Posted In: News on March 12, 2025
Geoff Shepard’s book was referenced in this latest OpEd for The Orange County Register by Teri Sforza. Here’s an excerpt:
Nixon defenders cast him as victim in Watergate, blast library exhibit
Column: Any ‘lawfare’ against Nixon doesn’t absolve him of transgressions, scholar argues
A funny thing happened on the way to ranking the four big presidential scandals of our time: Former Nixon staffers in O.C. said Watergate wasn’t Nixon’s scandal after all, and he was actually the first victim of “lawfare,” and that our understanding of history is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Oh, we got quite an inbox-earful from Ken Khachigian, longtime aide to Nixon, and Bob Bostock, who did the original (booster-y?) Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Museum, before it was part of the presidential library system. “The conventional wisdom about Watergate has, over the past 50 years, increasingly been proven to be wrong in virtually every particular,” Khachigian told me.
Nixon had nothing to do with the break-in and knew nothing about it. The cover-up is in dispute. And the “smoking gun tape” — where it sure sounds like Nixon ordered the FBI to abandon its investigation of the Watergate break-in, which led directly to his resignation — was misread and is not what everyone thinks, they said.
The men cite Geoff Shepard’s book, “The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President,” and assert that Nixon was the first victim of “lawfare” in the United States. The real Watergate conspiracy, in their view, was a corrupt “Deep State-big media alliance” wherein Democrats wrongly brought down a Republican president.
Shepard was an attorney on Nixon’s Watergate defense team and based his book on four caches of internal prosecutorial documents that surfaced fairly recently. Those documents include descriptions of prosecutors’ meetings with Watergate judges and what Shepard calls their “suppression of exculpatory evidence.”