Fifty-two years after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, The Tennessee Star’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy said a growing reassessment of the former president’s legacy is challenging the conventional narrative surrounding his downfall.
On Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Leahy pointed to an August 9 article from the Nixon Foundation by Ken Khachigian, a former Nixon adviser, as evidence of what he described as a broader resurgence of interest in the 37th president.
Leahy said, “52 years ago yesterday, August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned and left the presidency in disgrace. But 52 years and one day later, things are turning around. As an example, there’s this thing called Nixonmaxxing.”
Khachigian, who served in the Nixon administration and later worked with the former president on his memoirs, argued in the Nixon Foundation article that Nixon’s resignation was not the end of his political influence. He pointed to what he described as a renewed interest among younger Americans in Nixon’s presidency and the circumstances surrounding Watergate.
Leahy connected that reassessment to his own work examining the legal proceedings surrounding Watergate.
“One year ago today, we released our documentary, How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon,” Leahy said. “But now today, after working for a year, I can tell you that our e-book will be released next week, How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon.”
Leahy said the documentary and forthcoming e-book focus on what he characterizes as 12 due process violations involving Nixon and several Watergate defendants, including former Attorney General John Mitchell, former presidential counsel John Ehrlichman, and former White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman.
“The key to this is…a dozen due process violations of the rights of President Nixon and Watergate defendants John Mitchell, former attorney general, John Ehrlichman, counselor to the president, and H.R. Haldeman, the chief of staff,” Leahy said. “And you look at these due process violations and you go, ‘Are you kidding me? These guys did not get a fair trial at all.’”
Leahy specifically highlighted allegations involving former federal Judge John Sirica and journalist Clark Mollenhoff, saying the two held meetings concerning the Watergate proceedings.
“From the very beginning, even before the trial of the burglars began in the fall of 1972, Judge Sirica and Clark Mollenhoff would hold illegal ex parte meetings where Mollenhoff would talk to Sirica about what he had to do as a judge,” Leahy said.
Leahy also argued that the appointment of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox created a prosecutorial structure hostile to Nixon.
“They brought in a prosecutor who’d been part of the Kennedy Johnson Department of Justice who hated Richard Nixon, and he brought in all their buddies, and that was the team that functioned as almost the old Department of Justice under the previous administration that had lost the election,” he noted. “And they went after Nixon tooth and nail.”
Khachigian similarly argued in his Nixon Foundation essay that the Watergate prosecution involved improper interactions between the judge overseeing the case and prosecutors. He wrote that Geoff Shepard, another former Nixon legal adviser, uncovered records that he said show the judge had repeated contacts with the prosecution without defense counsel present.
Leahy said his examination of Watergate ultimately points toward a potential posthumous pardon for Nixon’s top aides.
“Quite frankly, where this is headed is a posthumous pardon for Attorney General Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, and H.R. Haldeman,” Leahy said.
He concluded the alleged violations were so egregious that, in his view, “if they had been illegal aliens today, they would’ve been released and never gone to trial.”
Leahy’s e-book, How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon, is scheduled for release next week and will be bundled with the 90-minute documentary examining the alleged due process violations surrounding Watergate.
Tune in now to The Michael Patrick Leahy Show – your AMERICA FIRST news talk!
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– Read more at @TheTNStar https://t.co/flKnbOwiF2— Michael Patrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) August 10, 2026
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
