April 29, 2023

Big Media never tires of repeating two enormous lies — their versions of Joe McCarthy’s investigations and the Watergate Scandal. The latter gets another bad history treatment this May with HBO’s White House Plumbers.  Back then, there was no effective broadcast opposition to dispute the falsehoods. Luckily talk radio and the internet came along and changed things. Just ask Hunter Biden.

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The Watergate break-in and cover-up was the result of the disastrous interaction of John Dean with the CIA. This is demonstrated by mounds of evidence uncovered by writers starting with Jim Hougan’s in Secret Agenda. Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA, and proven in open court with a series of John Dean-Gordon Liddy lawsuits that ended in complete victory 20 years ago in Wells v. Liddy.

That’s not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. But Nixon was at best a peripheral figure. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats.

The Watergate story really begins in 1969, when Nixon took office. The FBI and the CIA let it be known they would not do the black-bag jobs and political capers, they formerly did for the Kennedys and LBJ. The CIA however, and the Pentagon separately, did not trust Nixon and had quietly organized their own spy operations against him.

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Enter White House Counsel, John Ehrlichman, Air Force hero of WWII and wealthy Seattle zoning lawyer, but a man totally ill-suited for the sensitive post he was given. He assembled, with Nixon’s permission, a White House investigative team, who other than Gordon Liddy, were actually part of the CIA spy team. James Rosen thinks Hunt, McCord and others were trying to infiltrate Nixon’s circle before the 1968 campaign even began. These “White House Plumbers” carried out the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’ office, on the hunch that Ellsberg was a Soviet agent, as opposed to just being a world-class jerk.

When Ehrlichman moved on, John Dean got to be White House counsel, thanks to his connections to the Goldwater family. Dean needed government employment because he was fired from his law firm a few years earlier for betraying client information.

Ever ambitious and ruthless, he saw Ehrlichman’s investigative team, many of whom had moved over to work for Nixon’s campaign, as his ticket to bigger things. He set his private investigators looking into Xaviera Hollander’s black book. But she had as many Republican clients as Democrats. Then he looked into the operation Heidi Rikan was running right there next to the Watergate at the Columbia Plaza.

Rikan was roommates with Mo Biner, the gal Dean would later marry.  Easily manipulating Nixon’s deputy campaign manager, the squishy Jeb Magruder, Dean got him to push a bugging operation into the Watergate offices of the DNC — Heidi’s biggest customer contact.

But unknown to Dean, this wasn’t any ordinary high-dollar D.C. brothel. It was an actual CIA honeytrap. Robert Maheu, one-time Howard Hughes executive and the real-life inspiration for Jim Phelps of Mission Impossible, would often set these up for the agency during his time there.

At Dean’s urging, Magruder and Liddy came up with a massive spying plan for the 1972 election, called Gemstone, which John Mitchell, the campaign manager, soundly rejected.