Watergate To Russiagate: The Same Play, The Same Players, The Same Press

The common view of Watergate is fixed: a corrupt president, caught red-handed, brought low by courageous reporters and an independent judiciary. But history, examined soberly, seldom aligns so neatly with mythology. When we return to the documents, the testimony, and the peculiar coincidences of the time, another picture begins to emerge, one less comforting to those who imagine the press as democracy’s unerring guardian. Richard Nixon was no saint, but the machinery that brought him down was not saintly either. The Watergate scandal was not a case of presidential wrongdoing; it was a politically driven setup executed by a biased and unrestrained drive-by media establishment whose influence had grown to rival, and perhaps exceed, that of elected officials.

Start with the facts so often forgotten. Of the five burglars caught at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, four worked for the CIA, and the fifth for the FBI. They were not Nixon’s handpicked men; they were veterans of Cold War covert operations, men with loyalties and histories that stretched far beyond the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The theory that these men were rogue political spies directed personally by Nixon was debunked by the evidence from the very start of the scandal. The record proves no order from the Oval Office, no memo, no testimony from any of the 35 witnesses before Congress suggesting that Nixon had prior knowledge of the break-in. Even John Dean, the prosecution’s star witness, never claimed Nixon planned the burglary. Nixon’s crime, we are told, was not the break-in itself but the cover-up. Yet even this has been misrepresented.

The so-called “smoking gun” tape from June 23, 1972, was long taken as proof that Nixon ordered an obstruction of justice. On the recording, Nixon discussed asking the CIA to tell the FBI to limit its probe, a request critics took as evidence of a cover-up. But later analysis suggests otherwise. Nixon believed, rightly or wrongly, that the FBI’s investigation might inadvertently expose sensitive CIA operations in Cuba. The tape shows a president juggling competing national security concerns, not conspiring to destroy evidence. The FBI ignored the suggestion and continued its work unhindered. If this was obstruction, it was an astonishingly ineffective one. What remains is ambiguity, and the historical record should have been treated as such. Instead, the media transformed that ambiguity into certainty, a narrative of criminality that foreclosed honest debate. The pattern would repeat decades later when former FBI Director James Comey privately briefed President Trump on the now-debunked Steele Dossier, then leaked to the media that Trump had allegedly sought to cover up its claims. Like Nixon, Trump was maneuvered into a trap, baited by a senior law enforcement official using selective disclosure to manufacture the appearance of guilt and feed a media frenzy. The parallel is unmistakable: both episodes reveal how the power to leak, frame, and narrate can be more potent than evidence itself.

The judicial process that followed only deepened the suspicion that Nixon was facing not justice but a political ambush. Judge John Sirica, lionized by the press, met secretly with prosecutors before key indictments. Such private conferences between judge and prosecutor violated basic standards of impartiality. Years later, internal records confirmed that Sirica pressured Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski to expedite indictments so that Sirica himself could preside over the trials. In any other case, such conduct would have disqualified the judge and possibly overturned convictions. The pattern is not unique to the 1970s. Today, Judge James Boasberg’s maneuvers in Washington raise the same concerns. In a jurisdiction with fifteen eligible judges, Boasberg ensured that he, and not the other fourteen, received four separate Trump-related cases. The parallels are striking: Sirica’s insistence on presiding over Nixon’s fate mirrors Boasberg’s quiet accumulation of authority over Trump’s. Both men, celebrated in establishment circles, blurred the boundary between impartial justice and political orchestration. But in the moral fever of their respective eras, due process seemed a luxury America could afford to ignore. The court, the prosecutors, and the media all wanted the same thing, a president’s head on a spike.

This alliance between political operators, legal zealots, and an increasingly ideological press transformed Watergate into a morality play rather than a fair investigation. Nixon’s enemies understood that a legal verdict alone could not destroy him. He had to be delegitimized before the public. The Washington Post and other major outlets obliged. Through a relentless campaign of leaks and front-page speculation, they built the narrative brick by brick until resignation seemed inevitable. The FBI’s own associate director, Mark Felt, known later as “Deep Throat”, was feeding the Post selective leaks while engaged in a bureaucratic power struggle within the Bureau. What was presented as noble whistleblowing was, in reality, an insider using the press to settle scores and shape history. Decades later, former FBI Director James Comey would perform a strikingly similar act, leaking selective details of his private interactions with President Trump to trigger a special counsel investigation. Both men portrayed themselves as defenders of integrity while maneuvering to frame their presidents in the public eye. In each case, the leaks were less about transparency and more about power, the weaponization of selective disclosure to shape political outcomes. It was the Deep State’s first great media collaboration, and not its last.

By the mid-1970s, America had not an imperial presidency but an imperial media, a press corps that claimed for itself the power to define morality, assign guilt, and dictate outcomes. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, warned of this shift in 1969, calling out the “effete core of impudent snobs” who ran the national news. He pointed to the concentration of information in the hands of a few networks and major newspapers, where a handful of editors decided what millions would see and believe. That critique now reads as prophecy. Agnew asked a simple question: who checks the checkers? Who holds journalists accountable when they overstep? In Watergate, the answer was clear, no one. The same reporters who condemned Nixon for secrecy built their own web of anonymous sources, selective omissions, and ideological framing. Their errors were forgiven, their biases applauded, and their rewards plentiful. The Washington Post won the Pulitzer; its reporters became movie heroes. The press congratulated itself for saving democracy, never pausing to ask whether it had simply replaced one form of hubris with another. That corruption of purpose, born in the Watergate era, has metastasized into the present day. The unchecked triumphalism of that generation’s press laid the foundation for today’s collapse of public trust in journalism. What began as self-righteous crusading in the 1970s has hardened into the ideological capture of the news industry itself, leaving Americans skeptical not because they reject truth, but because they have seen too often how truth is manufactured by those who claim to defend it.

The legal system, too, had rendered itself powerless to correct this imbalance. Ten years before Watergate, the Supreme Court decided New York Times v. Sullivan, a case that made it almost impossible for public officials to sue the press for defamation. The Court held that even false statements about public figures were protected unless made with “actual malice.” The standard was so high that few could ever meet it. This doctrine of near-total immunity, celebrated as a triumph for free speech, effectively removed any legal restraint on media recklessness. Once Sullivan became law, the press could attack a president with virtual impunity. Nixon’s inability to defend himself in court, even against inaccuracies, created a structural asymmetry of power. The press could destroy him, and he could do nothing but protest.

Compounding this was the decline of competition in journalism. In Washington, the Post eventually swallowed its rivals, leaving one dominant voice in the capital. Monopoly breeds arrogance. When a single newspaper can define the national story, dissenting perspectives die by silence, not rebuttal. Even in the 1970s, the city’s other major paper, the Washington Star, was struggling. By 1981, it was gone, and the Post reigned alone. This consolidation of media power is as dangerous as the consolidation of political power. A free society depends not merely on a free press but on a diverse press, a press that competes, contradicts, and keeps itself honest. The Watergate press corps, far from representing diversity, reflected a near-unanimous culture of liberal activism masquerading as objectivity. Yet imbalances have a way of finding balance. Today we see the rise of independent journalism supported by free speech platforms like 𝕏, where millions of citizens bypass the old gatekeepers to investigate, debate, and publish in real time. What was once monopolized by a handful of editors is now decentralized, giving new life to the principle that a truly free press belongs to everyone, not just those who own printing presses or broadcast towers.

The steelman of Nixon’s defense does not deny his flaws. Nixon was proud, secretive, and often self-defeating. His enemies did not need to invent his paranoia; they only had to weaponize it. Yet compared with the open abuses of power seen under Bush, Obama, Biden, and even Trump, Nixon looks like a Boy Scout. His transgressions were modest beside drone wars without oversight, domestic surveillance programs, politicized prosecutions, and the weaponization of intelligence agencies that later presidents normalized. But when history is written solely by those who hated him, it becomes propaganda, not scholarship. The tapes that damned Nixon also revealed moments of reflection and conscience, evidence that he understood the moral weight of his office. Yet this side of the man was erased by a media machine determined to cast him as a villain in its own morality play.

The legacy of Watergate, therefore, is twofold. First, it established that the press could bring down a president, an awesome power that future generations of journalists have often wielded with pride but rarely with humility. Second, it revealed how fragile truth becomes when filtered through institutions that face no accountability. When Nixon said history would vindicate him, he was not imagining sainthood. He meant that, in time, the distortions would clear, and the public would see how power operates behind the curtain, not just in the Oval Office but in the newsrooms and courtrooms of the capital.

f Nixon erred by placing too much faith in loyalty, the media erred by placing too much faith in itself. What Watergate exposed, more than presidential corruption, was the emergence of an unelected fourth branch of government, the press, empowered by ideology, protected by law, and unchecked by competition. That, not Nixon’s downfall, is the true scandal of Watergate. And until America reckons with the dangers of an imperial media, it will remain vulnerable to the same forces that destroyed its 37th president.

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