Hopefully, the OPR will follow up with a vigorous investigation and clear the record of this unfairly maligned former President.

Many citizens today, with varied sources of information, understand the highly unethical lawfare waged against President Donald Trump, as exemplified by the Russiagate hoax. By contrast, the more restricted media environment of the early 1970s made prosecutorial misconduct during Watergate harder to scrutinize. With fresh eyes now taking a closer look at the reporting and prosecution of Watergate, it is becoming clear that DOJ investigators should sanction prosecutorial misconduct and set the historical record straight on Richard Nixon’s innocence.

As a refresher, Watergate refers to a political scandal stemming from the June 17, 1972, burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate building by burglars with known CIA ties. After two years of investigations, committee inquiries, and trials, over 40 government officials were convicted or jailed, and President Richard Nixon was forced to resign from office.

Recently, former Nixon aide and historian Geoff Shepard presented his case to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), arguing that the proceedings against Richard Nixon amounted to dishonest, partisan “lawfare” enabled by prosecutorial and Congressional misconduct. Hopefully, the OPR will follow up with a vigorous investigation and clear the record of this unfairly maligned former president.

Modern Watergate critics are familiar with Shepard’s excellent work, The Real Watergate Scandal. In this book, Shepard details what he describes as serious ethical lapses by the Watergate Special Prosecutor in pursuing Nixon and his aides. More importantly, he argues that the evidence strongly suggests Nixon was innocent of the long-alleged “cover-up.”

In addition to Shepard’s tour de force, several key revisionist works have been published in recent years, including Secret Agenda (Jim Hougan), Silent Coup (Colodny and Gettlin), and my book, Postgate. Additionally, White House Call Girl (Phil Stanford) covers a minor but convincing set of lurid background facts showing the motivation for the burglary.

Oddly, Watergate: A New History (Garrett Graff), while conventionally anti-Nixon in tone and intent, confirms the earth-shaking revelations of James Rosen’s book, The Strong Man, showing a lack of approval by John Mitchell or the Oval Office for the Watergate burglary.

These works, together with Shepard’s detailed documentation of corrupt insider framing of Nixon, are proof not only of Nixon’s lack of guilt but also of the massive unethical cover-up of the true story by those we are asked to believe without question: the Special Prosecutor, the Democrat-led Senate Watergate Committee and the mainstream media, specifically the Washington Post.

Why, fifty years later, should we investigate any flaws in Nixon’s prosecution? Because key questions remain: 1) was the prosecution of Nixon and aides (with Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator) so clearly unethical that the OPR should conclude formally that the prosecution was fatally and unethically flawed; and 2) were the Senate investigation and Majority Watergate Report false in material particulars, constituting a willfully false official Report to the public? In light of the attempted replay of Watergate and the Russiagate hoax, these questions are existential.

To understand both scandals, we should first note the prosecution’s duty to provide the defense with all exculpatory evidence and all summaries and recordings of witness statements; the related prosecution should be dismissed.

We present here the crucial information deliberately concealed by Watergate Special Prosecutors, by the Congressional committees investigating Nixon, and also hidden by the Post.

1. Former Attorney General John Mitchell did not order the Watergate break-ins.

John Mitchell did not order the Watergate break-ins, either as Attorney General or later as Director of the Nixon reelection campaign (CRP), as aide Jeb Magruder falsely testified. The Oval Office had no connection to the burglary and could not cover up what it did not know.

Shepard’s book is invaluable in showing that Magruder, eager to avoid jail, constantly changed his story to prosecutors and contradicted himself and others on more than forty aspects of his statements. But the Special Prosecutor never, it appears, disclosed to the defense the facts showing Magruder’s constantly changing story, its memos reflecting his changing statements, or those memos in which prosecutors cast serious doubt on his story as inconsistent with other facts. In addition, prosecutors put on the stand this internally known perjurer.

Shepard’s treatment alone suggests the prosecution violated its duty of disclosure to the defense and put a perjuring witness on the stand, both grounds for overturning a conviction.

Graff’s work strongly shows that John Mitchell did not order the break-in, although he oddly argues that the question of who actually ordered the burglary should not be pursued, given the passage of time. Interestingly, Len Downie, editor emeritus of the Washington Post, echoed Graff’s findings.

Graff’s conclusion that John Mitchell did not order the break-in is not new. Both reporter James Rosen in The Strong Man and I in Postgate concluded similarly.

2. The Watergate burglary was primarily a CIA operation, not a Nixon campaign operation, as the prosecution and Senate have claimed.

The prosecution and the Senate had ample evidence that Watergate was primarily a CIA operation designed to gain ostensible authority for its prostitute-taping program. Howard Hunt was an undercover CIA agent who, in his criminal Watergate trial, was prepared to offer a “CIA defense,” which he pursued until pleading guilty at the urging of John Dean, Nixon’s White House Counsel, who turned state’s evidence.

The prosecutors were well aware of this defense, while another CIA operative, burglary leader James McCord, told his Metropolitan Police friend on the morning of the burglary that this had been a CIA operation.

Republican Senator Howard Baker published a detailed, persuasive 43-page, unpublicized minority report on July 2, 1974, detailing CIA participation in the burglary, but the Washington Post’s reporting of it concealed its findings, and the highly publicized 1,250-page Watergate Committee Report (also known as the Ervin Report), prepared by the Democrat majority, ignored this key evidence.

3. The burglary targets were the wiretapping and documentation of prostitutes and their johns.

While the prosecution and congressional investigations premised the break-in as a campaign operation gone wrong, it was, beyond a doubt, about wiretapping prostitutes and their visiting Democrat johns.

The Washington Post has been overheated in its rhetoric denying this incontrovertible fact, but this strenuous denial only shows its guilt for this gross concealment.

4. The “key” to the burglary was likely undisclosed to Nixon and his aides.

Upon arrest, Eugenio Martinez, an active CIA agent, was wrestled to the ground as he tried to rid himself of an object in his pocket—a desk key of the secretary arranging the prostitution calls overheard.

The DOJ should therefore investigate and report that this key was the true key to Presidential innocence. Nixon was not concerned with prostitution, nor was his campaign.

5. The smoking gun White House tape was misrepresented as a cover-up of criminality.

Shepard and Dean both concur on Nixon’s innocence relating to the “smoking gun” White House tape of June 23, 1972, which ultimately forced his resignation when disclosed in July 1974. It was on this tape that Nixon plotted to ask the CIA to call the FBI off the “Mexican Money Trail” investigation.

To this day, most think that Nixon was attempting to shut down the FBI’s Watergate investigation. But in fact, he simply did not wish to expose the names of key Democrat campaign donors, including Dwayne Andreas of ADM, for fear of their embarrassment for contributing to a Republican.

With all these surrounding false depictions of the scandal, most notably by false Post reports, this tape, to be sure, incorrectly seemed like a material cover-up.

The OPR should then apply the same framework it uses to examine Watergate to the prosecutorial practices surrounding Russiagate. False history should be corrected, and this is a good start.

By American Greatness – https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/14/long-concealed-facts-exonerate-nixon-and-require-sanctioning-the-unethical-prosecution/

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that major oil, natural-gas, and mineral exploration is being prepared in Greenland, which is now mostly under U.S. control. The president argued that the territory offers exceptional strategic advantages for missile defense and American national security.

The statement follows a September agreement with Denmark and Greenland that expands American military access to the Arctic island and gives the United States a formal role in screening sensitive investments. President Trump’s tough talk ultimately gave him more leverage to complete this deal that will help Americans demonstrably.

Greenland stopped issuing new oil and gas exploration licenses in 2021, though some older permits remain valid. President Trump’s announcement does not rewrite any laws, but it signals a clear American intent to develop the island’s resources under the new security framework.

The shortest route from Europe to North America runs across the Arctic, and the island already hosts a U.S. space base. Expanding energy and mineral work there reduces dependence on adversaries for critical materials while strengthening the northern flank.

The arrangement is the result of a president who is always looking to give his country the edge and is not afraid of tipping over some sacred cows for the betterment of his people.

A Shanghai kindergarten named for the grandfather of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao has been used by a United Front Work Department arm to cultivate ties with Chao and her family. Chao has returned to the school for decades and met with Chinese Communist Party and United Front officials there, according to translations of Chinese government and state-media reports.

The kindergarten has held military-themed events for young children that included toy rifles and games supervised in some cases by People’s Liberation Army personnel. Chao’s father donated to the school in 1995.

Chao has been rumored to have ties to Chinese communist for years, and this report seems to indicate that where there is smoke, there is indeed fire. McConnell is leaving the Senate after decades in leadership, a shell of his former self. He looked the other way as China gained influence as he and his wife no doubt took advantage of special favors for their complicity.

The record is not a single meeting; it is a multi-decade relationship centered on a school that stages military activities for toddlers to worship China’s godless communist system. This will be McConnell’s legacy. He will be remembered among those who sold out his country to a foreign power. He will be fortunate to bow out gracefully before he can truly be held accountable for his actions.

In a closed-door meeting at the Justice Department last month, senior officials with the Office of Professional Responsibility spent two hours reviewing 78 PowerPoint slides relating to — of all things — Watergate.

The presentation focused on longstanding allegations of misconduct by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the team of young Ivy League lawyers whose investigation helped bring down President Richard Nixon and secured criminal convictions of his top former aides.

After The Wall Street Journal broke news of the session this month, Nick Akerman, one of the task force’s few surviving staff lawyers, denounced the presentation in an essay titled “I Helped Investigate Watergate. The D.O.J.’s Attempt to Reframe Nixon as the Victim Is Extremely Dangerous.” Mr. Akerman dismissed the presenter — a graduate, like him, of Harvard Law School — as the peddler of a “bonkers conspiracy theory” asserting that Mr. Nixon was ousted in a “plot.”

The Journal’s headline — “Decades After Watergate, Justice Department Reviews Whether Nixon Got a Raw Deal” — fueled skepticism by suggesting that Mr. Nixon, long assigned the role of irredeemable historical villain, might have been treated unfairly.

Mr. Nixon, of course, got a great deal: pardoned a month after his resignation for all crimes he committed or may have committed during his presidency. He went on to publish best-selling books, serve his successors as consigliere and travel the world as an elder statesman.

But what about all the president’s men? Did they get a raw deal?

According to a raft of scholarly work, the answer, unequivocally, is yes. By fabricating witness testimony, suppressing exculpatory evidence and colluding with the presiding judge, the Watergate prosecutors railroaded the former attorney general John Mitchell, the former White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and the former domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman. This does not mean these convicted officials were innocent. But it does mean they did not receive the due process that even the men around Mr. Nixon deserved.

Mr. Akerman and others suggested that the Justice Department officials convened the meeting because they hoped, indirectly, to exculpate President Trump. If the Watergate prosecutions could be exposed as corrupt, the argument goes, then so, too, could the investigation led by Robert Mueller that looked into possible ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

This misses the point. The role of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, itself a post-Watergate creation, is to review any information that suggests a department employee might have violated the law, regulations or standards of conduct.

With its political animus and early use of computers, the Watergate investigation is indeed the grandfather of lawfare. One of the jurors who pronounced judgment on Mr. Nixon’s cabinet officials described Watergate as “war between the ins and the outs.”

A case in point, omitted from the recent presentation: On Feb. 6, 1974, a task force staff lawyer, Peter Rient, sent a colleague a three-page memo titled “Material Discrepancies Between the Senate Select Committee Testimony of John Dean and the Tapes of Dean’s Meetings With the President.”

Mr. Nixon was then six months away from resigning. Mr. Dean was the young White House counsel who admitted to having managed the Watergate cover-up until, fired by Mr. Nixon, he negotiated partial immunity from the Senate Watergate committee and cooperated with the prosecutors. In exchange for leniency, Mr. Dean gave damning testimony against the president and his men.

The existence of Mr. Nixon’s secret taping system was publicly disclosed 17 days after Mr. Dean concluded his televised Senate testimony. The remaining year of Mr. Nixon’s presidency was spent litigating access to his tapes. When their contents tumbled out, the press, the courts and scholars all concluded the recordings vindicated Mr. Dean’s proclaimed “astounding memory for detail.” With his brown comb-over and owlish eyeglasses, the ex-wunderkind became, in Walter Cronkite’s words, “an all-purpose Watergate witness.”

The Rient memo was never released to the news media. The public was kept in the dark about acute problems that Watergate prosecutors had identified in the Senate testimony of their star witness.

Likewise, the Rient memo was withheld from defense counsel in U.S. v. Mitchell, the Watergate cover-up trial in which Mr. Dean’s testimony proved decisive. Having ironed out all the material discrepancies from his sworn Senate appearance, the prosecutors used Mr. Dean’s new testimony to secure convictions of Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman, once among the most powerful men in government.

A material discrepancy, in criminal procedure, means it is significant enough to affect the outcome of a case. Criminal convictions routinely get overturned after disclosure of prosecutorial misconduct less egregious than this. Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman, now dead, all served prison terms.

The Rient memo remained undisclosed until 1997, when I revealed its contents in National Review. Also disclosed in that article was a memo by the Watergate prosecutor George Frampton dated July 22, 1974 — 10 weeks before jury selection in the Watergate cover-up trial began — outlining “significant discrepancies between Dean’s anticipated trial testimony” and “that of other government witnesses or evidence.”

Mr. Frampton’s analysis showed that one meeting Mr. Dean testified to “apparently didn’t take place.” The prosecutor advised, “We probably would do well simply to omit Dean’s testimony about this.” Mr. Dean later acknowledged the discrepancies, testifying that he and the prosecutors cleaned them up before the Mitchell trial.

The Frampton memo showed that the prosecutors’ concerns extended beyond the problems that the Nixon tapes posed for their star witness. Like the Rient memo, the Frampton memo was hidden from the news media and the defense counsel in U.S. v. Mitchell.

As the Watergate prosecutors must have known, withholding these memorandums trampled the constitutional rights of their prosecutorial targets. Had lawyers for Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman had access to these analyses, they could have used them for cross-examination and probably demolished what little credibility the disbarred Mr. Dean still possessed.

It was Geoff Shepard, a veteran of Mr. Nixon’s defense team and a leading Watergate scholar, who delivered last month’s briefing. In 2013, Mr. Shepard published an article in The Atlantic that made use of previously unpublished task force memorandums to chronicle how prosecutors repeatedly met privately with Judge John Sirica, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. He had presided over the Watergate break-in trial and was determined to sit as well on Mr. Mitchell’s trial. No defense lawyers were included in these meetings — a major violation of federal criminal procedure.

Judge Sirica had a problem: Approaching 70, he would soon be forced, under rules then in place, to resign as chief judge, surrendering his power to assign cases. Mr. Shepard found memos by Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor whose work helped secure the convictions in the Mitchell case, showing he had allowed Judge Sirica to orchestrate the contents and timing of the indictments so he could assign the case to himself.

Mr. Shepard’s findings shocked the bar. At a 2015 panel event at George Washington University Law School, the law professor Stephen Saltzburg, a former clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall and one of the nation’s most renowned experts on criminal procedure, declared that the prosecutors’ concealment of exculpatory information in the Mitchell case and the conduct of Judge Sirica constituted “as gross misconduct as you could possibly get.”

If the Trump Justice Department officials demonstrate the courage to revisit the Nixon years, whose mythologies remain foundational to mainstream media and elite academia, they can expunge the tainted convictions secured during Watergate.

Their chief problem could be whether the rogue Watergate prosecutors are covered by the Office of Professional Responsibility. Certainly, Judge Sirica was not; any official review of his misconduct must occur elsewhere. And there is good reason to question whether the Watergate task force was ever part of the Justice Department. In 1974, Antonin Scalia, an assistant attorney general at the time, complained in writing that “the special prosecutor’s briefs are not reviewed in the department” and therefore the Justice Department would not endorse “the positions adopted by the special prosecutor.”

These are technicalities. Official review of the crooked convictions in Watergate is rooted in a wealth of newly declassified evidence and is long overdue. One need not be a supporter of Mr. Trump — or of any other target in the various investigations he has faced — to agree with Santayana’s maxim that those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

By NY Times – https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/13/opinion/watergate-nixon-trump.html

On June 28th, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was a surprise witness in the January 6th committee hearings. Although heavily hyped as a “surprise witness” with startling “new information” much of what Cassidy said was both eagerly reported as “fact” by the mainstream media and just as quickly debunked by more objective news organizations.

I won’t recount here how quickly disproved Cassidy’s second-hand claim that President Trump, irate that his Secret Service detail would not take him to the Capitol, sought to grab the wheel of his Presidential Limousine and assaulted a Secret Service Agent. Even NBC News reported that Secret Service Officials are prepared to testify under oath that neither of these things happened.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney induced Hutchinson to say it was her “understanding” that “President Trump instructed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to call Roger Stone and General Michael Flynn on the evening of January 5th” and that it was Hutchinson’s “understanding” that these calls were completed on the evening of January 5th.

Cheney would later speculate that the purpose of these calls on January 5th was “to find out what was going to happen on January 6th. Once again USA Today, would report this falsehood without any effort to confirm its accuracy.

Rolling Stone, USA Today, MSNBC, Yahoo News, Miami-Herald, and others almost immediately reported Hutchinson’s claim as if it were a fact. If any of these “news outlets” had bothered to call for comment, they would have learned that Hutchinson’s claim was unequivocally false; I received no such call from Mark Meadows on January 5th. In fact, although I met him once in the green room at FOX in 2019 when he was still a Congressman, I have never spoken to him by phone or in person on any other occasion.

General Flynn tells me that he didn’t speak to Mark Meadows on January 5th and neither has he ever had any phone conversation with Meadows. To their credit, ABC News was the only media outlet to request a comment on Hutchinson’s baseless claims and accurately report my denial.

Hutchinson went on to say that Meadows wanted to attend a “briefing in a war room set up in the Willard Hotel.” Hutchinson said that Meadows was persuaded not to attend this briefing in person but that he participated in the briefing “with Roger Stone and General Flynn” by phone.

Here’s how NPR reported it:

Once again, there never was any such telephone briefing. That of course did not stop USA Today or the New York Times from gleefully recycling this canard without contacting me or my attorney for comment. Nor was I aware of or involved with any “war room” within the Willard Hotel.

In fact, the Washington Post has reported accurately that “The Willard attracted many pro-Trump figures around that time, including “Stop the Steal” provocateur Roger Stone. Stone was not part of the Giuliani team at the Willard and did not participate in the team’s efforts, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.”

I continue to believe that the “Stop the Steal” effort to bring public attention to the anomalies and irregularities as well as very real evidence of fraud in the results of the 2020 election, constitutes an act of Constitutionally protected free speech and that the legally permitted and peaceful events on January 5th and 6th are Constitutionally protected under the 4th amendment. At no time did I, Ali Alexander, or Alex Jones publicly or privately advocate violence or lawlessness. There has been a concerted effort by the Democrats and their allies in the fake news media to insist otherwise.

It is sad that I must reiterate it, but any assertion, claim, or even implication that I was aware in advance of, involved in, or condoned any illegal activity at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th or any other date is categorically false. Nor was I involved in any legal effort to delay the certification of the results of the electoral college. There is no witness, email, text message, encrypted message, or individual that proves otherwise. Unfortunately, since this assertion is never reported by the fake news media, false claims about my actions on January 5th and 6th are constantly recycled, including today by the Miami-Herald.

The favored tactic of the left, in this case, is “guilt by association.” Because the off-duty D.C. police officers who had provided paid security for me and my family during my January 2020 Trial in Washington D.C. were unavailable; the Oath Keepers organization provided security for me on January 5th. I do know individual members of the Proud Boys. I am a 41-year friend and supporter of President Donald Trump. None of these facts proves anything whatsoever.

Hutchinson’s Cheney-induced assertions about me were the source of a tsunami-like wave of hatred and vilification on Twitter. This exposes the true purpose of the baseless attacks on me; to associate me falsely with actions I was not involved in and had no involvement in, to drive up the cost of lawyers that I require to defend myself, and to drag my name through the mud one more time. Sadly, I am the Trump Supporter that woke leftists love most to hate.

Of course Congresswoman Liz Cheney suborned Hutchinson’s perjury, coaching her to lie and should also be prosecuted but then she has a auto-pen signed pardon from Joe Biden.

He now says he was pressured and coerced by prosecutors. But despite repeated claims to the contrary, Cohen still insists that the testimony he gave against Donald Trump was truthful.

There is an old rule in politics: words matter. There is an even older rule in a courtroom: sworn words matter even more.

That distinction is essential in understanding what seems to be the extraordinary reconciliation between President Donald Trump and his former personal attorney Michael Cohen — and the increasingly widespread claim that Cohen has now “recanted” the testimony he gave against Trump.

He has not.

Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to this question. Charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s thugs and pressured to give false testimony against President Trump in return for leniency in sentencing for the contrived process crimes I had been convicted for in a DC Soviet style show trial, I refused.

Michael Cohen chose a different path He told Trump’s persecutors what they wanted to hear.

President Trump has understandably seized upon Cohen’s alleged about-face regarding the prosecutors who pursued him. In January, Cohen accused the offices of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James of pressuring him to provide testimony useful to their cases against Trump. Cohen wrote that he “felt pressured and coerced” to provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to convict Trump.

I’m not sure President Trump understands that Michael Cohen has not recanted or withdrawn any of his testimony against Trump in the so-called hush money case brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. But saying “I felt pressured and coerced” is not the same thing as saying “my testimony was false.”

Cohen himself has gone out of his way to make precisely that distinction.

When Cohen appeared with Dan Abrams on SiriusXM and was directly asked whether his allegations of prosecutorial pressure meant his previous testimony was untruthful, Cohen answered unequivocally: “No, to the exact contrary.” He then said that nothing about his allegations of pressure should suggest that the information he provided was anything other than “truthful and accurate”

There is simply no intellectually honest way to describe that as a recantation. A recantation means taking back a previous statement. It means saying, in substance: What I told you before under oath was not true.

Cohen has not done that. In fact, he has specifically done the opposite.

This distinction became glaring during Cohen’s remarkable August reunion with President Trump on WABC. Trump repeatedly praised Cohen for supposedly recanting his testimony. “You took it back,” Trump told him, adding, “I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now if you didn’t, to be honest.” Cohen did not correct the President. That’s because he has taken nothing back. He said nothing.

That silence undoubtedly helped create the impression that Cohen had withdrawn his allegations against Trump. But silence is not a recantation.

And when Cohen was subsequently confronted directly with the question, he stood behind his sworn testimony. The New York Times, got this narrow but important factual point right: Cohen “has not taken any of it back.”

This presents a rather obvious contradiction that neither Cohen nor many of those celebrating his supposed recantation appear anxious to address. If prosecutors pressured Cohen to provide testimony designed to secure a conviction against Donald Trump, what exactly did Cohen say because of that pressure that was untrue?

Name it. Which statement? Which allegation? Which material fact? What part of his sworn testimony does Michael Cohen now withdraw?

Thus far, the answer is: none of it.

Cohen testified for Bragg in the Manhattan criminal prosecution that ultimately resulted in Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. He also testified in Attorney General James’s civil fraud case. His testimony was not incidental to either proceeding, although it was also not the only evidence presented against Trump.

Those were not television interviews. They were not podcasts. They were not Substack posts. They were sworn testimony in legal proceedings.

Cohen now says the prosecutors behind those cases were politically motivated and that he felt pressured and coerced by them. Yet he simultaneously maintains that what he told the courts was truthful and accurate. Both statements can theoretically be true. A witness can believe prosecutors exerted enormous pressure upon him while still maintaining that the testimony he ultimately gave was truthful.

But if that is Cohen’s position, then it is not a recantation.

The distinction is particularly important because Cohen himself appears acutely aware of it. When CNN’s Jake Tapper characterized Cohen as saying he had been “pressured and coerced” into testifying against Trump, Cohen corrected him. The comment, Cohen explained, was that he “felt pressured and coerced.” Cohen then added: “And I think the distinction is extremely important.”

Indeed it is.

Cohen is an attorney. He knows the difference between alleging prosecutorial pressure and admitting that sworn testimony was false. He also knows the potential consequences of admitting that testimony he gave under oath was knowingly false.Perhaps Cohen understands that to recant his sworn testimony now could open him to new State charge of perjury. Perhaps those encouraging Cohen to recant his sworn testimony understand they could face charges of obstruction if Cohen was given anything in return for his new claims.

This is not to minimize what Cohen has said. His accusations against Bragg and James are extraordinary precisely because he was one of the government’s most important cooperating witnesses. According to Cohen, prosecutors approached their investigations determined to build cases against Trump and pressured him to provide information useful to those cases. Those allegations deserve scrutiny on their own merits.

But they should not be embellished into something Cohen himself refuses to say.

There is another fascinating dimension to all of this. Michael Cohen spent years attacking Donald Trump in the most viciously personal terms imaginable. He wrote two anti-Trump books. He became a fixture in the anti-Trump media. He testified against his former boss. According to the Times, Cohen sought a pardon from President Joe Biden and, after failing to obtain one, subsequently resubmitted his pardon application with Trump’s name in Biden’s place.

Criticism of Alvin Bragg is not recantation. Criticism of Letitia James is not recantation. Saying prosecutors pressured you is not recantation. Calling the system politically weaponized is not recantation. Even seeking a presidential pardon is not recantation.

Taking back your sworn testimony is recantation.

Michael Cohen has conspicuously refused to do that.

Perhaps Cohen will someday say explicitly that material testimony he gave against Donald Trump was false. If he does, that will be major news, and it will raise profound questions about the prosecutions themselves as well as Cohen’s own conduct under oath.

But he hasn’t said it yet.

Instead, when finally asked the question directly, Cohen said exactly the opposite: the information he provided was “truthful and accurate.” President Trump has claimed that Cohen “fully RECANTED his testimony.” But the first half of that proposition is contradicted by Cohen’s own public statements. And it raises the question that Cohen has still declined to answer:

What, specifically, did Michael Cohen testify to about Donald Trump that was not true?

But there has not been a recantation.