Transcript of Geoff Shepard’s Interview On The Tucker Carlson Show

Because he agreed to this idea to get the CIA to tell the FBI not to interview the people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just for people who aren’t as familiar with the details in the overview. So the break-in happens in 1972, during the campaign.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nixon wins an overwhelming landslide. By some measures the biggest landslide in American electoral history.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so he’s the most popular President. And then the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein being the reporters on this story, start to break a series of stories about the break-in and the cover-up, et cetera, et cetera. And what happens then? How is Nixon booted from office?

The Unfolding Scandal

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, those stories were breaking before he was reelected.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So it is fair to say the public was informed about this minor scandal, but they still voted overwhelmingly for the President. He was running against George McGovern.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: An acknowledged progressive. We characterized his campaign as being in favor of acid, amnesty, and abortion. Yes, he promised to raise taxes. It was a wipeout. But then facts started to come out that were embarrassing as the cover-up started to come apart.

The actual trial of the Watergate burglars occurred after the President had been re-elected. So he went to landslide in November, but the trial starts in January. And when those seven were all convicted and facing tens of years of imprisonment, it broke the cover-up. They didn’t hold anymore. And as that broke, it was like a flood coming downstream, swallowing dam after dam. More and more things came out that were adverse.

The Senate set up an investigative committee, the Senate Ervin Committee. They were public hearings. They were dragging people up there and the people didn’t look good, you know, it looked bad stories. And then it turned out there was a taping system. And everybody thought wow, now we can learn the truth. And there was a year-long battle over who got the tapes.

And the famous case is US v. Nixon handed down in July of 1974. Now it was the prosecutor who subpoenaed the tapes. Americans don’t understand. It had nothing to do with the Congress. Congress never won a battle saying they could have the tapes because of separation of powers. Now the President could protect his own conversations, but not from possible criminal involvement. And that was the holding of the Supreme Court.

So you end up with three things for certain. There really was a break-in. They were caught red-handed. There really was a cover-up. There’s just no question about that. Who was involved is the real question. And Nixon really did resign. He’s the only president, at least to date, who’s ever resigned from office.

The CIA Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: So let’s start with the crime. The break-in. You said there was one. The man in charge was a CIA officer. McCord.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, yes, he was the senior guy of the break-in team, but it would be unfair to say he was in charge.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, at on the scene.

GEOFF SHEPARD: On the scene, there were two goals, as I understand it, I have no personal knowledge. Two goals of the break-in. One was to fix a listening device, a bug in the Chairman’s phone, Larry O’Brien’s phone, that wasn’t transmitting correctly. And the other was to photocopy every document they could find. And the Cubans were supposed to do that. And McCord was supposed to fix the bug. Some people think there’s all kinds of conspiracy theories about that break-in because we’ve never ascertained why. The lead prosecutor, the career prosecutor.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why what?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Why did they go in? Why did they go in? Who thought that was a bright idea? You get down to it and there are all kinds of stories. Tucker and I can’t vouch for the stories, but supposedly Howard Hunt, who’s a separate career CIA agent, he said, this is nuts. Larry O’Brien has already left for their convention down in Miami. This is high risk, low reward. I don’t want to go back in. But Gordon Liddy, who developed the campaign intelligence plan, was eager to show off. Kind of a macho man. No, by Jove, if that stuff isn’t working, I’m going to send my team back in to fix it. And then to fix it, he recruits the head of security for the reelection committee, who’s James McCord. So you’re right. McCord is the senior guy on site, but Liddy’s pulling the strings.

TUCKER CARLSON: How many of the burglars had some connection to the CIA?

GEOFF SHEPARD: All. As did Howard Hunt. The only guy who doesn’t is Gordon Liddy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Liddy, who was an FBI agent.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, he had been an FBI agent and an assistant district attorney. I had the pleasure of knowing Gordon when I was a White House fellow at Treasury and he was fired from the Department of Treasury because he wouldn’t follow direction. And I have the misfortune of having fought to keep him off the White House staff. I maintained he was a loose cannon. He wouldn’t follow direction. And we would rue the day if we hired him. But I lost.

TUCKER CARLSON: I knew him well and I can verify. I thought he was great, but he was definitely a loose cannon.

GEOFF SHEPARD: I remember walking down the hallway of the old EOB, the gorgeous marble squares, black and white, saying to myself the day Gordon left, good heavens, he’s been here and he’s left and nothing’s gone wrong. And I pitched a hissy fit. They must think I’m a fool. And then later it turned out that Gordon had run this whole thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: But can I ask? So the CIA is an intelligence gathering agency whose main purpose is to collect information from around the world and give it to the President so he can make better informed foreign policy decisions.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: They have no right to operate in the United States.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Open and shut, no operation whatsoever.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I mean from its inception that has been the rule. It seems very strange that every burglar has some connection to the CIA, has worked for the CIA. Like what is that?

The CIA’s Involvement in Watergate

GEOFF SHEPARD: Everyone but Gordon. And Gordon is the moving force. So I tell you right off the top, the CIA knew all about the burglary in advance. Everything. President Nixon knew nothing. When Gordon goes over to the re-election committee, he’s recruited by John Dean, the President’s lawyer. He shows up at CREEP and he says, “I’ve been promised a million dollars to do a campaign intelligence plan.” Now those words are pretty innocent, but the operation is not innocent at all. It’s opposition research. Every campaign wants to know everything they can find out adverse about their opponent, of course, and when. Today, when they were looking for who was going to be Trump’s vice presidential nominee, the other side was doing research on all the possibilities, of course, so they were ready to jump.

Gordon is asked to prepare. He’s recruited by John Dean, the President’s lawyer, to develop a campaign intelligence plan. And he gets carried away. He says, “Wow, I can really impress these people. I will put together a plan that they will just blow them out of the water.” And he has specific proposals for mugging, bugging, kidnapping and prostitution. And I’m not making this stuff up. Gordon is so thrilled with his plan, he describes it in his autobiography. So you can go to see his book and read in great detail.

He shows up over at re-election, says, “I’ve been promised a million dollars.” The acting head says, “Well, nobody here has authority to decide a budget item that’s that big. The only guy that can make that decision is John Mitchell. And he hasn’t arrived yet. He’s still Attorney General. We’ll have to go over to his office and explain the plan.” So they go over on January 27, 1972, and Gordon puts up his plan on whiteboards prepared by the CIA and explains this plan, this crazy plan.

TUCKER CARLSON: Now I just want to get back to the same question, which is why would the CIA be involved in anything like this?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, we’ve agreed they cannot do anything domestic.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is illegal. We know that they can’t do this, but they are.

GEOFF SHEPARD: But why they do? Well, Howard Hunt was a career officer with the CIA. We got John Ehrlichman, the head of Domestic affairs, to call Richard Helms or Vern Walters, one or the other, the head or deputy, at CIA. At CIA you need to help these people. You need to help these people. So they gave Howard Hunt, their former employee, a wig, a voice altering device, something to put in his shoe to make him look like he had a limp so he wouldn’t be recognizable if he was seen. They give him a camera, a CIA-produced camera that only the CIA can open and develop. And they use it to take pictures of a break-in they’re planning out in Los Angeles. And then they come back and they say, “Well, we’re going to show this plan.” And Gordon talks them in.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry to ask you, what break-in were they planning in Los Angeles? The CIA.

The Pentagon Papers Connection

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, this is why Watergate gets to be so much fun. There was this four-volume study of the Vietnam War called the Pentagon Papers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And it went up through Lyndon Johnson and it leaked and it was considered to be the biggest national security leak in the Cold War. And the…

TUCKER CARLSON: It was an internal assessment of how the Vietnam War was going.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, how it started from day one all the way back to World War II. And it was put together secretly, unpeer-reviewed by the three most senior doves on the war. Paul Wary, who was counsel to the Department of Defense, Morton Halperin, who was a national security officer, and a third guy, Les Gelb, who did most of the writing. And it went on for a couple years. Nobody else knew it was underway. It wasn’t even completed when Nixon took office. So they took their study to Brookings and completed it in the next six months.

Nobody on the National Security Council knew. Nobody on the State Department or anybody else. Just an internal study by the Pentagon. But one of the people who participated in the study, Daniel Ellsberg, originally a former Marine, originally strongly in favor of the war, had switched and was opposed to the war, and felt this thing should be leaked. And he worked very hard to get it leaked. He offered it to William Fulbright, the chairman of Senate Foreign Relations. And Fulbright wouldn’t touch it. He said, “This is top secret. You get it sent to me officially and I’ll deal with it, but I’m not going to touch it until it’s official. I don’t want any part of that.”

So ultimately the New York Times decided they’d go with it. And in June of 1971, they started producing excerpts. And Henry Kissinger went crazy. It didn’t concern Nixon. Nixon wasn’t a part of the study, but it suggested the war was illegitimate from day one. That was the purpose of the study. And Kissinger said, “Look, I’m negotiating with three totalitarian regimes. North Vietnam, China and Russia. If they think we can’t keep secrets, they won’t talk. So you must do something.”

So there was an all-out press to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers. And we lost. But on the way to the Supreme Court, there were 29 injunctions stopping newspapers from publishing excerpts. And then the court held, no prior publication. You can’t stop it until. You can sue after they publish, but you can’t stop something before it’s published. That’s freedom of the press.

It turned out Ellsberg had strong connections, worked for the RAND Corporation out west in Santa Monica. And he had access because RAND had access to 54,000 other classified documents. And so this unit set up in the White House to try to stop the damage from the Pentagon Papers and stop Ellsberg from leaking anything further, decided what they ought to do to possibly learn his plans was to break into his psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills, Dr. Lewis Fielding.

And they tried to get Hoover to do it, but Hoover wouldn’t do it because Ellsberg’s father-in-law was a guy named Leonard Marks. He ran a big toy company and he gave toys to Hoover at Christmas to give to underprivileged kids. You know, you sit there and say, what goes wrong with our government? Well, what goes wrong is we deal with human beings.

So they got the bright idea to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to search his files and see if by some chance Daniel Ellsberg had told Dr. Fielding what his plans were. And they didn’t use the FBI, of course, they couldn’t use the CIA. It could staff them, but couldn’t take operations. So they used Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt and they said, “We know who can actually do the deed. We know these Cubans down in Miami because when we were going to invade Cuba, I was their CIA contact. I was the mysterious…” This is Howard Hunt. “I was the mysterious Eduardo. And they respect me. So if I tell them this break-in is necessary because it has something to do with Castro, they’ll do it.” So they go out and they break in, and they can’t pick the lock.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’s paying for this? Who’s organizing? Who is the authority telling these guys to go break into…

The Plumbers Unit

GEOFF SHEPARD: Gordon Liddy is the chief operational officer for the Plumbers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: He wasn’t hired to be the Plumber. He was already on the staff. Remember, I tried to keep…

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

GEOFF SHEPARD: I failed. So when this thing all developed, my immediate supervisor, Bud Krog, who was put in charge of the special unit that became nicknamed the Plumbers because they stopped leaks. He assigned Gordon Liddy and this other gentleman who is a retired CIA officer, Howard Hunt joined the team as a consultant. So they were the two people who were planning it. Gordon was on the staff. He was paid as a staff member. And Hunt was paid from a fund that domestic council had to fund operations. It was government money.

So they do the breaking. I don’t know who paid the Cubans. I’m unable to say that. I doubt the CIA paid them. It could have been private money raised off budget, but I just don’t know. The break-in was not successful. They did not find the file. But since they couldn’t pick the lock, Gordon ordered them to break in and make it look like a drug bust. Like some druggie went into the shrink’s office looking for pills. They didn’t get caught. Fielding reports it to the police, so there’s a police record. So when this all starts to come out later, they know exactly when the break-in occurred.

Now assume for a moment, whether you agree or not agree, that the FBI conducted the operation. It would have been successful. No fingerprints, no trace left behind. So there could have been. “Oh, I think it was broken into,” but no proof. But because it was botched, there was proof.

They got back to the White House, they told John Ehrlichman, who had approved a secret operation, covert, not necessarily illegal, and they told him they’d broken in, they hadn’t been successful. So they wanted to go break into Fielding’s house to see if the file was there. And Ehrlichman said, “No, no, no, we aren’t going to do this anymore. Get Liddy off my staff.”

Then comes John Dean, assigned to do a campaign intelligence plan, looking for somebody to recruit. Talks to Bud Krog. Bud says, “Have I got a deal for you. Here’s Gordon Liddy. Gordon has handled sensitive items for us in the past.” So Dean goes for it and he recruits Gordon Liddy and promises him all this money. I think the actual promise was a half million, possibly a million.

So Gordon shows up at the re-election committee. “I’m supposed to do this plan.” And Magruder, the acting chief, says, “Nobody with authority to do this to approve the expenditure.” So they go over to John Mitchell’s office twice to present the plan. It’s not approved at either meeting. But later, when these guys are arrested and caught in the act, people who were at that meeting are at risk of prosecution. And that’s when John Dean, who was at the meeting, who had recruited Gordon Liddy, he starts running the cover-up. Nobody on the White House staff, not Haldeman or Ehrlichman or Nixon, knew anything about the break-in.

TUCKER CARLSON: But is that confirmed?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, absolutely. Without question. Absolutely without question. Gordon Liddy had never met any of them. There’s nothing in writing. There was a tickler file. With Bob Haldeman, the way he ran the White House. If there was five projects. We want a presidential library started. We want to know what we’re going to do about the environment. We want to know something else. And they’d be after you until you said yes. That’s underway. It wasn’t substantive. It was just this item has been addressed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So that they can show, they can show that they were told they had made arrangements for a campaign intelligence plan, but no details.

TUCKER CARLSON: When do you think Nixon learned about the Watergate break-in?

GEOFF SHEPARD: He was down in Key Biscayne. He came back on Monday. He read about it in the Sunday paper, the Miami Herald.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, really?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yeah. And he says, “What a dumb thing to do. Who would be so stupid to break into the headquarters of the DNC?” Especially…

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they didn’t need to.

GEOFF SHEPARD: They didn’t need to. And they weren’t running it. The candidates were running it. If you were into this, if you were into spying, you’d break into McGovern’s headquarters. Of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s such a smart point.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So they come back and as it comes apart.

The CIA Connection to Watergate

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, so I’m going to ask you to pause again just because I don’t want to lose this thread. So you just made, I think, an airtight case that there was no reason to do this. Nixon was winning.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: The DNC wasn’t running the campaign anyway. The whole thing was sloppy and stupid. But we know that the CIA had knowledge of it because everyone there was.

GEOFF SHEPARD: A former CIA and they did the charts. That’s hugely important. Did the charts, did the charts. Gordon Liddy used to explain the plans. John Mitchell.

TUCKER CARLSON: So we know that the CIA had a hand in orchestrating this break-in, which was unnecessary.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Absolutely. So what the hell. Why, you come back to why the break-in? Yeah, it’s Gordon Liddy showing off. He’s a madman.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why would the CIA go along with it?

GEOFF SHEPARD: I can’t respond to that part. Put it in. Flip the coin. The alleged wrongdoing is the CIA knew and they didn’t tell anybody. They knew. Okay. You could make that case that they watched it burn down. Then you ask yourself, who were they supposed to tell? Who were they supposed to tell?

TUCKER CARLSON: They work for the President of the United States.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And John Mitchell is alleged to have approved the plan. John Mitchell, the President’s best friend. Who do you tell? We think you’re making a mistake?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you dispatch the director, Richard Helms.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Maybe you send Bob Woodward over.

TUCKER CARLSON: The former Navy intel officer, right? So it’s all very strange. But you believe that it was all because Gordon Liddy was greedy and reckless.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Without question, in my mind, based on knowing Gordon Liddy, but not knowing anything about the break-in. I have no personal knowledge.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you, I mean, you worked there at the time. You had no idea.

Inside the White House During Watergate

GEOFF SHEPARD: I knew everybody in—well, I did know the Cubans. I knew everybody from the White House that ended up being involved. I never set foot in the campaign headquarters. How did you survive, Jeff? Well, one, I never worked on any campaign. I worked on the governance, of course, not the campaign staff.

TUCKER CARLSON: I get it, but. So when did you learn of the break-in. In the paper?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yeah, in the paper. So my secretary had a roommate that was the secretary to the plumbers. I can’t come up with her name, but she sent me an email just very recently. And she would tell my secretary that there were people that were under investigation they hadn’t yet indicted, hadn’t yet caught because the five people caught red-handed and there were two others. And there was speculation in the press about who those two others might be.

So Joanne Lemaire, my secretary, says, “Well, you know who they’re talking about?” And I said, “Well, no, I have no idea.” She said, “Well, let me give you his initials. It’s G.G.L.” I said, “Means nothing to me.” And she says, “It’s G. Gordon, Jeff.” And there’s this shocked pause when I remember my fight to keep him off the staff and my telling myself that he’s gone, and nothing’s gone wrong. It turns out there’s a whole lot that’s gone wrong.

TUCKER CARLSON: So can I ask. I’ve already said that I knew Gordon Liddy pretty well and really liked him. I found him enormously entertaining and smart and interesting. However. And he’s gone now, so he can’t defend himself. But that’s so crazy to do something like that. To break into the DNC for no real reason in the middle of a presidential campaign. You’re winning anyway if he drove that. And you’re saying that he did. Is it possible that he was working against Nixon?

Liddy’s Motivations and Alternative Theories

GEOFF SHEPARD: No, no. He expected to get, based on his spectacular work on this campaign intel plan, that he would get a very high position in the second term. That’s what was driving him. He has conversations with Howard Hunt and says to Hunt, “You’ve played your hand, you know, you’ve retired, you’re older. I’m looking to impress these people so I get a more senior position.” And he had dreams of grandeur.

Now the other issue, and it’s in Len Colodny’s book, “Silent Coup,” he says there was a totally separate reason and the reason had to do with John Dean’s girlfriend, his fiancée. I know nothing about this story except to reproduce Len’s work. He says the CIA was running a honey trap in the apartment building next door, Columbia Plaza Apartments, and they were catching foreign diplomats in compromising positions with good looking women.

And John Dean was dating the roommate of the madame, Heidi Ryken, that was running the honey trap. And she was best maid of honor at John Dean’s marriage to Mo Biner Dean. But when they were dating, Mo’s nickname was “clout” because she was dating the counsel to the president. So she had clout.

And according to Len—this is not me, this is Len Colodny—John Dean became worried that Maureen Dean’s picture was in the desk drawer where not the foreign diplomats, but the DNC field officers would come in right to the campaign headquarters and they were looking for a good time. And the DNC was availing itself of the honey trap next door.

TUCKER CARLSON: The prostitutes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: The prostitutes. And what you would do, this is the allegation, what you would do is sit at the desk, pull open the drawer. There’s a picture book. You pick out somebody you like, you call the number and say, “I like 15.” And a few minutes later 15 calls you back and arranges a date. Pretty good. Unless John Dean’s girlfriend’s picture was part of that portfolio.

So according to Len, the reason for the break-in was to go back in and if her picture was there, take it out. Now one of the Cubans has a key and the key is taped to his notebook. And when they are arrested, during the course of his arrest, he tries to swallow the key. Okay, he’s damn lucky he didn’t get shot. He’s not successful. They wrestle him down, they get the key and then they try to figure out where it goes. And I’ll be a son of a gun, it goes to Maxie Wells’ desk, which is alleged to have the photographs. Now they didn’t find that out, they didn’t know what it opened for a long time. So the photographs are gone, but the story lingers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where was Maxie Wells’s desk?

The CIA Connections Deepen

GEOFF SHEPARD: She was the secretary to a guy named Stuart, I’m blocking on the name. And it was the only phone because he was running field operations that was apart from the DNC. So it was the only telephone that didn’t go through the DNC switchboard. And she was his secretary for the—for the conspirators among us. His dad worked for Mullen & Co. Which was a CIA front operation in Washington. So there’s again, there’s a remote CIA connection.

Now let me finish on that because I don’t disagree with this allegation that this break-in is just weird as it can be, almost as weird as the Trump assassination. All these things should never have happened. But on the break-in, the issue that is so strange—it has to do with his, John Dean’s girlfriend and the stories that are told about it. And that’s why John Dean runs the cover-up because he’s trying to protect his involvement both in the meetings with John Mitchell and in this involvement with his fiancée.

So it just gets weirder and weirder. Mullen and company again, the CIA front, they hire the first lawyer to come down to try to bail the five who’ve been arrested out of jail. His name is Douglas Caddy. And he shows up, they don’t know they’ve never retained him. He just shows up at the police station and says, “I represent those five guys, we want to get him out of here.” And the Cubans are saying to the police, “You know, we’re on the same side, you know, there’s going to be a phone call and we’re going to be out of here within the next half hour.” Now he doesn’t say it but you know, “We’re working for the President of the United States.”

TUCKER CARLSON: But the CIA jumps in to save the burglars.

The Aftermath and Cover-Up

GEOFF SHEPARD: The Mullen and company lawyer, they send the lawyer over. I think what happens again this is all speculation is Howard Hunt, who’s not caught, goes back to the hotel room where the listening device is across the street to the Howard Johnson’s hotel across the street and tells the guy who was supposed to be listening to the wiretaps, “Get your stuff and get out, get lost.”

And then Howard Hunt drives around Washington for a couple of hours—he’s not caught—and decides the safest place to put his stuff is his office in the old executive office building because he’s a consultant to the plumbers. So he goes in 2am, 3am leaves all his stuff in his safe. He’s got too much stuff. So it’s on the desk and in his safe.

And then you switch. The FBI agent who is assigned, Angelo Lano, who’s assigned to the case from day one, he says, “You know, the burglars had two hotel keys at the Watergate Hotel where they were staying. So we went to their rooms, I went to one of the rooms and all the evidence we could ever have needed is laid out on the bed. Here’s their ID, here’s their wallets. Here’s the sequential hundred dollar bills. Here’s an envelope from Howard Hunt, nominally from Miami to pay his dues to a country club. So it looks like he’s a non-resident member.” I mean, Howard’s cheating on his dues.

So they go over and interview Howard Hunt that very day. Now Hunt doesn’t talk to him. Hunt bolts for the west coast and hides out with an attorney friend. Waiting for word from Gordon on what on earth to do. You know, they’ve been caught. Gordon is over at the reelection committee shredding documents like there’s no tomorrow. He actually had stationary printed up with the name “Gemstone” because that was the overall code name of his campaign intelligence plan. And he’s shredding incriminating documents like mad.

And he’s fired from the reelection committee about five days later because he won’t cooperate with the FBI. And then he’s indicted on September 15th. Breaking is June 17th. Caught red-handed. The prosecutors launch a huge investigation.

John Dean does everything in his power to thwart it, to coordinate the testimony. He does incredible things in his cover-up. He rehearses some of the people on what they’re to testify to when they appear in front of the grand jury. He destroys evidence. Some stuff taken from Howard Hunt’s safe he found dangerous. So he peels it off, puts it in his file cabinet and later admits he’s destroyed it.

He talks the head of the FBI, Pat Gray, into sharing intelligence reports, prosecutive reports with him so he can share them with defense counsel so they know where the investigation is going. And Pat Gray testifies under oath. He’s put up to be head of the FBI permanently. And he says, “Yes, I gave John Dean 81 investigative reports over time. He told me he was doing this investigation on behalf of the President. And I believed him. Why wouldn’t I give him the investigative reports?” But John Dean was giving them to defense counsel.

And John Dean is the only person in Watergate who took money. He embezzled $4,000 of campaign funds to pay for his honeymoon. It’s all admitted. It’s all on record. He’s disbarred by the Commonwealth of Virginia. February 6, 1974, and the court hearing. The New York Times article says he was accused of suborning perjury. All these criminal acts and he’s disbarred. He’s been disbarred through today. He cannot represent anybody in court, give legal advice. He never goes to prison, never spent a day.

TUCKER CARLSON: Then he winds up on MSNBC as a political analyst.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Huh.

GEOFF SHEPARD: You know, there’s certain unfairness in life. Well, how did he earn that? He flipped on his colleagues.

The Truth About Watergate: John Dean’s Role in the Cover-Up

TUCKER CARLSON: Most of us, well, actually all of us go through our daily lives using all sorts of “free” technology without paying attention to why it’s “free.” Who’s paying for this and how? Think about it for a minute. Think about your free email account, the free messenger system you use to chat with your friends, the free weather app or game app you open up and never think about. It’s all free. But is it? No, it’s not free. These companies aren’t developing expensive products and just giving them to you because they love you. They’re doing it because their programs take all your information. They hoover up your data, private personal data, and sell it to data brokers and the government. And all of those people who are not your friends are very interested in manipulating you and your personal, political and financial decisions. It’s scary as hell and it’s happening out in the open without anybody saying anything about it.

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John Dean’s Immunity Deal

GEOFF SHEPARD: The prosecutors wouldn’t give him immunity. He did everything he could. He was first in to reveal the cover-up and he said, “I can give you John Mitchell, I can give you Jeb Magruder.” And they said that’s not good enough. So he said, “Well, shoot, there was a cover-up. I was running it. I can give you White House people.” And they said, not good enough. You go before the grand jury, you want the truth to come out, go before the grand jury without immunity.

But his lawyer is a very, very well placed Democrat. He goes up to Capitol Hill to the Ervin Committee, works out a deal. He’ll be their principal witness against his former colleagues if they will give him immunity. And they do. And then it turns out he’s going to be the lead witness in the cover-up trial and they’re worried about his credibility. So they hurry up and sentence him to one to four years in prison. The harshest sentence passed down to non-burglars at that time before he testifies with his incarceration to begin on the first day of the trial.

Except he doesn’t go to prison. He’s held in a witness holding facility at Fort Holabird, Maryland, a military base. And he comes and he testifies: “I’ve been punished. I’m guilty. There was a cover-up. I know, I was running it. These other people here, they were part of it. I swear to you, they were part of it. You should convict them too.” And then seven days after they’re convicted on all counts, John Dean’s sentence is reduced to time served. He never spent a single night in jail.

So there’s only two real criminals in Watergate. There’s people on the periphery, but the core criminals are Gordon Liddy, his plan, his genius, his involvement. He got five years. He was sentenced to 35, five years in jail. John Dean ran the cover-up. I mean, we have, in the documentary that we’ve prepared that’s being released, we have Angelo Lano, the lead FBI agent. He’s asked about the involvement in the cover-up? What about John Dean? And he says, “I credit him with 95% of the cover-up activities.” This is the head FBI agent.

TUCKER CARLSON: But he becomes, in later life, I mean, I’ve watched it over decades. He becomes obedient apologist for the people in charge.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, he’s counted upon to come out no matter what the case is and announce it’s “worse than Watergate.” I mean, he testifies against Republicans every time. He doesn’t testify on behalf of Republicans.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s kind of the point. He’s become, probably for the last 50 years, in exchange for not being punished for what he did, he has become a servant of the people who took Nixon out. That’s the way it looks to me.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And then out of nowhere, is that—

TUCKER CARLSON: Fair, do you think?

The Smoking Gun Revelation

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, completely. Out of nowhere, in 2014, he publishes lots of books, all on Watergate. His wife publishes a book on Watergate. He publishes one in 2014 called “The Nixon Defense.” And at page 54 in his book there’s a footnote. And the footnote says, you know, funny thing, the smoking gun tape that drove Nixon out of office. It’s released on August 5th. He resigns on August 8th. That’s what knocked Nixon off. That’s been misunderstood from the beginning. It was really an effort to not have the FBI interview two people who might reveal the donation of significant contributions to CREEP by Democrats, by very prominent Democrats.

So what appears to be Nixon agreeing to using the CIA to cover up the break-in is nothing of the sort. Nixon agreed to use the CIA to protect the testimony against two prominent Democrats. “If Nixon had known this when this tape came out, when the tape was first heard, he might have lived to fight another day.” Those are quotes at the bottom of the page. “He might have lived to fight another day. In short, the smoking gun was shooting blanks.”

Okay, here’s the guy who’s at the absolute center of the alleged wrongdoing saying it’s all been a mistake. Now he testified at the trial and when you swear in as a witness, you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. John Dean knew from the date that tape was released that it was misinterpreted. But he didn’t say so at the trial when they were pushing on him. I mean, Bob Haldeman, his life is hanging by a balance. And he says that was a political decision. And John Dean says, “Well, they were worried about Gordon Liddy’s involvement,” which is true, but a lie.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just interesting that Nixon was forced from office on the allegation that he was using the CIA to cover it up, when in fact the CIA had been involved in it long before Nixon even knew.

GEOFF SHEPARD: When we released the smoking gun tape on August 5th, we knew that would be the nail in the coffin that his described.

The Smoking Gun Tape Explained

TUCKER CARLSON: Since you transcribed it yourself, what did it say, for those who can’t remember, what was the substance of it?

GEOFF SHEPARD: I did transcribe it. I don’t have the transcript.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you could just characterize it.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Bob Haldeman comes in and he says, “The investigation is going in a direction we don’t want it to go.” And Nixon says, “What? What are you talking about?” He says, “Well, they’re tracing the money.” And what he means is they’re not tracing how the money got to the burglars, because it’s clear that came from CREEP. It’s how the money got to CREEP in the first place. And that will reveal these two guys.

So Nixon says, “Is it Maurice Stans?” who’s finance chairman. And Haldeman says, “No, it’s somebody who works for Stans. It’s Ken Dahlberg.” And then one of the most famous lines in our history. Nixon says, “Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?” And Haldeman says, “He’s the middleman. And there’s another guy, a Mexican attorney. I’ll have the name for you tomorrow.”

But John—they’re going to reveal the identities of these donors. And John’s thought about it and come up with an answer. And he says, “Why don’t we—” He’s just been over to see Pat Gray at the FBI, and Pat Gray says they think it’s a CIA operation because there’s all these foreigners, all this foreign money and these Cubans. “So we’ll just get the CIA to tell the FBI lay off these two guys, okay?”

Totally misunderstood by Nixon’s lawyers. They read it as the effort was to shut down the investigation. But John Dean, who was there—John Dean is the one who came up with the idea—he gets in 2014, around the same. Not so. And even though he said that in his book, he’ll sit there in meetings, he’ll sit there in TV shows where people say, “And Nixon tried to stop the investigation.” He won’t say a word.

See, John’s caught in a trap. His interactions with Nixon, personal interactions with Nixon, they’re on tape, so he can’t fudge much. There’s a memo, and I’ve produced the memo written by one of the special prosecutors on February 6, 1974, and it lists the material discrepancies between John Dean’s testimony before the Senate and what’s on the tapes. And there’s 19 material discrepancies. But the press doesn’t care. The press has got a narrative, and the narrative is Nixon, man. His people are all crooks. We don’t have to look any further. We don’t have to read the transcripts. We know what they say, but they don’t say it. That’s what my work keys off of, and that’s what we’ve reduced to in this documentary.

The Media’s Role in Watergate

TUCKER CARLSON: So this might be a good transition to the question of the press’s role in this. Now, from my perspective, the press drove it. I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but from the vantage of 50 years, it looks like the Washington Post in particular, Ben Bradley, the editor, and the two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, drove the coverage with the New York Times and Time and Newsweek and the networks.

GEOFF SHEPARD: At the time, there were three networks. NBC, ABC, CBS.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: There were two very powerful weekly news magazines, Time and Newsweek, both gone. And there was one nationally prominent dominant newspaper, the New York Times. Yes, and there was the Washington Post. But the other five were all—the other six were all headquartered within six blocks of each other in midtown Manhattan. And there was a single narrative. Nixon, crook, people guilty. And nothing to the contrary ever made it into print. So it’s no wonder American citizens think Nixon was guilty as hell, was properly caught, and his people were properly punished.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so, just for people who weren’t around 50 years ago and weren’t working in government then, you’re saying that those six news outlets, all headquartered in midtown Manhattan, were basically the sum total of the narrative machine in the United States.

The Birth of Lawfare

GEOFF SHEPARD: There was nothing else. There was no other point of view. There was no talk radio. There were no podcasts. There was no alternate news networks. There was no Tucker Carlson. And now look what’s happened. Look what’s happened today, 50 years. We have four terms that are newly appreciated: Deep state, fake news, false narrative. And most of all, lawfare. The use of the law, the criminal provisions of the law to ruin your political opponent. The word lawfare is very recent. But the big bang, the creation of lawfare, that was Watergate.

You have the special prosecution force. A hundred people. That’s the original table of organization and employment. 60 of whom are lawyers specially recruited to get Nixon. The top 17 burglary—well, over possibly knowing about a burglary, you could—the burglars should have been punished. The issue is who else could we get? How could we expand a “third-rate burglary”? That’s what it was called in the beginning. Dismissed. How could we expand that to void the most popular president that we’ve ever seen in an election?

TUCKER CARLSON: So I want to get that you, I mean, you actually participated in that whole process personally as an attorney.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, not getting Nixon, but defending.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m aware. Defending Nixon, but you had a front row seat to all of that. But I just want to linger for one moment on the question of the press. So I don’t know what Bob Woodward is doing this week, but I’m sure he’s participating in some sort of commemoration of his heroic role.

GEOFF SHEPARD: I’m sure he is. I’m sure he is. They’re celebrating the strong power of the press.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Carl Bernstein, who is like an idiot. I know him well, I know them both. But Bernstein, like, I don’t even know how. I mean, that’s all he’s ever done with his life is Watergate.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Okay.

The Truth About Watergate: Woodward, Bernstein, and Deep Throat

TUCKER CARLSON: I still don’t understand. The one thing I can assess, having worked in journalism for over 30 years is it’s incredibly weird that they got the story. Just doesn’t make any sense to me from my knowledge of how news organizations work. So Woodward and Bernstein were really young. Bernstein had been a reporter for a number of years. Few years. Woodward had not been. He was a naval intel officer working at the Pentagon. Sent on a couple of occasions at least over to the Nixon White House to deliver things to do. Briefings.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then within like months, winds up at the Washington Post.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: With no journalism experience at all.

GEOFF SHEPARD: None.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then winds up with the biggest story in the modern history of journalism. Well, and if you go, what is that? That’s just not. That’s bullshit. That’s not plausible.

GEOFF SHEPARD: If you want to go back and really look at it on Bob Woodward, he starts out as number two. Bernstein is the lead name. Bernstein is a more experienced guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, definitely.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And Woodward doesn’t know how to write. Okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: He just put a naval intel officer.

GEOFF SHEPARD: But Woodward has this connection with the individual who later is called Deep Throat. And we’re told that Woodward has a source of inside information that fuels their stories. Now he and to a lesser extent, Carl, accredited with being the greatest investigative reporters of all time. Yes, but all they did was leak information that the FBI had already gathered. That’s not investigative reporting.

The FBI’s Role in Watergate

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s the second part of your sentence that really gives me pause. Like, the FBI is a law enforcement agency. Their job is to investigate crime and to help prosecutors punish the guilty. But that’s not what they’re doing here. They’re acting as a political tool.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, it’s one guy, he’s later called Deep Throat, but it’s Mark Felt, who’s a deputy director. And he thinks he should have been named director to succeed J. Edgar Hoover. But Nixon didn’t do that. He named Pat Gray, former head of the Civil Division at the Department of Justice, as acting director. So Pat Gray is a useful idiot. And Mark Felt sets out to undermine him at every turn in the road. So Pat Gray is staffed by Mark Felt. Mark Felt starts leaking stuff to Bob Woodward to undermine Felt as leader of the FBI.

TUCKER CARLSON: So he can take it over.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So he can take it over. That’s his dream. That’s his purpose, he says. So now Woodward, when they do the book, they don’t want to admit this all came from the FBI.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, because it’s so dark at that point, then it is a deep state coup against the President.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes, but it also undermines the narrative, the popular narrative that it was Nixon and Nixon’s people. Somebody on Nixon’s White House staff who was leaking to Woodward one of the great disservices of all time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, because it’s a completely different story. If it’s someone in Nixon’s political circle or one of his White House staff, you bet it’s a man of principle who can’t abide it anymore. His conscience won’t allow him to participate. He has to tell the truth about the crimes he’s seeing. If it’s the FBI doing it, totally different. Once again, it’s a coup by permanent Washington against an elected official. It’s a subversion of democracy is what it is.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And for 30 years, Bob Woodward actively supports the idea that Deep Throat is on the Nixon White House.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s lying.

The Deep Throat Deception

GEOFF SHEPARD: That’s lying. It’s worse than lying. You can see it with your own eyes. I don’t know if you’ve watched the movie recently.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

GEOFF SHEPARD: All the President’s Men, but you know Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Woodward and Bernstein are on the steps of the U.S. Capitol of the Library of Congress. They’re out of leads. They don’t have any place to go. And Woodward says, I have a friend at the White House. And all of a sudden, they start moving again. They’re getting more information. They’re back in control. Next scene or scene after that, Woodward calls Deep Throat at his office. Deep Throat said, never call me at the office. He’s in a public phone booth. Remember those glass phone booths? In front of the old EOB. Right where Blair House is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And he’s looking up at the old EOB when he’s talking to Deep Throat. And Deep Throat says, don’t call me here. But the implication is there’s no question where Deep Throat works. He works in the old EOB. And then there’s another scene where Deep Throat goes to pulls out at night to go to a rendezvous at midnight in some basement garage.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, parking garage.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And Hal Holbrook is playing Deep Throat. And there’s this gorgeous shot from the floorboards up. And it’s Deep Throat in the shadows pulling out from the northwest gate of the White House to go do the meeting. So there are three open and shut indications. He’s on Deep Throat’s on the White House staff. Absolute fraud. Because the truth would ruin the narrative.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, and not just the narrative, the story against Nixon. But it would also raise questions about who runs the government. I mean, the promise of our system is that the people rule. It’s their country. And in order to enact their will, they elect their representatives up to and including the President. And the real story of Watergate tells a very different tale about who runs the country, which is that the people with permanent jobs, accountable to nobody unfirable, have all the power.

Journalistic Misconduct

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, then there’s the idea that Bob Woodward took it upon himself to interview grand jurors. Absolute foreboding. Because a grand juror complained to the prosecutor and said, we’ve been approached by these reporters. Woodward denies it, Bernstein denies it. They send Edward.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they were asked directly.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Absolutely. They send Edward Bennett Williams to see Judge Sirica, the most famous lawyer in.

TUCKER CARLSON: Washington, owner of the Redskins, counsel to.

GEOFF SHEPARD: The Washington Post and the Democratic National Committee, a very, very good lawyer. Okay. He goes to see Judge Sirica, his best friend. Judge Sirica has asked Edward Bennett Williams to be godparents to Sirica’s daughter. Sirica is frequently at the owner’s box for the Redskins game. I mean, the owner’s box is 50 seats. So Edward Bennett Williams knows how to use power. He goes to see Sirica and said, you know, they tried, but they didn’t really interview a grand juror. No harm, no foul. Don’t punish them.

2014, a guy is doing a biography on Ben Bradley, editor of the Washington Post. Gives him access to his records. He finds in Bradley’s files, seven page typed memo by Carl Bernstein describing his interview with the grand juror. Open and shut. Proof. Not only did they interview a grand juror, but the Post management knew it. You don’t know for sure if Edward Bennett Williams knew it, but Ben Bradley knew it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the reason that you don’t interview you’re not allowed to talk to grand jurors is because it can influence the process.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of indictment. So what you have here is the news organization the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein not only lying about what they did, but inserting themselves into the legal process.

GEOFF SHEPARD: You bet.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s like. And when this the most immoral thing you can imagine.

GEOFF SHEPARD: When this author, Jeff Himmelman, the book’s called “Yours in Truth,” describes it chapter and verse, 2014. He approaches Woodward and says, can you explain this? And Woodward says, you print that and I will ruin you. You do anything about that and you’ll never work in this town again. Threatens the guy over the truth coming out about illegally approaching a grand juror.

Woodward’s Continued Influence

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I just add this? Again, this is a sidebar, but it’s interesting to me. Woodward for the last 50 years has remained kind of at the very top of journalism in Washington.

GEOFF SHEPARD: The hero.

TUCKER CARLSON: He is a hero. Truly.

GEOFF SHEPARD: I mean, yes, he’s a fraud.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s an utter fraud. And it’s proven that he’s a fraud. So how, you know, why is every, I think every president since Nixon, maybe not Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, but the rest have all sat with Bob Woodward. Talked about Woodward. Their whole staff should talk to Bob Woodward.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And you know why?

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Because Woodward’s going to do a book. Okay, whatever. The book book on the Supreme Court book on the CIA.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And he says in no uncertain terms, if you refuse to talk with me, I will ruin you in the book. So you got a choice, fella. Either you talk to me or I write about you without presenting your side.

TUCKER CARLSON: So how is that different from what the Mafia used to do?

GEOFF SHEPARD: The Mafia literally killed people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Woodward kills reputations. Let me show you one other thing, if I could. And then please, we’ll go from there. Bob Woodward secures the first interview with the recently departed special prosecutor, whose name is Leon Jaworski. He’s the second special prosecutor. He didn’t want to be special prosecutor. He wanted to go back home to Texas.

So when the cover-up trial is still going on, but the jury has been sequestered, he tenders his resignation. He saw it through. Nixon being named a co-conspirator. Nixon resigning. Nixon being pardoned by Ford. Time to go home. The first interview after he leaves is with Bob Woodward. And we have Bob’s typewritten notes of that interview. And in the second sentence, I happen to have it with me right here. Because I work off the written record. The second sentence of his notes says quote “says there were a lot of one-on-one conversations that nobody knows about but him and the other party.” But that’s a bizarre thing for the special prosecutor to say. How did you succeed? Well, there were a lot of one-on-one conversations with somebody that nobody knows about. He was talking about the multitude of secret meetings he had had with Judge Sirica. We didn’t know it at the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, I’m sorry to ask you to pause, but since you’re a Harvard Law School graduate, you’ll know the answer. How can one side in a criminal proceeding meet secretly with the judge?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, they can’t. It’s just absolute per se violation if you’re caught. If it becomes public you met with a judge without the other side being present, you are off the case, you might be disbarred and the judge will be prevented from hearing that case and he may be impeached. It is a flipping.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s not, it’s not just a technical violation. It gets to the core of fairness in the judge.

Secret Meetings and Due Process Violations

GEOFF SHEPARD: It goes to the core of due process. Goes to the absolute core of due process. And what I’ve uncovered, Holy smokes. What I’ve uncovered is written proof of at least 10 secret meetings between prosecutors and Judge Sirica. Judge Sirica was a terrible judge, the most reversed in the D.C. circuit. A petty tyrant who knew nothing about the law. He was not a bright man. Naturally Time magazine named him Man of the Year because he was reversed most often for violating defendants’ rights. And you’re sitting there saying, you mean to tell me you met with the other prosecutors? The prosecutors wrote descriptions of their meetings with Judge Sirica.

TUCKER CARLSON: But wait, I mean that’s just absolutely nuts. And that was never reported by anyone?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh no. In fact what happened was the three top prosecutors left early. They left before the cover-up trial was over. And they took their records with them, their sensitive files and they didn’t start to surface until 2013. Well after these guys died and they ended up at the National Archives and I happened to be researching, I’ve spent 27,000 hours researching the Watergate prosecutions, reading every document, pursuing every possibility.

And I was the first to see what turned out to be Leon Jaworski’s confidential Watergate files. And they describe unbelievable things. They describe secret meetings with the judge, they describe political decisions that we’re going to indict Republicans on very, very flimsy evidence and not indict Democrats on super strong evidence because if you indicted Democrats that would ruin the narrative.

I mean the big case. If I could just two names. Chuck Colson was perhaps Nixon’s fiercest defender, but he wasn’t involved in the cover-up. So the prosecutors come in for a review and the lead trial guys who want to indict everybody, they said, we want to indict Colson, name him in the comprehensive cover-up indictment. And the question is asked, well, what are the odds of conviction? Well, he’s not that involved. The odds are about 50-50. And one of the other lawyers says, well, you can’t do that. That’s not the standard for indicting somebody. That’s the standard for saying there’s probable cause. But we don’t. We at the Department of Justice do not let people get indicted unless we’re very confident that a jury knowing what we know will convict. 50-50 is not good enough. And then they go on to a guy named… But they indict him anyway.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he went to prison.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, he was convicted. Open and shut. He pled guilty to the plumbers’ case so he wouldn’t get sentenced by maximum John Sirica in the cover-up case. And after that, Sirica announced no more plea deals. All got to come through me because I am the avenging angel. I will have justice in my court, due process be damned.

Political Bias in the Watergate Proceedings

TUCKER CARLSON: Sounds like Sirica was a Democratic partisan.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, he was named by Eisenhower as a Republican, but he acted as a Democrat throughout. Edward Bennett Williams was his best friend, his career mentor, and as I say.

TUCKER CARLSON: The counsel of the DNC and the Washington Post.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And Sirica was a frequent occupant at the owner’s box of the Redskins games. And Edward Bennett Williams and his wife were godparents to Sirica’s daughter.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s all so crazy.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, it’s absolutely not.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s so recognizable. It’s a city that I recognize having spent my life there. But it’s all where everyone knows everybody. And everybody’s sort of intertwined in that, you know, media, politics, government.

GEOFF SHEPARD: One industry. One industry, really.

TUCKER CARLSON: And everyone’s kind of serving the same master and has the same instincts of self-preservation.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So these…

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s crazy that the whole country could have watched this. And I guess the news coverage didn’t reflect any.

John Dean and the Ervin Committee

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, no. When the Ervin Committee gave John Dean immunity and he agreed to testify against Nixon, they had every reason in the world to have John Dean portrayed as an innocent whistleblower, and they did a very good job at it. He alone arrives to testify and he has a 240-page statement. Now normally they say thanks, put that in the record, summarize it in the next couple of minutes we’ll get to our questions. John Dean was allowed to read his entire 240-page statement. It was not passed out in advance. Republicans had no chance to look at it in advance. And he started at 2 in the afternoon. So when he was through, the committee adjourned. No cross-examination, no opportunity to ask what on earth he was doing. So Dean’s reputation is made as an innocent whistleblower.

Now, the Ervin Committee bears striking parallels to the J6 committee of today. Democrat dominance 4 to 3. No other topic to look into except the ’72 campaign. Not ’68. Not ’64. Not ’60. Oh no, we don’t want to go back that far. And Nixon had no defenders on the committee. There were three Republicans but no defenders on the committee.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

GEOFF SHEPARD: One of the senators, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut went on the committee for the avowed purpose of sinking Richard Nixon.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. And he later became effectively a Democrat.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Absolutely.

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Political Connections and Corruption

TUCKER CARLSON: Lowell P. Weicker, my former neighbor in Washington, and Howard Baker of Texas.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Where in Washington?

TUCKER CARLSON: In Belhaven, actually.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, John Dean owned a townhouse in Old Town on Quail Quay Street. Weicker owned a townhouse two or three doors up. He bought Dean’s townhouse to get Dean enough money to enable Dean to relocate to Beverly Hills. I have the deed from John Dean to Lowell Weicker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not Beverly Hills, Alexandria. Beverly Hills, California.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Beverly Hills, California. So Weicker describes in his book, he’s walking out from a restaurant, he’s had dinner with Dean and he says, what else can we do, you know, to ruin Nixon? Dean says his taxes. Dean had his taxes because he was counsel to the President. Magically, they leak. Whole new investigation. Did Richard Nixon properly pay taxes? Just unbelievable.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it really is like having Liz Cheney on the committee.

GEOFF SHEPARD: It is absolutely. Now, go back.

TUCKER CARLSON: I wish I’d understood all of this during the January 6th as well.

The Constitutional Inversion

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yeah, but see you would be making points nobody would believe. I mean, as we started out this discussion, the special Prosecutor, the top 17 lawyers, all worked together in Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice. This was a constitutional inversion where the people who lost power with Nixon’s election, 1968, suddenly are in charge of investigation and prosecution. They announce at their first press conference they will investigate every allegation of wrongdoing about Nixon since he took office in 1969. So what we originally characterized as a third-rate burglary maybe so suddenly had been used as the bootstrap to launch investigations of every aspect of the Nixon administration. Just unbelievable. And they ruined him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they certainly did. The first 17 lawyers. How many lawyers were there?

GEOFF SHEPARD: 60.

TUCKER CARLSON: How? 60 lawyers working full time on.

GEOFF SHEPARD: This, specially recruited because they hated Nixon. Archibald Cox is the first special prosecutor. He’s a labor lawyer from Harvard. He hires as his first hire James Vorenberg, who teaches criminal law. Vorenberg does two things. He says, I’m going to staff this place and I’m only going to hire people I know so we don’t have to worry about full field investigations. We got to get this thing up and running. And I’ll take back.

TUCKER CARLSON: In other words, background checks.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yeah, background check. Don’t have time for that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

GEOFF SHEPARD: I’ll take responsibility for keeping notes of how things unfold so I can write the report when we’re done. Because they didn’t know they’d win. So he takes notes at every staff meeting by hand. He takes them back to Harvard. They didn’t become available to public researchers until 2015.

Concealed Documents and Selective Prosecution

TUCKER CARLSON: How is that? That’s.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, Harvard didn’t make them available. I’d go up to the Treasure Room in the Harvard Law Library. I know the director well, and I would say, where are his papers? He’s dead. He’s died a long time ago. And I had a sentence in my second book, and I said, Harvard won’t disclose. And I called up to be sure the footnote was still valid, and they said, oh, we just opened them. So I went up.

TUCKER CARLSON: Let me ask you again. Who makes that decision?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Beats the heck out of me. Somebody at Harvard.

TUCKER CARLSON: These are all. I mean, these were lawyers being paid for with tax dollars, correct?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, absolutely. On government time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, you know.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why does Harvard have a right to keep documents produced at our expense secret in their archive? Like, I don’t. I don’t get that at all.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, on the Harvard story, I came down and told the archives. They got these records, and the archives is chicken to go challenge Harvard, go demand those papers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Harvard likes the National Archives. Federal Archives.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Federal Archives. Now Jaworski’s papers. He took them back to Texas. You aren’t supposed to take papers, Tucker. You’re absolutely right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I think Trump got indicted for that.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, I think he did, but. But Joe didn’t. So you see how that works out. Trump did, but Joe didn’t. That’s kind of like Watergate.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The Origins of Lawfare

GEOFF SHEPARD: I say lawfare didn’t start with Trump. The origin of lawfare was Watergate, where every decision was made against Nixon and his people. I told you. Chuck Colson, who should never have been indicted. Well, Howard Hunt’s lawyer, Bill Bittman, was a very prominent Democrat, a Democrat icon. He’s guilty as hell. He was running the cover-up from the lawyer’s point of view, never indicted.

And in the notes in the meetings where they’re making those decisions, the prosecution team says, he’s guilty as hell. And Leon Jaworski, who’s a Texan, a Lyndon Johnson protege, says no. If we indict Bittman, it’ll ruin him. You’ve got to be positive that he’s guilty before I’ll sign an indictment. In light of what he’s done. It’s in the notes. In light of what he’s done for us as Democrats, I don’t want him indicted. So, again, open and shut in writing documents showing political persuasion on who got indicted and who doesn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m just fascinated by. There were 60 lawyers paid for by taxpayers.

GEOFF SHEPARD: I have their names in my first book.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who are some of them?

GEOFF SHEPARD: They’re not famous.

TUCKER CARLSON: None of them went on to.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, no, there are famous members of our class, but they weren’t involved in Watergate. Kimba Wood is a 2nd Circuit judge.

TUCKER CARLSON: Kimba Wood was nominated to the Supreme Court.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes. No, be Attorney General.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m so sorry.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Prettiest girl you’ve ever laid eyes on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Bill. Bill Clinton.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And then Lou Kaplan. Lou Kaplan is the one who recently decided the Carol Jane defamation case where the assessor. Oh, he’s.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he was one of the 60 lawyers.

GEOFF SHEPARD: No, he’s in my Harvard Law School.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m sorry. No, no, I’m.

The Watergate Investigation Team

GEOFF SHEPARD: We’re trying to get famous lawyers. No, I mean Bill. Bill Weld. Now, this is a perfect example of what happened to me. Bill Weld’s in my class. Or within a year or two when I would go out and crew, you know, row for relaxation on the Charles River. I check the shell out of the Weld boathouse.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah.

GEOFF SHEPARD: There are three buildings on the Harvard campus named after Weld. He’s the 18th Weld to attend Harvard. And here comes Jeff. Jeff from nowhere, out of Whittier College and Irvine Ranch. I mean, just thrown in a lion’s den with the preppies and the guys who went to the white shoe schools.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, not the preppies.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Not like you. So can I.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I just ask. Bill Weld is a buffoon, unfortunately. Sad buffoon, but I just can’t believe there were 60 lawyers on this case against Nixon. That just seems like an extraordinarily large number of lawyers.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, they stopped announcing them. The reason I was able to piece it together is they show in their report the names of the staff, but they don’t include whether they were a lawyer or not. So you’ve got to Google each and every name and see if you can come up with somebody from Harvard or Yale.

TUCKER CARLSON: And who were they all, would you say? Democratic partisans?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, they had to be to get hired. There’s one guy who’s nominally a Republican, Phil Lacovara, but he’s never been in a Republican administration. It’s very strange. How could you say, yes, I’m a die-hard Republican, but you’ve never served.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you bring that guy in for the same reason you bring Liz Cheney in to say this is.

Behind-the-Scenes Revelations

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, except. Except Phil Lacovara was number one in his class at Columbia and is coming from the Solicitor General’s office and is ranking number two and a half in the special prosecutor’s office. He takes his files with him when he leaves. Now he’s still alive. He quits flamboyantly over the Ford pardon. And he says “I will not be a party to prosecuting Nixon’s staff when Nixon got off scot-free.” Now, that’s a man of principle.

But he’s the one that wrote the memo that said, you can’t indict Chuck Colson on a 50-50 assumption of conviction. He’s the one that writes a memo. I have all these because he gave them back in 2020, gave them all the files he’d taken with him back to archives. And I happened to be having lunch with the archivist most responsible for the prosecutor’s documents. And he said, “Oh, we got Phil Lacovara’s papers.” And I said, “Do you need a FOIA request? I’d love to look through them.” He said, “You don’t have to. He just gave them to us. We’ve got them now.”

When you look at them and you get to look at the originals, you know, I’m not going to destroy anything. It’s obvious they’ve been stored in the basement somewhere because the staples have rusted a little bit and stained the paper. So they’ve gone through it and they’ve made photocopies. So you’re not looking at the actual originals.

But he has one memo in there saying, “We just got the dissent on the effort to get Sirica thrown off the case. And it’s a good dissent. And I’m really worried about that issue, the issue of recusal. We should never have let Sirica name himself to preside over the second trial. But since we’ve crossed that bridge, there’s no turning back now.”

So you can say in writing, even the top prosecutors knew Sirica should not have been allowed to appoint himself to preside over the trial. When he did, we objected. We took it up on appeal. He’s too tainted. You can’t use him. And the ACLU submitted an amicus brief, the American Civil Liberties Union, and said, “We put this brief in because the defendants deserve an unbiased judge. And they’ve asked for a hearing on whether Sirica has met privately with the prosecutors.” Now, we know he’d met at least seven times with these prosecutors. He’d met with Cox, he’d met with Silbert, he met with Jaworski.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s absolutely crazy.

Judicial Corruption Exposed

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, it’s absolutely crazy that they wrote memos about it. And we went up to the court and said, we got to have this hearing. And the court rules, this is the D.C. circuit. Without allowing the opportunity for oral argument in a per curiam that’s unsigned, one sentence holding, motion denied. Cannot have an evidentiary hearing at that point. The fix is in. You know why the fix was in.

It just gets worse and worse. Archibald Cox, the first special prosecutor, became so worried that Sirica was doing these crazy rulings on behalf of the prosecutors that they’d win at trial but lose on appeal. He was the most reversed judge on appeal because of his ignorance unacceptability of defendants’ rights.

So Cox goes to see the chief Judge of the D.C. circuit, David Bazelon, and he says, “I tell you what, there’s five liberals on your court and there’s four non-liberals. It’s a nine-man court. The normal appeal will be heard by three judges. That’s how we do appeals. You’re guaranteed an appeal, but it’s three judges. We could end up with two Republicans and maybe Sirica would be overturned. These are crazy rulings. But if you hold all hearings on Sirica’s cases en banc, the whole nine judges, then you’ll always be in control and Sirica can always be upheld.”

Okay, so you can look at the 12 criminal appeals from Judge Sirica. Never before or since in any federal court in our nation’s history. They’re all heard en banc from the very outset, never done before.

TUCKER CARLSON: So all nine judges hear every one because the partisan breakdown guarantees that Sirica will be upheld every time.

GEOFF SHEPARD: You’ve got it.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Bazelon, what was his role? Was that his suggestion?

GEOFF SHEPARD: He’s chief judge. Well, Cox goes to see Bazelon. Okay. Now what adds spice to life?

TUCKER CARLSON: Is Bazelon corrupt? That sounds like a corrupt conversation to me.

The Law Clerk’s Testimony

GEOFF SHEPARD: It’s absolutely corrupt. But what adds spice to life is the law clerk is in the room. The law clerk hears this conversation. How to stack the deck on appeal. Bazelon doesn’t agree, but he follows through. Later when the appeals come, that law clerk told one person, nearest we can reconstruct. This has been a lot of effort. One person. And that person was about to be sworn in to the D.C. circuit.

And he said, “You know, there was this one time when the court corruption really came through.” That judge told me that story. And he told me that story on June 17, 2008 in the lobby of the Metropolitan Club. My book was coming out that day and I happened to run into the judge, good friend, I’ll tell you his name in a minute. Good friend. And he was going to come to the book launch which was being held at the spy museum. I mean, my first book was going to be fun.

And he said, “You know, what happened? What happened is Cox went to see Bazelon and told her how to stack the deck.” And I said, “By God, that’s the missing link.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, I’ve got all these crazy decisions by Sirica. But he was always upheld on appeal, and I can’t figure it out.” He said, “Well, now you do. But don’t quote me. This is a sensitive… It was in the lobby of the Metropolitan Club. This is a private conversation. I don’t want the heat from telling you that story.”

TUCKER CARLSON: So in 2008, referring back to 1973 or 4?

GEOFF SHEPARD: 4. Well, no, 73.

TUCKER CARLSON: 73, yeah. And he’s still worried about it?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, very much so. Now, the guy is Carr. First name might be Robert, might be Bob. Bill. But his last name is Carr C-A-R-R. And he was Bazelon’s law clerk. The judge is Larry Silberman.

TUCKER CARLSON: No way.

The Silberman Connection

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, most prominent Republican on the D.C. circuit. He was deputy Attorney General during Watergate’s unfolding. And Larry and I talked every day, regardless of the crisis.

TUCKER CARLSON: What a nice man he was.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, what a wonderful person. Regardless of the crisis. The White House has to talk to the Department of Justice. There’s stuff that can’t be put off. And Larry and I would kid each other that we held the nation together during the worst days. Toward the end of Watergate, talked every day.

I begged Larry to let me get somebody else. Who the law clerk talk to. His law school roommate was on the D.C. circuit, Ginsburg, Richard Ginsburg. And Larry said, “I’ve checked. He didn’t tell Ginsburg.” Now, what about his wife? His wife was a lawyer. If he told you, he told somebody else. He said, “No, didn’t happen.” So I interviewed the wife. Didn’t know a thing about it. So I put it in the book without attribution, that the fix was in.

Years go by, and my third book comes out, and I go down to see Larry. He’s a good friend. And I say, “Larry, what I want you to do is call up Merrick Garland and tell him I know what I’m talking about. That the Department of Justice ought to look into this stuff. This stuff I’ve uncovered is incredible.” He says, “I’m not talking to him. I don’t like what he’s done. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. What you ought to do is have the Federalist Society put on a seminar about this, about what you’ve discovered.” And he’s on the board, and I said, “Will you participate?” And he looks off and he says, “Yeah, I’ll participate in your seminar.”

So we get ready, and it’s on film. It’s available. And he says, “Now what do you want me to say other than the Bazelon event?” He’s now eager to get that on the record. And we have it on film. And he describes just what I told you, that the clerk was there, the setup. Cox went in the setup.

And then he says, “Now I’ve asked today’s clerk of court for the record. You don’t just move to go en banc from the beginning without a vote of the judges. There’s got to be discussion. And I asked the clerk for the record.” He said the clerk took a long time looking and he came back and he said, “There’s no record. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. Bazelon just did it without notice to the minority judges.”

TUCKER CARLSON: That is so corrupt. For a prosecutor to rig the appeals process with a judge is just Africa. I mean, that’s just next level.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

Hillary Clinton’s Role in Watergate

TUCKER CARLSON: So what role did Hillary Clinton, then, Hillary Rodham, play in Watergate?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, there’s a book, the book is called “The Crime Without Honor, the Crimes of Camelot and the Fall of Richard Nixon,” written in the 1990s by the former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee. And he describes terrible things about Hillary Clinton.

And the one that I find the most interesting, she’s a very recent graduate of Yale Law School, Hillary Rodham. And he says the staffer running the impeachment inquiry, John Doerr, was beholden to a professor at Yale Law School, Burke Marshall, who was going to be Ted Kennedy’s Attorney General if he won. Okay, so Hillary Rodham was a recent graduate of Yale, and she was a go-between. She was carrying messages back and forth between these two people.

And she did things that were hugely political. For example, the Republican minority on the impeachment inquiry kept demanding comparability. What about acts by other presidents? You say Nixon abused power, that he’s responsible for abuse of power. What about other presidents? How did they respond to allegations of abuse?

So Hillary’s assigned the project. She goes back up to Yale and lines up the chairman of the Yale history department, C. Van Woodward, and he gets four other history professors, and they work round the clock to research and write up every president from Lyndon Johnson back to George Washington and how they interacted with the Congress. And of course, there’s always tension between the two branches. Allegations of abuse. Thomas Jefferson won’t build the submarine. Well, that’s abuse. We gave the money. You can’t sequester. He wants to fire somebody. Well, we like that body. We don’t want him to fire them.

So they produce this manuscript which looks too good for Richard Nixon. It says these tensions between the two branches have gone on since its founding. So they suppress it. They do not share it with the Republican minority, particularly Congressman Wiggins out of California, who is Nixon’s principal defender on the House Judiciary.

TUCKER CARLSON: And this is a document produced with federal money?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, absolutely, without question. I don’t know that they paid them, but Hillary’s trips back and all the communication.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s part of it. It’s part of the judicial system. It’s part of our justice system.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, yes, but this is the impeachment inquiry by the House, of.

TUCKER CARLSON: Course, but it’s not some freelance project.

The Truth About Watergate: Suppressed Evidence and Political Prosecution

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh no. Oh no, this is, this is. But they suppress it, surely and it never comes up. We decided it wouldn’t be helpful for them to see this stuff. That’s what Rodino and Hillary say. Months later, the professors are pretty damn proud about their work product. You know, they did this big study and they publish it as a book out of nowhere. I happen to have a copy of the book.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct,” with C. Van Wood writing the introduction. Interesting. Does that come out before Nixon’s resignation?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Oh, after, after. Of course. Of course it comes out after. It would have been helpful if it had come out before.

TUCKER CARLSON: So Hillary Clinton works for who?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Technically she reports to John Doar, who is the head of the combined impeachment staff. I think there were 45 lawyers on the combined impeachment staff. I think they were specially hired by Doar. The person you want to read is a lady named Renata Adler who was on the staff at the time, then went to Yale Law School and then became a writer. And she wrote one article about the first year reunion of the impeachment staff. And she said, “You know, seems to me in retrospect it was something of a cover up. Nobody told us about what came out under the Church Committee.” The Church Committee was a Watergate reform.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: To look into the abuse and misuse of the CIA and the FBI. They looked at international and domestic. And she says, “The only thing I can think was we were part of a cover up because we weren’t told about any of that. And that would have changed everything.”

And then there’s another article she did when she was editor of New York magazine, and she wrote a book about the last great days of the New York magazine. And she said in the book, “I refused to run a review of John Sirica’s book because he was so corrupt.” And his son was working for Newsday and the New York Times and others responded badly. And so she licked her wounds. And then she published an article just dumping all over John Sirica. You know, his parents were bootleggers. He intentionally tossed the first 13 cases he was supposed to try under the Volstead Act. He dropped out of law school twice. He was an organizer of boxing matches in the district when it was illegal. He’s just a terrible, terrible guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sounds like a criminal.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, it does sound like he did criminal activities. He said that nobody was more surprised than he was when he passed the bar. He’d already moved to Florida to resume his semi-pro boxing career. And then he shows up as this petty tyrant, you know, and he does all these really strange rulings. As a judge, he may as well have sat at the prosecutor’s table.

Parallels Between Watergate and Modern Political Prosecutions

TUCKER CARLSON: So what is this? I mean, this is also amazing. I thought I knew a lot about this. I didn’t. As you’ve watched the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump as he becomes the Republican nominee, have you noticed similarities between what you’re seeing now and what you saw 50 years ago?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yeah, I call them parallels. But it’s just unbelievable, the parallels. And I don’t like to write about Trump because I don’t have any inside information.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: But the suspicion is there based on what I’ve proven about what happened in Nixon. So the J6 committee is loaded with Democrats. Trump has no representative on the committee, nominal Republicans, but no defendant representative like Adam Kinzinger. They don’t look at why the Capitol was unguarded. They start at a certain point and go forward. They’ve misplaced or lost records that would appear to be helpful to Trump people, but, oh, they’re gone. We don’t have those interviews.

The charges – I think this is astonishing. Just astonishing. Trump is tried in New York and they got to get a felony in order to have an extended statute of limitations. The fix is in from the beginning. The defenders don’t know the charge against Trump until the prosecutor’s summation at the end of the trial. Yes, you faked your accounting, but there has to be another felony and they didn’t name the other felony. So today it’s one of three. Doesn’t have to be a majority of the jury. That’s why it’s on appeal.

The prosecutors decided in a secret meeting with Sirica that the law was too unclear as to whether you could indict a sitting president. It’s assumed today, but there’s no decision. So they decided, rather than litigate that, let’s take all the evidence that we’ve gathered to indict Nixon, send it to the House Judiciary Committee so they can impeach Richard Nixon.

Now, there’s different standards on indictment. Only prosecutors have access to grand juries. Grand juries are something like a star chamber. It’s conducted in secret. Your attorney can’t be in the room with you. You can’t put on your own evidence. You can’t cross-examine witnesses. You don’t know what they said about you when you get there. You don’t know what they said about you when you leave. So it is a horror show if it becomes used for political purposes.

Congress doesn’t have access to a grand jury. So Congress in its investigations is limited. Here’s these specially recruited special prosecutors. And they say what we know, the House Judiciary can’t find out. We could only do it with a grand jury. Now, parallel to your grand jury operating in secret. And it’s got to stay secret forever. What the witnesses say, you know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: By federal law, no exceptions. In essence, no exceptions. But when you go to prove that in court, same evidence, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments come into play.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Got to be sworn testimony, got to be evidence, got to be cross-examination, got to be a public trial, got to be a jury of your peers. All this stuff. So it balances out, even though the grand jury is a holy terror, particularly if you’re called. I’ve never been called in front of a grand jury, but it would terrify you.

What the prosecutors worked out – brilliant – was “Let’s send our evidence up to the House Judiciary Committee and we’ll call it a presentment.” Because the Fifth Amendment says you can’t be charged a federal crime except by presentment or indictment of a grand jury. Nobody’s really sure what presentment means. Let’s call it presentment. We’ll send it up.

Now for just a second, assume what the grand jury knows is garbage. It’s untested, okay? It shouldn’t be and should never see the light of day unless it’s going to have the counter tests. But they send it to House Judiciary and they say, “Oh, no. Got to be secret. Can’t be revealed to anybody.” So Nixon’s defenders don’t know what he’s been charged with.

Kind of out of nowhere, he’s charged as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate cover-up. Both special prosecutors said publicly we would never do that to Nixon because he’s named. But he can’t come into court to defend himself because he’s not charged. He’s unindicted. But they did it anyway and they sent it up there to the Hill.

Secret accusations of what Nixon did to cause them to name him a co-conspirator. That document is called the roadmap. Now, the roadmap is an outline of 55 pages. Fact: John Dean is named counsel to the President. Underline citation: John Dean’s grand jury testimony. Okay, fact, citation, fact, citation – 55 pages. But if you print out the citations mainly to Watergate tapes or grand jury testimony, two reams of paper.

I tell you, nobody reads the citations. They just took the facts as facts. They couldn’t prove Nixon had done anything wrong. They couldn’t prove that Nixon was personally involved in the cover-up. So they lied. They lied about it. They faked their evidence.

And it wasn’t until 2018, as a result of my court petition, that Beryl Howell, then chief Judge, unsealed the roadmap. So for the first time in 45 years, we could learn what Nixon was accused of having done that justified his removal. But at the time, his indictment, nothing short of incredible. And I’m the only one. You know, you get the impression I’ve drilled pretty deeply in this stuff. I’m the only one that had the knowledge to go back through and check all the citations and uncover way down in one of them, they fake it.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what’s so interesting is like they removed the President of the United States and nobody thought to demand an answer to the most simple question, which is, what exactly did he do wrong?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes, that is absolutely true.

TUCKER CARLSON: 45 years to find out.

GEOFF SHEPARD: We were told it was there. Trust us and move on.

Watergate Secrets Documentary

TUCKER CARLSON: Now, you know, we spent the Washington Post.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yeah, we spent a lot of time on this. And it’s complicated as it can be. Help is on the way. The 50th anniversary is the 8th of August. And we’ve produced and we’re releasing an hour-long documentary that summarizes all this.

Over the years, I’ve written three books. One is concentrating on the Kennedy people and how they orchestrated this. One is concentrating on Leon Jaworski’s internal files that describe all these secret meetings. And one centers on the roadmap and the fact that the Congress was lied to. And it’s complex and people can read the books, but they really ought to watch the movie.

And the movie is going to come out on our website www.WatergateSecrets.com and called the documentary “Watergate Secrets and Betrayals: Orchestrating Nixon’s Demise.” And it’s narrated by John O’Hurley and the genius is the guy who wrote it, George Bugatti, because he took my hugely detailed legal expressions and he put them into language that Americans can understand. Hit the high points so you can get an appreciation of what was going on.

Now we got there, this is funny. We got there because he wanted to produce a play on Nixon’s impeachment, okay? And here’s the playbill. It played off Broadway in August of 2021. And if you think about it for a second, you reduce all my books to an hour and a half play. You got to pick out the highlights and the words and be persuasive without taking up too much time.

Now what we’ve done, same thing, same people, is produce a serious documentary on those documents. And we started with a set of 24 that I put together for a production we did for the Hoover Institution about a year ago. And they are 24 internal memos that trace the ex parte meetings which are terribly wrong. The suppression of evidence that would have been helpful to the defense. The political naming of defendants. We only name Republicans, we don’t name Democrats. All laid out in these 24 worst memos. And we took a selection of that to put in the documentary.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask you. Thank you for saying that. And I’m going to watch it. I have two more questions for you. Both sort of broader questions, less precise. First is what did Nixon think of all of this? Do you have any idea?

GEOFF SHEPARD: He went to his grave not knowing what had been done to him. One of the great disappointments in life, not even suspecting what had been done. And so did Ehrlichman and Haldeman, so did, to a large extent, Chuck Colson. Chuck died much later, but I’ve uncovered what was simply not known.

Now I grant you your knowledge of and interest in the break-in and it looks peculiar. Good questions. But that’s not what sunk Richard Nixon. What sunk Richard Nixon was hugely biased lawfare, the perversion of the criminal justice system designed to drive Nixon from office to void his re-election and to imprison his top aides.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Nixon didn’t understand that?

GEOFF SHEPARD: No, no.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did he think happened? I mean he got…

The Definition of Tragedy

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, I’ll tell you what I thought and maybe that’s what he thought. Until I discovered these documents, I thought of Watergate as a tragedy. Let me read you the definition of tragedy. Greek tragedy. Okay. In Poetics, Aristotle’s book, he defines the ideal tragic hero as a man who’s highly renowned and prosperous, but not one who is preeminently virtuous and just. Whose misfortune is brought upon him not by vice or depravity, but by some error of judgment or frailty. And that’s Nixon.

And then there’s the interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy which envisions a setting in which a moral order reacts violently and convulsively against certain infractions. From this reaction comes the calamity which befalls the hero frequently way out of proportion to the infraction itself. And within this calamity there is a dominating impression of waste. You could say that’s Watergate too. And that’s what I believed.

I thought he should have resigned. I believe the smoking gun said what was properly interpreted as being a part of the cover-up. And then I started discovering these documents and I picture myself sometimes as a monk, you know, sitting up on a high topped desk in a monastery in the Middle Ages with a candle here, going through dusty manuscripts and discovering what we’ve been told is the opposite of what was written down at the time. The memos that I’ve uncovered are nothing short of incredible. And what distinguishes my work from allegations from suspicions today is I’ve got this paper trail nobody can refute. These documents are either at the National Archives, released on the web. You can go read them or up at Harvard. Who would question Harvard?

TUCKER CARLSON: But they were for me.

GEOFF SHEPARD: They’re handwritten notes from James Forenberg.

TUCKER CARLSON: But did, I mean, did you ever speak to Nixon after he left office?

Personal Interactions with Nixon

GEOFF SHEPARD: I did not. I went out for his groundbreaking, I went out for his funeral. I decided it was better not to remind him of my role on his defense team. Now remember, I’m just a staffer I’m just a kid, right? But he knew who I was. There’s this one happy sequence where Jerry Ford gets my name wrong and Nixon corrects him in the Cabinet Room on my name. So I mean that’s a pretty proud moment.

There’s another segment in the Cabinet Room where when we have the Republican leadership up and Nixon gets an odd feeling every once in a while and he starts talking about these really bright lawyers who are on the staff. And Jeff Shepard in particular is just, he works so hard and he’s so bright and he goes on and on and on. And Tom Korologos, recently passed away, great guy, starts writing down this fake newspaper called Leader News. And he’s got a picture – is this Shepard? Star rises enormously. So he’s got a handwritten shepherd with a crook and a sheep and the star and it says, “President praises Shepard 40 times. The Cabinet is at risk. Shepard’s going to get a chauffeured car, bigger office.” I mean just… And it was embarrassing, but it sure stoked my ego.

TUCKER CARLSON: I bet it did. So, but Nixon, I mean, I didn’t know Richard Nixon, but he did several interviews famously with David Frost, but others where this came up and he seemed not very bitter about it.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, but that’s self-control.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

Nixon’s Self-Control and Character

GEOFF SHEPARD: You know, one of the really interesting things about Nixon, he’s in the military, he’s in the Navy, goes to the Front Pacific and he sets up a hamburger stand, all this kind of stuff. But he plays poker and he comes home with $10,000 of winnings from poker that funds his first campaign. Okay. Now to be that good, you got to be able to read people and you got to prevent people from reading you. And nobody writes about that. They don’t understand. And for Nixon it was self-control.

So he says, I don’t blame John Dean for doing what he did. The guy brought down the presidency. But he makes himself say that. Now on his final speech on the morning where he’s going to go out and get on the helicopter, he’s announced the night before he’s going to resign. He’s saying goodbye to his staff. And I was there, pretty bitter because of that tape. But he says, you know, you just can’t be bitter if you’re bitter. If you return hatred, then you lose and the hatred will consume you. And at the time I thought it was just babble, you know, what do you say? But he was being sincere, he really believed that.

A couple of the truths, if I may. Nixon believed the truth was going to come out without question when he would allude to his prosecution or exposure of Alger Hiss as a Communist spy in 1946-47. The statute had run on his being a communist. What botched him up was his perjured testimony.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So Nixon would say from then on, remember Alger Hiss, anything you do, don’t perjure yourself. And in one of the tapes he says, because then you got two problems. You got the original problem and you got the problem that you perjured yourself.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So I know if people from the re-election committee had come in, which they didn’t, and said what do I do? He was, for God’s sakes, don’t lie. You know that just digs you in deeper. He was told by John Dean after the break-in that nobody on the White House staff knew. Completely clean. They built their whole defense on that. Dean neglected to remind them about his meetings in the Attorney General’s office.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So Nixon felt to the last day, we could put out a statement saying, I’m not involved and neither are my two top lieutenants, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They knew nothing. But then the game changed and Dean to get out from under, he says, “Ah, but there was a cover-up. I know there was a cover-up because I was running it and my word against theirs.” There’s no taping system with those guys. But you should trust me. I don’t see how you protect yourself from that. I mean they were hated in the press.

The Hatred of Nixon

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, and that’s my last question. And it has to do with Nixon, not just during Watergate or after his ’72 reelection, but really for the scope of his career going back to his case, which I may be answering my own question, but the hatred of Richard Nixon was like pathological. I mean, I don’t know how many books hating Nixon came out. Nixon is monster, Nazi, evil. What was that? Why the monomaniacal hatred of Richard Nixon?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, let’s hurry to today just for a second.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: An assassination attempt.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Worried there may be more. I don’t think people thought somebody was going to take a shot at him. They hated him. They blamed him. They dismissed him as a criminal. He couldn’t go out in public because he was so disliked. But I think they felt Richard Nixon, the man was the cause of all their problems with the dominance of the Democrat party. Let me show you what I mean, here’s a chart just to…

TUCKER CARLSON: Reset what you said. They believe that Nixon was personally cause of their problems as well.

Nixon’s Threat to Democratic Party Dominance

GEOFF SHEPARD: They were fading in dominance. Okay, so this chart shows the presidency and the control of the House and the Senate. Red is Republican, blue is Democrat from 1932.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s going back to the first years of the Depression. And what it shows, Roosevelt, of course.

GEOFF SHEPARD: They had three-fourths of the House and Senate. Roosevelt’s reelected four times. And just when Truman became president, they won. Republicans won for one session and when Eisenhower was elected, they won for one session. Those are the red blocks at the bottom. But then it reverted to total Democrat control and the Goldwater debacle in 1964 gave the Democrats 2/3 majority in both the House and the Senate. They ruled.

And who interrupts that? Well, Richard Nixon. Forget Eisenhower, he was a war hero. He could have run as a Democrat. Who did his dirty work? Richard Nixon. You could believe, I think wrongly, but you could believe if you were a Democrat that if you could get rid of Nixon the man, it would all go back to Democrat dominance, which is what it should be. You know, that’s what they believed.

TUCKER CARLSON: The way is what you’re saying.

The Democratic Strategy Against Republicans

GEOFF SHEPARD: He was certainly in the way. Now what they did, my first book about the Kennedy people, they set out to have three goals. They wanted to ruin Nixon and his people. Okay. They wanted to stop the Republican money machine. In those days Republicans had all the money. Democrats had all the unions.

There was a campaign committee set up in 1970 mid-year elections designed to elect more conservatives, whether they were Democrats or Republicans. And they raised a fair amount of money. The Democrats investigated that as part of what they’re going to do. And they sent FBI agents or IRS agents out to interview 150 Republican donors to this 1970 group called the Townhouse Project because it turned out it didn’t have a registered campaign treasurer. Okay. Nothing to do with Watergate at the time.

There was a federal law on campaigns called the Corrupt Practices Act of 1925. It wasn’t enforced anymore. The last prosecution was brought in 1934. The Department of Justice testified in 1972 that they had a policy of non-enforcement. But the special prosecutors re-erected it, sent their minions out, scared the living bejesus out of donors. Now if the IRS came to see you as a prominent donor next time around, you wouldn’t play. So they crippled the Republican money machine.

And then they launched investigations, internal investigations of every single potential Republican candidate for President in 1976 who would run against, they assumed Ted Kennedy. So they had Jerry Ford’s full field investigations. They didn’t do them, but Ford had to be confirmed by both the House and the Senate. It was the most thorough FBI investigation. They had the investigation. His vice president was Nelson Rockefeller. They had an investigation of Nelson Rockefeller.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did that find?

GEOFF SHEPARD: The allegation was he had given money in support of McGovern to throw the case on the Democrat side. And they, I mean, you talk about… There’s records investigating this. Ford tossed Rockefeller and named Bob Dole as his running mate. There’s an investigation of Bob Dole and Bob Dole had campaign irregularities. And finally, well, it was John Connolly. They indicted John Connolly for campaign abuse.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, bankrupted him in the end.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, they did. And then there’s Ronald Reagan, governor of California, 3,000 miles away, and there’s no file on Ronald Reagan. But there’s a memo that I published, I put in my first book. And the prosecutor says, “I just want to follow up on our hallway conversation and bring you up to date on where we are on the investigation of Ronald Reagan.” Now, I looked into it. Remember Ross Perot?

TUCKER CARLSON: Very well.

GEOFF SHEPARD: He had his computer company, EDS.

TUCKER CARLSON: EDS Electronic Data Systems.

GEOFF SHEPARD: He wanted contracts from Medicare. He got them to process the stuff.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And he asked Congress for help in getting those appointments to make his pitch. He didn’t get them first time around, but he also wanted California’s because it was huge. And the theory was he might have exercised undue influence in trying to get the California contract. “We’re just going to look into it just because he might be our opponent.” You know, you sit there and it curls your hair.

The Kennedy Assassination

TUCKER CARLSON: So let me ask one last question. I said I would only ask one more, but here’s my last question. So you show up in 1969 as a White House fellow at the Nixon White House.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s less than six years after the murder of John F. Kennedy.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you know, you’re in the building that Kennedy worked in. Did anyone talk about that in 1969 through ’75 when you left, did anybody say, you know, I think this Warren Commission thing’s a little weird?

GEOFF SHEPARD: No, that never came up in my presence, ever. What we did talk about was Nixon’s absolute paranoia that Ted Kennedy would emerge as his opponent in 1972 and they would steal his re-election just like they stole 1960. But I can’t remember a single conversation about the Warren Commission.

TUCKER CARLSON: How interesting.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Even when Jerry… I know you… You say you know, Jerry Ford got named. He was on the Warren Commission.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was.

GEOFF SHEPARD: And of course the Arlen Specter single bullet theory is simply bizarre.

TUCKER CARLSON: It is bizarre.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Simply bizarre.

TUCKER CARLSON: Rifle shooter. I’ll say that’s just false.

Nixon’s Perspective on the 1960 Election

GEOFF SHEPARD: But. Well, yes, on his cot in the hospital. But no discussion. But remember I’m very junior. I’m part of the governance group.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

GEOFF SHEPARD: No campaigning. I’m hatched. I never participated in any campaign and it’s absolute fluke that I got hired to do governance issues.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, and that’s why you’re still here unbowed. You know, that’s why I have a clearance from this.

GEOFF SHEPARD: But can I ask you.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you say now I keep. I’m not to ask you more questions. But. Okay, this is last one. So you said Nixon was worried that Kennedy would run against him in ’72 instead of McGovern and that they would steal the election as they had in 1960.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Two parter. Did Nixon sincerely believe that the ’60 election was stolen from him and was it?

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well, he believed there were grounds for investigation and he was urged even by President Eisenhower to challenge the outcome. Remember it’s Illinois and the late ballots from Mayor Daley and all the dead.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who voted in West Virginia and. Yeah.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Well that’s where they bought the primary.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEOFF SHEPARD: With Kennedy money in West Virginia and Texas where interestingly Leon Jaworski leads the defense and claims in Texas there’s no law, there’s no standing to come into Texas and claim that the election was stolen. That’s a fascinating comment.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor before.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Before this is in 1960. Right. But.

TUCKER CARLSON: But ultimately the one who brought down Nixon.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was 14 years before leading the defense.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of Jack Kennedy’s theft of the 1960 election in Texas.

The Watergate Prosecution and Its Aftermath

GEOFF SHEPARD: You know, there’s these currents and eddies. Leon Jaworski was captured by his staff. He went in and wanted to conduct a fair criminal investigation. That’s what he was hired to do. And he actually writes a memo to his deputy and says this place has got one theme. That Nixon must be reached at all cost. Those are his words and at all cost. I can’t even work with a staff. You guys are having meetings before you meet with me. So I only get one point of view. I’m not going to meet with you anymore. And then he gets rolled by his staff.

So we’re asking for two things. Last answer. Okay, we have a documentary. The documentary details everything that has been done. It’s not thorough, but, boy, it touches on the big stuff. Got three books. Three books contain all the documents we’re talking about and many more.

So what do we want from this interview? From knowledge that cheating occurred. We want two things. One, we want the Department of Justice to go in and disclose what the grand jury was told to convince them to name Nixon a co-conspirator. We’ve been demanding that since they did it. For 50 years. We’ve said, tell us what you told the grand jurors, because we don’t think you had anything on Dick Nixon. Maybe they won’t do it, but you can’t compel it.

TUCKER CARLSON: You can’t compel them to answer.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Grand juries love to help you, son, but grand jury information stays secret forever. Okay? That’s the law.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I thought, I’m not a lawyer.

GEOFF SHEPARD: When I brought my suit, if I may, when I brought my suit to disclose the road map, and I prevailed, the judge at the same time said she was going to rule against my motion to disclose the grand jury testimony. So the Department of Justice called me and said, we’ve been asked to prepare the order finding against you on that part of your petition. And I said, but I’m not looking for a witness. This is what the Department said.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that was my question, slash point. I mean, it’s one thing to protect.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: What the grand jurors say, they’re citizens who’ve been brought in to affect justice, one hopes, yes. But there’s no justification for keeping what government prosecutors say about an American citizen. Why should that ever be secret?

Seeking Justice and Transparency

GEOFF SHEPARD: Right. The judge, chief judge, told the Department she’s going to rule against me. So I said, well, I made the case, begged them. I said, okay, what if I withdraw it? So there’s not a decision against me, there’s just no decision. And they eagerly accepted that. So today as we sit here, we don’t know what they told the grand jurors. And accusing Richard Nixon of an indictable offense.

TUCKER CARLSON: Pretty much everyone’s dead, I’m sure.

GEOFF SHEPARD: So, well, yeah, but we still want to know. Second thing, there is a post-Watergate reform at the Department of Justice, a unit set up whose only responsibility is to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by Justice Department lawyers. It’s called the Office of Professional Responsibility, was founded the year after Watergate. Okay. Didn’t exist during Watergate.

I learned about it about a year and a half ago, I immediately filed asking for a review of the prosecutors. Look what they did. And I followed it up with 11 letters. Let me come down and explain. This is complex. I got all the paperwork. Please let me come make the case.

One year passes, I get a letter. “Thank you for your interest in the enforcement of the laws. It’s been a long time. These lawyers aren’t here anymore. We’re busy doing other things. And we take no responsibility for the special prosecutors because subsequent to the special prosecution force, they enacted the independent counsel law and we deem them to have operated under that. The Department of Justice is simply not involved.”

And I sent—it’s posted on my website—and I sent back a letter and I said, “Here’s your stationary for your letters and your internal memos saying Department of Justice, of course. Don’t tell me you don’t take.”

So what we hope to interest and anger the American public, look at what we’ve uncovered, watch the documentary, read the books, go on my website and look at all the documents. We hope there’s a new administration at the Department of Justice who’s willing to look into this. Because if they look into it, you know, it’s open and shut.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, just disclose it. Just disclose it. You’re good at looking into it, obviously.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Absolutely true.

TUCKER CARLSON: Geoff Shepard, I really appreciate your taking all this time and explaining that this has been fun.

GEOFF SHEPARD: I appreciate the opportunity. Tucker, thank you.

TUCKER CARLSON: This has been amazing.

GEOFF SHEPARD: Thank you for having me on.

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