Former Nixon White House attorney and longtime Watergate researcher Geoff Shepard said the Watergate defendants were denied the fair trials guaranteed to them under the U.S. Constitution, arguing documents he uncovered show prosecutors and federal judges engaged in improper conduct during the proceedings.
Shepard detailed his research during an appearance Wednesday on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show about Leahy’s new eBook and documentary, How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon.
Leahy’s project is based on Shepard’s decades of research into the Watergate prosecutions.
Shepard praised Leahy’s work during the interview, saying Leahy had “extracted the essence of what was wrong with the trials.”
“Your book and that part of my argument doesn’t say they weren’t, there weren’t crooks. There were,” Shepard said. “The issue was, did they get a fair trial?”
“What your book is all about is detailing how they were denied the fair trial guaranteed to them by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments,” he added.
Shepard said his research has uncovered documents that he believes demonstrate prosecutors and Judge John Sirica, who presided over the Watergate trials, engaged in secret meetings.
“They had a biased judge. They had prosecutors who were meeting secretly with the biased judge, and what’s so exciting from my perspective, we lost,” Shepard said. “We lost big time. But they left a paper trail, and I’ve uncovered these documents that detail what they were doing to deny these defendants their rights.”
Shepard described one meeting between Sirica and Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski as particularly significant. According to Shepard, the two met privately in Sirica’s jury room on February 11, 1974, as the special prosecutor prepared to bring indictments in the Watergate cover-up case.
Sirica, Shepard said, wanted the indictments issued before his 70th birthday so he could appoint himself to preside over the trial.
“He’s gonna fix these guys good,” Shepard said. “So you couldn’t find a more biased judge to preside over the coverup trial than John Sirica.”
Shepard said the alleged arrangement also involved a request for “special handling” that could remove the case from the normal judicial rotation and allow Sirica to select himself as the judge.
“If we knew then about this secret meeting and this agreement that we will bring the indictment in time for you to name yourself, he couldn’t preside, and the prosecutors, the individuals involved in that, couldn’t prosecute,” Shepard said. “They’d be thrown off the case for violating the due process, the fair trial requirement for the defendants.”
Shepard also discussed what he characterized as a Brady Rule violation involving a grand jury report known as the “roadmap.” He explained that prosecutors generally have an obligation to turn over evidence that could help the defense.
“They’ve got all the cards and all the time and all the money and all the witnesses and they’re really not win at any cost,” Shepard said. “They’ve got to share if they come across evidence that would help you.”
According to Shepard, Haldeman’s attorney, John Wilson, sent a three-sentence letter to Sirica questioning whether the judge had been meeting secretly with prosecutors after the grand jury report appeared unexpectedly.
Shepard said the letter was significant because it put a Brady obligation on prosecutors who allegedly knew about the meetings.
“He thinks that little note is the biggest ticking time bomb in the whole thing,” Shepard said, referring to a criminal-procedure professor with whom he worked at George Washington University. “Because it put a Brady obligation on at least five and maybe 10 special prosecutors to come forward and say, ‘We know he’s been meeting secretly with our colleagues.’”
“Of course not,” Shepard said when Leahy asked whether the prosecutors came forward.
Shepard said the evidence remained unknown to the public for decades because the relevant documents were not available until later.
“All of these meetings were unknown,” he said. “We didn’t have cameras everywhere. And so nobody knew that they’d been secretly meeting with the judge.”
Shepard said he focuses his research on contemporaneous documents rather than relying primarily on interviews with people decades after the events.
“I don’t care to interview people today on what they did 50 years ago. What I care about is what they wrote 50 years ago,” Shepard said.
When Leahy suggested that former prosecutors could simply claim they did not remember what happened, Shepard responded, “They’re gonna say they don’t remember. They just don’t remember.”
But Shepard added, “They can’t challenge the documents. They’re publicly available at the National Archives.”
Shepard has consistently argued on Leahy’s show that the central question surrounding Watergate should not simply be whether some defendants committed crimes, but whether they received constitutionally fair trials.
“If you wanna think about these guys, guilty or not, they didn’t get fair trials,” Shepard said during an appearance last week on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. “The Watergate defendants did not get anything remotely close, and Michael’s proving it with his book and this dirty dozen of due process violations.”
The How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon eBook and documentary bundle is currently offered for $9.95 through Leahy’s website.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
