#watergate

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

Cronyism, politicization and outright weaponization of the Justice Department have become so routine in Trump’s second term that the scale is hard to comprehend. New abuses, attacks and crimes by the White House and its enablers land in rapid succession, and they usually register individually rather than as parts of a pattern. That pattern is why Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general carries such grave weight. Critics and former officials warn that Blanche now effectively has free rein at the Justice Department, now that he is no longer angling for the job and forced to appease critics and skeptics in the Senate. He is fully empowered to pursue Trump’s agenda, and there is little to hold him back. We already know where his priorities and loyalties lie. Asked at an April press conference whether he wanted the attorney general job permanently, Blanche said, “I did not ask for this job. I love working for President Trump.” Pressed on what would happen if Trump chose someone else, Blanche said he would respond, “Thank you very much. I love you, sir.”

Cultish devotion of that sort—from the man who spent 16 months as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before joining the department—is an organizing principle. It will underlie all of the DOJ’s decisions in the coming years about prosecutions, self-dealing, transparency and even our elections. Rather than throw up our hands and surrender to the storm, we can chart a path above its dark clouds. From there, we can make some predictions about what’s coming straight for us and our democracy now that Blanche is helming the DOJ. We can in fact sort his likely behavior into four large buckets.

But first, in order to get our bearings, it’s helpful to remember what the DOJ is supposed to be. We begin some 50 years ago, in the wake of the previous worst scandal of the modern U.S. presidency.

The reforms Blanche is dismantling

Historically, the Justice Department has not had a clean track record. Even before Nixon, the DOJ was implicated in abuses and scandals. As Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer noted, Woodrow Wilson’s AG targeted socialists and communists, imprisoning thousands without due process. Harding’s AG was forced out amid allegations that he failed to investigate a corruption scandal linked to the interior secretary accepting bribes from oil interests. Bobby Kennedy, serving under JFK, authorized the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. Under Richard Nixon, however, the DOJ truly became an instrument of the president’s personal grievances. Attorney General John Mitchell, who had also run Nixon’s re-election campaign, oversaw illegal wiretaps of anti-war activists, leaked damaging information about Nixon’s political opponents and worked to block publication of the Pentagon Papers before resigning to lead the Nixon re-election committee later implicated in the Watergate break-in.

Nixon’s resignation in 1974 left the department’s credibility in ruins. Gerald Ford’s response was to install Edward H. Levi, a University of Chicago law scholar with no political ambitions of his own, specifically to rebuild the DOJ as a nonpartisan institution the public could trust. At his 1975 swearing-in, Levi told the department that “our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” and warned that nothing could more endanger the country than failing to make that true by word and deed.

Levi spent the next two years building the guardrails that defined DOJ independence for the next half-century. He established early limits on White House contacts with a policy limiting communication between the department and the president on pending matters. He created the Office of Professional Responsibility to police the DOJ’s own attorneys. And he initiated the work that led to the Principles of Federal Prosecution, implemented later by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, which hold that charging decisions should follow the evidence rather than the target’s politics. Every administration since Ford maintained some version of these guardrails for the next 50 years. Until Trump came along.

Weaponized prosecutions and the Principles of Federal Prosecution

The first Blanche bucket carries the slop of Trump’s personal grievances against his political enemies. Here, the Principles of Federal Prosecution bear directly on the pattern we are seeing from this DOJ. And those principles will likely continue to expose Blanche’s politicized prosecution decisions for what they are. Under those principles, a charging decision is supposed to arise from the evidence, not the defendant’s politics. But Pam Bondi, and now Todd Blanche, moved in precisely the opposite direction. Since Blanche took the deputy attorney general post in 2025 and the acting AG role in April, the department has pursued criminal investigations or prosecutions against a lengthening list of Trump’s perceived critics: former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, former FBI Director James Comey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).

Bondi’s failure to get any charges to stick against the people on this list contributed to her being pushed out of the job. Blanche no doubt understands that he has to deliver more than Bondi did in order to keep his boss happy. That may not be so simple. The problem both Bondi and Blanche face is institutional. Politicized prosecutions don’t go very well when career prosecutors won’t cooperate. The case against New York Attorney General Letitia James is a good example. After the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia resigned rather than press charges on a politicized case against James that lacked sufficient evidence, Trump installed his former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan. But she had no prior prosecutorial experience and little support from the office. She personally presented mortgage fraud charges against James to a grand jury and secured an indictment—though it was rife with issues. Not long after, however, a federal judge threw it out on the grounds that Halligan’s appointment itself was invalid. The department returned to a grand jury in Norfolk to refile the charges, but jurors there refused to indict—a rare rejection. Prosecutors tried a second time in Alexandria, before a different grand jury. Jurors refused again. Career prosecutors in New York also invoked the Principles of Federal Prosecution in the corruption case against then-Mayor Eric Adams. They were fired or resigned rather than carry out the DOJ’s order to drop corruption charges against Adams as part of what was reported as an arrangement trading dismissal for Adams’s cooperation with the White House on immigration enforcement.

The DOJ also struck out in its attempt to prosecute sitting lawmakers who challenged Trump’s unlawful military orders. Prosecutors asked a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. to indict Sens. Kelly and Slotkin, along with four House members, over a video in which the lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, reminded service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders. The grand jury refused, demonstrating that regular citizens can also smell a political witch hunt and abridgement of speech when presented with one. This year, while serving as acting attorney general, Blanche extended the White House’s target list beyond individual political enemies of Trump to include groups working to oppose his agenda. The DOJ brought charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization whose prosecution the ACLU describes as touching on nothing more than SPLC’s long-standing work tracking extremist groups. Disturbingly, a federal judge in Alabama, appointed by Trump, refused to dismiss the case, allowing the targeting and weaponization to continue while raising the stakes for organizations everywhere that stand against white supremacy, Christian nationalism and the abridgement of civil liberties.

[...]

The greatest risk of all

After losing the 2020 election, Trump and his allies pushed a series of escalating claims that the national vote had been stolen through systemic fraud. Attorney Sidney Powell alleged that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from Trump to Biden as part of a coordinated international conspiracy. Trump pressed the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate, and at one point a group discussed federalizing the effort outright. Advisers even went so far as drafting an executive order that would have appointed Powell as a special counsel with authority to seize state voting machines, while Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, publicly suggested the military could be used to “rerun” the election. Then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s response was a rare example of the department’s principles actually holding. The DOJ investigated the voting machine-tampering claim specifically and found nothing to support it. Barr told the AP in December 2020 there was no evidence machines had been programmed to skew the results, and separately said he saw “no basis right now for seizing machines by the federal government” when pressed on whether the DOJ would act on the executive order under discussion.

Barr testified to the Jan. 6th Committee that he told Trump directly the fraud claims were “crazy stuff” that were “doing a grave disservice to the country.” Trump’s own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, independently rejected the machine-seizure executive order as a “terrible idea,” telling colleagues in a late-night West Wing meeting, “That’s not how we do things in the United States.” In short, at least with respect to Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election, Barr continued to recognize the Principles of Federal Prosecution and required that evidence rather than politics guide his decision. That baseline produced an attorney general willing to tell the president no, even under direct pressure, because the department’s institutional integrity mattered more than the president’s preference. It held in 2020, albeit imperfectly and briefly, under a president who would go on to try to overturn the outcome anyway.

Ty Cobb, who served as special counsel to the president during Trump’s first term, argues the guardrail will not hold this time. Referencing Barr’s refusal directly, Cobb told Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo’s “Mehdi Unfiltered” that there is “no circumstance under which we shouldn’t expect Blanche to seize ballots and seize voting machines and try to interfere in the process of the upcoming election.” That warning must be our guiding assumption, and the documented record already points in that direction. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County’s election hub in Union City, Georgia, seizing between 656 and 700 boxes of materials from the 2020 election, including original ballots, tabulator tapes and ballot images. In April, a federal grand jury convened by the DOJ subpoenaed the Fulton County elections board for the personal information of election staff and volunteers. Notably, the DOJ has now lost 20 consecutive lawsuits seeking unredacted voter rolls from states, including a Colorado case dismissed with prejudice this month, out of lawsuits filed against more than 30 states and D.C. in total. Twelve of those 20 losses came from judges appointed by Republican presidents, and eight of those 12 came from judges Trump himself appointed. Unable to force compliance through the courts, Trump has turned repeatedly to the SAVE America Act to try to reshape voter eligibility rules ahead of the midterms. That effort has hit resistance in the Senate, where it has twice failed even to reach a simple majority: The vote was 48–50 in April and again in June, with the same four Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) — joining every Democrat in voting no, well short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Beyond the courtroom record, the DOJ continues to defend Trump’s anti-mail-voting executive order. Bondi and Blanche have both sent letters pressuring state officials over voter roll compliance, including one to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tying compliance to concerns about unrest in his state.

Jay Kuo, writing for The Big Picture, details how the DOJ under recently Senate-confirmed Todd Blanche’s reign will ramp up the politicized prosecutions of the Trump Regime’s enemies.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 9, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 10, 2026

On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat.

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers.

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files.

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote.

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed the bombshell news that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.

Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”

Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them. Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that ‘the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.’... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”

Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, but the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.

In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed three articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape that proved to be the “smoking gun” Republicans had demanded before they would impeach and convict Nixon. Recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, the tape was a recording of Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even if he hadn’t known of the crime itself—although the tape suggested that he had—Nixon clearly had been central to the cover-up. A delegation of Republican lawmakers went to the White House to tell Nixon that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

[Nixon’s resignation letter from the National Archives, public domain.]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN