The Trump Justice Department is conducting a preliminary review into whether prosecutors in the Watergate special counsel’s office committed misconduct during the 1970s investigation.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a senior Justice Department official invited Geoff Shepard to department headquarters for a two-hour presentation before the Office of Professional Responsibility.
Shepard, who worked on Nixon’s defense team, is 81 years old and has spent decades arguing that the so-called deep state orchestrated the downfall of Richard Nixon.
His lengthy slideshow presentation, titled “Watergate As Lawfare,” outlines his long-held theory that Nixon was the victim of a politically motivated legal campaign rather than legitimate prosecution.
For years, the Justice Department dismissed Shepard’s theories, with officials historically rolling their eyes at his arguments about the Watergate special prosecutors.
That posture appears to have shifted under the leadership of Todd Blanche, who oversees the Justice Department team now taking a closer look at the matter.
Officially, the Justice Department has characterised Shepard’s visit as being invited for his scholarship, and stated that “that presentation does not constitute an investigation.”
However, the Justice Department does not traditionally grant two-hour meetings on topics where officials are not already deeply invested in the underlying questions.
The move raises significant questions about the priorities of the current administration, which critics argue is reaching back more than fifty years to relitigate one of America’s most consequential political scandals.
Nixon resigned from the presidency in August 1974 following the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, making any formal review of his prosecution a highly politically charged undertaking.
The preliminary review comes as the Trump administration has made a broader pattern of scrutinising past Justice Department conduct a central feature of its approach to running the department.
Whether the review progresses beyond its current preliminary stage into a formal investigation remains to be seen, but the decision to open even an informal inquiry marks a notable departure from decades of institutional precedent.