Darf

Watergate never got cracked bc it’s actually ten different conspiracies: -Nixon set up reckless loyalists who were willing to follow dubious orders -John Dean faked orders from higher-ups to make them go after the Watergate callgirl blackmail ring his wife was in -The CIA infiltrated them & intentionally sabotaged the Watergate break-in so they’d get caught & Nixon could be taken down for sidelining & subordinating them -The Pentagon was spying on Nixon over detente & sent its intel agent Woodward to WaPo so its White House insider Haig could work with him on making the Watergate narrative more scandalous -Ted Kennedy got his people to take over every aspect of the prosecutions & committees investigating this, to set him up for an election bid (7 of the 8 main investigators were very close Kennedy loyalists & they did things like secretly work with CIA-man E Howard Hunt’s Kennedy-aligned lawyer to cover up some crimes & manufacture others) -The chief judge kept sabotaging the defenses in bizarre ways (mainly for personal vanity reasons, to get his name in the paper [eg he used extremely novel args about “presentment” & extremely questionable private meetings with prosecutors to make sure he could get this case before his 70th birthday would limit his powers to assign it to himself]) -John Dean worked with everyone to frame higher-ups like Mitchell (eg the military & CIA & judge all coordinated on faking a prison sentence for him so his testimony would look less like it was given to avoid prison [he was actually given very nice lodging on a military base & let out years before his official sentence was up right when he was done testifying against Nixon’s guys [transcripts of his early statements to investigators {which included nothing about any cover-up} were also doctored in order to make them consistent with later testimony]) -The FBI was also trying to keep its unaccountable power in the wake of Hoover’s departure, thus putting their head of COINTELPRO Mark Felt up to being Deep Throat -While Nixon’s DoJ was in disarray (eg cycling through 3 AGs) various interests—nefarious & petty—came together to force the VP out over a few thousand bucks in unpaid taxes, & replace him with Ford (who’d eg been heavily involved in the Warren Report) -When Ford thus became the only unelected president in our history (wasn’t even on the ballot as VP), Rockefeller used his intel & political contacts to become VP, & suddenly two women (both connected to MK-ultra ops like Manson) independently came close to assassinating Ford within a few week, so Ford replaced Rockefeller with Dole on his 1976 ticket & lost to a hapless nuclear secrets navy man (the military spy ring was all about naval intelligence using hapless loyalists to spy on the White House for nuke related reasons) -Intel rings whack a number of people related to the running of WaPo then keep on handing the resulting leadership all the juiciest stories about presidential overreach (Deep Throat, Pentagon Papers, etc), & then the liberal media canonizes this as its modern foundation myth for every “-gate” since -I’m probably forgetting several other angles (eg activists had various less direct roles in setting the scene, & this obviously connects to the JFK/RFK stuff) Absolutely Shakespearean.