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**A quick poll.. do we have a poll mechanism ? ** We should.
**Were you aware **that Woodward of Watergate fame was, before his journalistic career an officer in the Navy, one trusted enough to handle nuclear codes?
Were you aware 'Deep Throat' of Watergate was deputy director of FBI, someone who had many reasons to hate Nixon ?
I was aware of the latter, but not of the former. I thought he was just a young journalist, not a young journalist fresh off from fed-land with a top secret clearance.
There's this incredible segment by Tucker Carlson that basically lays out a theory Nixon was not as big a crook as we think, and that he was set up because he tried to keep the government subordinate to its notional head.
To sum it up, the claim is that Watergate was a palace coup, where the secret services overthrew the US government, and have kept it under control ever since through influence operations.
It does look persuasive to me. Too persuasive, if you were pulling a coup of this sort, would you make one of the protagonists a retired naval officer with that kind of background ? Ok, I'm done expressing my confusion and astonishment with what I've learned today. If this isn't content fit for themotte, please let me know!
Supplementary viewing: Interview with 'Kay Griggs' , talking about deep state influence ops and what the military gets up to in secret. Was allegedly filmed during her divorce as a 'dead man' measure. Her husband was involved with it and drank / talked too much to her.
It's eight hours, I mean, anyone wants a rabbit hole to fall down through. I feel like I should watch it at some point, though there's probably an analysis somewhere.
It seems to be fairly tame conspiracy stuff: some classic secret societies, homosexuals, political murder, drug running, saudis, etc. However, the nice lady talking about is, if she says who she is, in a position where she may have actually learned something. If she made it up, it's a great performance, if she hasn't, it's not very surprising.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4fdS5cdtPOA
And how does the segment deal with the tapes, especially the "smoking gun" tape, in which Nixon is heard endorsing the coverup. Here is what Wikipedia says about it:
And, to be clear, the theory is that a bunch of Nixon's closest aides -- H.R. Haldeman (WH Chief of Staff), John Ehrlichman (Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs), John Dean (White House counsel), Jeb Magruder (chair of the Committee to Reelect the President), John Mitchell (Attorney General) --conspired against him, and exposed themselves to criminal liability (all served time, and the lawyers among them were disbarred), for the purpose of what, exactly?
And, by the way, I haven't seen the segment, but "he tried to keep the government subordinate to its notional head" strikes me as very possibly spin on pushback to a guy who claimed, "If the President does it, it isn't illegal."
I was listening to a podcast with Geoff Shepard and reading some of his book. Shepard was a very young, junior staffer in the Nixon White House who in the past years has done a great deal of archival research and released a revisionist book on Watergate in 2021. He is also the one who originally internally transcribed the "smoking gun" tape and coined that phrase when he listened to it, even though he was so junior he didn't actually know at the time what it was referring to. After doing his most recent research he says that the tape has been grossly misunderstood. What people think the "smoking gun" statement means is that Nixon knew about the break-in and was trying to order government officials to stop the investigation. What it actually was, was that the FBI was going to interview two specific people were linked with soliciting campaign donations from prominent Democrats, and Nixon and his staff were trying to protect the secrecy of those donations (because a Democrat would be bad for the Democrats reputation if it was known they had donated to Nixon). The two people ended up getting interviewed anyways two weeks later and were not found to have any criminally involvement. The "smoking gun" does not show that Nixon knew about Watergate or that he was trying to stop the entire investigation.
Shepard's take is that some of those who were actually more responsible for the break-in decided to side with the prosecutors and media establishment in taking down Nixon in order to get a better deal/reduced sentence.
Then why did Republicans who actually heard the tape think that it did? Why does the Nixon Foundation webpage say: " The release on August 5, 1974, of the June 23, 1972, tape (which was termed the “Smoking Gun”), appeared to undermine Nixon’s contention that he was not involved in the Watergate cover-up. The reaction to the tape caused Nixon’s remaining political support in Congress to collapse. Three days later, on August 8, 1974, he announced his resignation as president, effective at noon the next day."?
And, the claim is not that Nixon "knew about Watergate" beforehand; it is that he covered it up afterwards. And he certainly knew generally about the dirty tricks campaign.
It did "appear" to if you just take the quote out of its entire context and have it spun by hostile press and prosecutors. And that the time, even Republican Senators were more trusting in the establishment press, so that was enough to finally pull support for Nixon. Shepard's research on the full context of the quote is new research, not something that was known at the time.
The Republicans in question almost certainly listened to the actual tapes, or read the transcripts, which were publicly released
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