There’s a suspicion that’s gnawed at conservative Americans for decades – a quiet conviction that the machinery of government operates by two separate rulebooks. One for the establishment’s favorites. Another, much harsher one, for anyone who challenges the order. That suspicion didn’t materialize out of thin air. It was earned, incident by incident, administration by administration.

In recent years, millions watched federal prosecutors and intelligence operatives wage coordinated campaigns to kneecap a sitting president through endless investigations and partisan indictments. That spectacle forced an uncomfortable question into the open: if they were brazen enough to do this on camera in the twenty-first century, what exactly were they doing behind closed doors fifty years ago? It turns out the Department of Justice is now interested in the answer.

From the Daily Wire:

The Justice Department took steps to review the treatment of former President Richard Nixon as it seeks to root out the weaponization of the federal government against conservatives.

The review focuses on the conduct of the special prosecutor’s office established to investigate Nixon and the Watergate scandal, The Wall Street Journal reported. The outlet noted that the review is a preliminary stage and that a full investigation has not yet been launched.

So the DOJ is taking a fresh look at Watergate – the original sin of Washington scandal culture. Not as a history exercise. As an accountability exercise. And honestly, it’s overdue by about five decades.

Lawfare before we had the word

The man at the center of this review is Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon White House staffer who has spent twelve years digging through documentary evidence of prosecutorial misconduct during the original Watergate investigation. His presentation to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility carried a title that tells you everything: “Watergate as Lawfare.”

Shepard’s claims aren’t the ramblings of some embittered old loyalist nursing a grudge. He points to documented evidence of secret ex parte meetings between Watergate prosecutors and the judges presiding over the case. He highlights a special prosecutor’s office staffed almost wall-to-wall with partisan opponents of Nixon. These aren’t technicalities. If his evidence holds up, they represent the kind of due process violations that would torpedo any prosecution in a modern courtroom.

Here’s the part that deserves some attention: the Biden administration received a nearly identical request from Shepard in 2022. They didn’t challenge his research. They didn’t poke holes in his documentation. They just said no. Refused to look. Draw your own conclusions about why.

A pattern half a century in the making

Vice President JD Vance connected the dots earlier this year with characteristic bluntness: “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. There is a parallel.”

Hard to argue with that. Nixon won forty-nine states in 1972. Forty-nine. The permanent administrative class in Washington couldn’t touch him at the ballot box, so they engineered another path. The template was set, and every generation since has watched it deployed against whatever conservative leader becomes sufficiently inconvenient.

There’s a reason Nixon’s reputation has been climbing among younger conservatives. Once you’ve watched the same institutions run the same playbook against a president in your own lifetime, the history starts reading very differently.

Finish what you started

Now comes the real test. The DOJ review is preliminary. A department spokesman stressed that Shepard’s presentation “does not constitute an investigation” and that OPR remains focused on ensuring attorneys “meet the highest professional standards.”

Fine. Then meet them. The Office of Professional Responsibility was created in 1975 specifically because of Watergate. If it can’t examine whether the prosecutors who inspired its very existence actually followed the rules, then the office has no purpose. Shut the lights off and go home.

This reaches well beyond Richard Nixon. The question is whether the federal government can target a political opponent, corrupt the judicial process, conceal the evidence for half a century, and walk away clean. The DOJ cracked the door open. Now it needs to walk through.

If the weaponization of government is going to end – genuinely end – you don’t get to draw an arbitrary line at the present day. The rot has to be excavated wherever it took root, no matter how deep the digging goes. Americans who lived through Watergate and then watched the Trump years unfold have waited long enough for someone in power to acknowledge what they’ve known in their bones all along. The DOJ has that chance now. Don’t waste it.

Key Takeaways

• The Trump DOJ is reviewing whether Watergate prosecutors committed misconduct against Nixon.
• Documented evidence suggests secret meetings between prosecutors and judges tainted the case.
• The Biden administration refused to examine this same evidence in 2022.
• Ending government weaponization requires confronting institutional abuses past and present.

Sources: Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal