and DC.  Now the same drama is being played out in the case of Trump, who wins an election then is hounded by the losers who hope to destroy him and his family and run him out of office.

I confess I didn’t know who Shepard was a month ago, his first book The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President (Sentinel, 2008) was recommended to me by a politically well-informed and astute friend, Steve Milloy, so I read the book and was stunned.  Looking into the Geoff Shepard info I found he had written a follow up book The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down ( Regnery, 2015) and was an active speaker and researcher that could only be tracked if one kept a lookout on his research pages at his website.  

The reason that this is an ongoing investigation by Mr. Shepard is that the government documents are scattered and sometimes not easy to find -- besides, sometimes documents that are important are not in plain sight, certainly not all in the National Archives;  examples include personal work of government employees that they kept and took with them. The two Watergate Special Prosecutors took lots with them when they left; Leon Jaworski’s documents ended up in Texas at Baylor Law and Cox/Vorenberg documents in Massachusetts at Harvard Law.

Mr. Shepard has recently discovered files of import that didn’t make it into his second book in 2015, papers removed to the Harvard Law School Library by members of the Watergate Prosecution Force, papers that were records of work by Archibald Cox, the first Watergate Special Prosecutor, and his number one man, James Vorenberg, who was eventually Dean of the Harvard Law School and First Chair of the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission.  The documents demonstrate systematic misconduct and prosecutorial ethical misconduct by the Cox/Vorenberg team.  The Jaworski papers, among other things, show the harshly partisan nature of the prosecution team put together that Jaworski had to deal with -- as Jaworski said in a memo to his top aide -- to summarize -- you people have your minds made up and it is difficult to work with biased prosecutors who don’t properly assess the evidence and the law.

I have to tell you a few examples of the magnitude of the misconduct of the Watergate Prosecutor force and the judges involved.

Multiple ex parte contacts between lawyers and Democrat players of the Watergate Congressional investigative committee and Judge Sirica, along with ex parte meetings between Watergate prosecutor lawyers with Sirica, the Chief Judge of the DC District Courts, and presiding judge on Watergate trials.

·      Ex parte meetings with multiple interested parties for the prosecution and the Democrat side of the Watergate investigative committee and Judge Sirica; one included Judge Gesell. 

·      An ex parte meetings of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox with the Chief Judge of the DC Circuit Court David Bazelon, to set up appellate panels for the appeals of Sirica court convictions to assure no reversals. 

·      A series of ex parte meetings of journalist Clark Mellenhoff, an anti-Nixon partisan before and after Nixon brought him on as White House Ombudsman, with Sirica.

·      Sirica imposing an unprecedented threat to convicted Watergate defendants that they would receive maximum sentences that could be reduced if they agree to testify for the congressional investigative committee.

In case you didn’t know, ex parte discussions are discussions about matters in litigation, including prosecutions between one of the parties and the judge -- and they are prohibited and compromise the trial. They certainly deny the party not in attendance due process and fair impartial judicial conduct.

The Shepard books go into great detail on the treacherous John Dean, the White House counsel who ran the criminal gang and then ran a cover up because he was culpable.  Dean jumped ship and turned witness against his bosses because he was offered leniency -- he never went to jail.  Dean told lies and turned so he could make a deal for a reduced sentence even though he coordinated the criminal break-ins and paid as well as supported the perps when they got caught.

Shepard also details the story of the slippery and criminal manipulation of prosecutor activity, such as not indicting a lawyer involved in Howard Hunt’s extortion efforts: William Bittman, a protected Democrat and considered someone who needed to be shielded from indictment because of work on behalf of Democrats.

Other prosecutorial misconduct is explained by Mr. Shepard in detail, and he exposes a dark side to the Watergate matter that implicates politicians, judges, prosecutors and other players whose mendacity and illegal acts put President Nixon and his top aides Ehrlichman and Haldeman in a bind and resulted in prosecutions that violated rules of prosecution and denied defendants due process. 

One glaring example of the problems is the violation of the rules that prosecutors are supposed to follow on revealing exculpatory evidence. John Dean was jumping around and changing his story so much trying to get immunity or a reduced sentence for his role that his changes in testimony were clearly exculpatory evidence (called Brady Material from the case Brady v. Maryland -- Supreme Court, 1963), which prosecutors are obligated by court rules to reveal to the defense.  That did not occur. 

Geoff Shepard was there as an eyewitness during Watergate events and has spent 20 years and more researching and gathering evidence on the matter, so can I just suggest to American Thinker readers -- take a look and you will see that Geoff Shepard has the goods on the deep state/bureaucracy.  Mr. Shepard and I talked Watergate details, the players, and the misconduct he has found after he graciously agreed to a telephone interview (he won’t comment on those matters that involve other events because he is committed to doing in depth investigations before offering opinions).  However, he agrees that the “bureaucracy” can be an abusive thing.  Mr. Shepard is disinclined to use the words “deep state,” since he points out, correctly I think, that the deep state of today is just the embedded government bureaucracy of the recent past.  

Shepard is a smart, classy guy, great speaker, researcher and analyst -- a well-groomed, handsome bulldog who has proven that the judges and prosecutors of the Watergate matter were culpably in violation of basic legal ethical norms and even more than that, they allowed partisan attitudes to corrupt their ability to be professional and administer justice according to judicial and prosecutorial rules.  Prosecutors have a duty to always provide justice; they are not paid hit men or thugs.  They must be ethical and adhere to the rules to assure that the state is administering justice, not scalp-hunting.   The result was they were unable to provide constitutionally guaranteed civil rights for accused citizens.  They failed to assure justice, and that is bound to make Americans outraged. I watched some of Mr. Shepard’s speeches and the interviews of audience members after and Mr. Shepard confirmed that even partisan Democrats were offended at prosecutorial misconduct directed at Nixon and his staff.  Americans demand fair treatment by their government in these matters of import like criminal prosecutions. 

Read Shepard’s books and look at his website full of original document evidence -- it is breathtaking what one man has done to take apart the complex Watergate matters and reveal and expose miscreant prominent lawyers, politicians and, to our despair and to their disgrace, judges in the most important district and appellate courts in the land.  If you want to read in his words about the sins of the Nixon attack dogs, read this essay in the Federalist critical of a standard CNN program set up to glorify the enemies of Richard Nixon and applaud their success in destroying him.  Mr. Shepard puts their mendacity on display and, by the way, reveals the residual blind biases of the lefty media.   He is a damn treasure for sure.

John Dale Dunn MD JD is a physician and non-practicing lawyer in Brownwood, Texas

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