JD Vance stood at the Nixon Presidential Library this summer and said Watergate would be a 12-hour news story today.
Now Trump's Justice Department is formally reviewing whether the prosecutors who brought Nixon down secretly rigged the case against him.
And what those files reveal about who the prosecutors were secretly meeting with is what Biden spent two years burying.
Biden Spent Two Years Blocking the Watergate Lawfare Review
In October 2021, Geoff Shepard – a former Nixon White House attorney who spent more than a decade digging through government archives – filed a formal misconduct complaint with the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.
Biden's DOJ said no.
The Biden administration officially rejected the request in 2022, leaving Shepard's evidence untouched and unexamined.
Shepard had unearthed four separate caches of internal documents at the National Archives – materials from inside the very prosecution team that destroyed Nixon, files Nixon's own defense attorneys never got to see.
Last month, a senior Trump DOJ official invited Shepard to Justice Department headquarters.
He spent two hours with OPR attorneys on September 21 walking them through a 78-page slide deck titled "Watergate As Lawfare."
Biden buried it. Trump answered the phone.
Watergate Prosecutors Had Secret Meetings With the Judge and Nixon Never Knew
Here's what Shepard found inside the Watergate Special Prosecution Force's own internal records.
Special prosecutors Archibald Cox and his successor Leon Jaworski held secret ex parte meetings with Judge John Sirica – the very judge presiding over their trials – and with Judge Gerhard Gesell.
That's not interpretation or conspiracy theory.
It's documented in memos the prosecutors wrote themselves and left in the National Archives.
Ex parte contact – a prosecutor privately meeting with a judge to discuss a pending case, without the defense present – is one of the most serious due process violations in American law.
Convictions get thrown out over it.
Attorneys get disbarred over it.
Yet the men running the Watergate prosecution did it as routine – and wrote about it openly in internal memos, apparently never imagining those files would see daylight.
That's not all Shepard found.
Prosecutors also withheld exculpatory evidence from Nixon's defense team – evidence that could have changed the outcome.
A parallel case tells you exactly what that means: in 1975, a federal judge dismissed charges against Nixon's tax advisor Frank DeMarco specifically because prosecutors failed to disclose exculpatory evidence.
They played that game more than once.
Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972.
Two years later, he was gone – run out of office by a prosecution team that Shepard's research identifies as something more than neutral investigators.
The Watergate Special Prosecution Force was stocked with partisan opponents of Nixon.
Archibald Cox had spent his career in Democratic circles with direct ties to the Kennedy family.
These weren't disinterested officers of the court pursuing truth.
One internal document described the team's attitude as centered on a single objective – conviction.
Not justice. Not truth. Conviction.
They were political opponents with subpoena power and a cooperating judge.
JD Vance made the parallel explicit this summer: "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."
Trump has personally asked former Nixon aides why Nixon resigned instead of fighting.
The answer may be that Nixon didn't know the referees were playing for the other team.
Trump found out the hard way in his first term. He came back anyway.
There is one detail about this review that makes the whole thing almost poetic.
The Office of Professional Responsibility – the DOJ watchdog now examining Shepard's allegations – was created in 1975.
The Justice Department built it to make sure corrupt prosecutions could never happen again.
Fifty years later, that same office is asking whether the prosecution it was built around was corrupt from the beginning.
The Left is already calling this review "crackpot" and "outrageous."
They called the Hunter Biden laptop "Russian disinformation" too.
Shepard spent 12 years waiting for someone in government to look at his evidence.
The files are open now. For millions of Americans who watched the deep state spend years hunting Trump, they already know what those files are going to show.
Sources:
- Leif Le Mahieu, "Trump DOJ Takes Second Look At Scandal That Brought Down Richard Nixon," The Daily Wire, October 2, 2026.
- "DOJ Reviewing Alleged 'Lawfare' Against Nixon in Watergate Investigation," Breitbart, October 2, 2026.
- "Nixon Aide to Newsmax: Watergate Case Was Tainted," Newsmax, October 3, 2026.
- "DOJ Considering Whether Prosecutor's Office Committed Misconduct Against Nixon: Report," The Western Journal, October 2, 2026.
- Geoff Shepard, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, Regnery, 2023.
- "Watergate Explained," The Richard Nixon Foundation, nixonfoundation.org.
