Vance peddles Watergate nonsense as White House tries to rewrite Nixon-era scandal

For those who support the integrity of the historical record, especially as it relates to Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, it has been an unfortunate week. In fact, it was earlier this week when Ed Martin, Donald Trump’s highly controversial U.S. pardon attorney, published a bizarre item to social media, arguing that the scandal was a “hoax” orchestrated in part by the CIA.

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Martin added, “The only thing worse than the lying CIA is the two-faced liar John Dean [who served as Nixon’s White House counsel] and the fiction-writer [Bob] Woodward. May they suffer in eternity.”

The Republican activist’s claims were ridiculous, but hours later they were nevertheless endorsed by Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who currently serves as the Trump administration’s chief of protocol. “President Nixon was the target of a Deep State hoax,” Crowley wrote online while referencing Martin’s tweet. “He will be vindicated.”

Days later, JD Vance appeared at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, where the vice president kept the rhetorical campaign going.

After arguing that Nixon’s legacy is “enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” the Ohio Republican said, “As I joked … backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

As part of the same comments, Vance argued in apparent seriousness, “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

There are a few ways to look at comments like these.

First, the idea that Watergate wouldn’t have endured as a major political scandal may very well be true. In 1973 and 1974, there were still a significant number of congressional Republicans willing to turn against a corrupt Republican president in the face of overwhelming evidence; major media outlets aligned with the White House didn’t really exist; and it was an era in which there was greater accountability for political wrongdoing.

But what the vice president described was more an indictment of our twisted political culture and less a credible effort to downplay the seriousness of Watergate.

Second, the idea that Nixon was brought down by nefarious government insiders who plotted against him is plainly bonkers. We have, after all, heard the tapes. Nixon chose to engage in systemic abuses. His crimes were his own, not the fault of “the deep state,” whether Vance chooses to acknowledge reality or not.

Historian and journalist Garrett Graff, who wrote one of the defining books about Watergate, described Vance’s comments as “shockingly a-historical” and an “immature understanding of what Watergate was and wasn’t.”