The Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side has seen costs rise from early estimates of $300–500 million to $909 million by the end of 2025, exceeding the previously cited $850 million estimate by $59 million. The projected cost was raised significantly several times throughout the project.

The Obama Foundation gained control of public land in Jackson Park for just $10 under a 99-year agreement. In return, it promised a major endowment to protect taxpayers from future costs.

Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett attributed the latest rise to “additional amenities” that made the campus “extraordinary beyond what we had originally intended,” raising the question of why a project tied to Barack Hussein Obama needed to grow this far beyond its original scope.

But, by mid-October 2026, the Obama Foundation indicated that the total cost of constructing the campus is anticipated to reach a price tag of $1 billion. Foundation officials described this as reflecting continued cost reconciliation along with additional investments in public art, insurance, scope changes, project management, and exhibit installation.

Early estimates were far lower, starting around $300 to $350 million and rising to a widely reported $500 million while Obama was still in office, 2016. After years of legal challenges and a federal review, construction began in 2021. Roughly five years after the Jackson Park site was selected, documents showed the cost had climbed to roughly $830 million.

The project was marketed with ambitious diversity goals, including a commitment that at least 50% of subcontracts would go to “diverse firms” owned by minorities, women, and what the Foundation called other underrepresented groups. Those pledges were central to the foundation’s portrayal of the campus as an economic engine for Chicago’s South Side and a model for minority business participation.

Yet, several firms have claimed they are owed significant sums for work performed. An earlier federal lawsuit filed in January 2025 by Robert McGee, owner of Black-owned II in One Contractors, against structural engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti alleged racial discrimination and sought about $40.8 million over disputed concrete work on the Obama Presidential Center.

Subcontractor complaints include those from Adamson Plumbing Company president Mike Owen, who said the firm is owed roughly $4 million out of about $12 million in work. The company later filed a mechanic’s lien, suspended operations, and laid off about 25 workers.

Omar Shareef, president of the African American Contractors Association, stated that multiple Black-owned subcontractors contacted his organization about unpaid or underpaid invoices, some in the seven-figure range, with many bound by nondisclosure agreements and reluctant to speak publicly.

Some of the firms reportedly indicated they would accept deep discounts simply to survive, while others faced risks to their bonding capacity and ongoing viability. The project’s stated minority-participation goals and the payment disputes involving Black-owned businesses have drawn particular attention.

The Obama Presidential Center has contributed to gentrification in the surrounding South Side neighborhood, with rising housing costs pricing out some longtime residents and making the area substantially more expensive. Years of legal fights over the use of public Jackson Park land for the private project delayed construction, and once built the campus required cutting down trees and redesigning the historic Women’s Garden even as it added limited new park acreage.

This vanity project for the former president, despite its publicized endowment meant to protect taxpayers, left some of the minority contractors it claimed to uplift fighting for payment and made surrounding neighborhoods more expensive for the minority residents it was supposed to benefit, all while climbing a steep hill of price increases from $300 million to nearly $1 billion.

For a project pitched by a former president who ran on hope, this was a poor representation of its core focus. Sold as a model of equity, empowerment, and community investment, the outcome has been cost overruns, unpaid invoices, and displacement. The campus is open. The bills, the disputes, and the longtime minority residents being priced out are still waiting.

The Biden administration did not merely miss a paperwork deadline on visas. Its lax immigration enforcement treated overstays as optional work. A Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report released September 29, 2026, puts the record in one place. OIG-26-38, “In FY 2021–FY 2024, ICE Took Limited Action on Nonimmigrant Overstays, Including Those Deemed High Risk to National Security,” says the State Department issued more than 31 million nonimmigrant visas from fiscal 2021 through fiscal 2024. They moved through without the normal interview, often without fingerprints, with almost no follow-up, and with little plan for who would stay.

Border officers often were not told who had skipped the screening. A later audit, OIG-25-50 from 2025, found that between March 2020 and March 2024 State issued more than 12 million nonimmigrant visas with no in-person interview and no fingerprints. Port officers treated the visa like any other and let the person in. The inspector general said that gap made it more likely a security or public-safety threat got through. The plan was that if those people stayed too long, ICE would find them. That part barely happened.

From fiscal 2021 through fiscal 2024, ICE received 3,145,375 leads on foreign nationals who entered and did not leave. Its Counter Threat Lead Development Unit rated only 104,049 of them, 3.3%, as potential national-security or public-safety concerns. The other 3,041,326 leads, 96.7%, were not flagged on those factors at all. Those ratings do not measure who was still here.

The stand-down was written down. A memo from then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, dated September 30, 2021, told ICE to target foreign nationals only for terrorism or espionage, a serious crime, or a narrow set of recent illegal entries. Applied to overstays, Homeland Security Investigations would work Priority 1 leads and little else. Leads judged viable fell from 20,648 in fiscal 2021 to 415 in 2022, 615 in 2023, and 207 in 2024. Across all four years ICE called 21,885 leads viable, opened 496 investigations, about 2%, and arrested only eight people.

The highest-risk stack was not exempt. Of 1,769 viable Priority 1 leads, the top of the scale, HSI opened 84 investigations, about 5%, and arrested two criminals. One was a Honduran national admitted in July 2022 on a tourist visa, charged the next month in Maryland with rape, assault, and a sexual offense, released on bond, and arrested in September 2023 after he overstayed. The other was a Chilean national admitted under the Visa Waiver Program in September 2023, charged in Florida with credit-card fraud, burglary, theft, and criminal mischief, released, and arrested in February 2024.

People lower on the list were not harmless either. The inspector general’s examples include a Serbian national admitted in January 2021 on a temporary worker visa who overstayed and was later convicted of sexual abuse, and a Bahamian national admitted in August 2021 on a tourist visa, charged with assault and battery, ordered removed, and only then deported. Add the Priority 1 cases and the record includes a man charged with rape. Of 2,837,188 Non-Priority leads sent to Enforcement and Removal Operations, ERO found five public-safety threats, investigated all five, made two arrests, and could not locate two of the cases.

Sanctuary jurisdictions in mostly blue cities made that search harder. Local jails there do not honor an ICE detainer, and the release on bond or from criminal custody is the moment the government loses the person. The audit does not study sanctuary cities. Instead it shows the results of Biden’s reckless approach to immigration: rapists and assailants the government already had in custody were released back into the public to commit more crimes, free from apprehension and consequently unfindable.

The failure to track them was built in from the start. State issued the visas without the interview and, in many cases, without the fingerprints that would have fixed an identity. ICE then received millions of overstay leads and could not generate viable cases because it did not have accurate addresses. Joseph Cuffari put it in one line: bad addresses and too few agents stopped the cases. A file with no interview, no fingerprints, and no reliable address is not a case. It is a name the government let in and then could not find.

The 3.1 million figure is leads sent to ICE, not a confirmed overstay count. The audit also does not claim ICE arrested only eight overstays in four years. The finding is narrower. New cases from these leads were not opened, and arrests tied to them were rare.

On October 5, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the record a dereliction of duty. ICE concurred with the only recommendation, a plan to increase investigations of Priority 1 overstays tied to national security, fraud, smuggling, worksite enforcement, human trafficking, or other HSI work. The estimated completion date is September 30, 2027. The Mayorkas memo was rescinded on January 20, 2025. The audit ends before that change can be measured.

The Trump administration’s goal is to uphold the rule of law. At the one-year mark, the Department of Homeland Security revealed that more than 670,000 people have been removed since Inauguration Day 2025. The Mayorkas limits are gone. Overstays are not optional under this administration.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose campaigns have received direct contributions from George Soros and family members along with support through Open Society-linked organizations, ran in 2018 on an explicit promise to go after President Donald J. Trump and his family.

A former public defender who had never prosecuted a criminal case, James centered her campaign on the 45th President, calling him an “illegitimate president” and pledging to use “every area of the law.”

In 2018 she called the NRA a “terrorist organization.” In 2020 she sued the NRA and CEO Wayne LaPierre, seeking to dissolve the group entirely. The judge rejected that bid pointing to members’ free-speech and association rights. Many have called this charade a waste of taxpayer money and selective enforcement driven by progressive donor talking points rather than an honest reading of basic law.

Her timeline of misfortune and deception does not begin this week, or even this year. It began in 2018, when a clear pattern of bad choices, consequences, and repeated failures to do the actual job of attorney general first became impossible to ignore. Everything since has been a variation on the same theme of the same habits, the same results, and the same insistence that each setback is somehow external, temporary, or unfair.

The signs of selective focus appeared once she took office. Campaign spending later raised ethics questions, including payments tied to her longtime hairdresser, who has since been jailed on mortgage fraud allegations. Once in office, James went straight for President Trump and his family while street crime and Medicaid fraud continued, and her investigations of him never produced criminal wrongdoing.

That same priority appeared in the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. Previous attorneys general recovered roughly $250 million a year with about 100 criminal convictions. Under James, recoveries fell as low as $19 million in some years, with single-digit convictions.

Other problems followed. In 2020 she bought a house in Norfolk, Virginia. Federal allegations claimed she listed it as a secondary residence to secure better mortgage terms while renting it out, producing roughly $18,993 in alleged savings.

Reports indicate her grandniece, who faced criminal charges and at the time was a “fugitive” from North Carolina probation, has lived there with her children since 2020. Questions regarding James’ other properties and insurance filings arose later. The resulting bank-fraud indictment was dismissed because the interim prosecutor’s appointment was ruled unlawful, a procedural escape hatch that avoided reaching the substance of the Norfolk mortgage allegations.

In 2021 her office released the report on Andrew Cuomo’s sexual-harassment allegations that helped force his resignation. Cuomo filed an ethics complaint alleging conflicts, selective evidence, and motives. The complaint produced no public discipline.

While her office spent years chasing the Trump case she had campaigned on, and coverage often framed the effort as closing in on major misconduct, campaign finance records show hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on lodging, flights, and related expenses, including stays at higher-end hotels.

During that same period her campaign filings reveal more than $310,000 was spent since she took office on luxury hotels and high-end expenses she labeled “political meetings,” including over $32,000 on Puerto Rico hotel stays, $4,600 on Martha’s Vineyard house rentals, a $12,000 private-jet payment, and additional lodging and transportation costs from 2021 onward totaling more than $215,000. Other analyses noted additional creative classifications, such as some lodging and travel costs shifted between “office,” “lodging,” and “transportation” categories for the same stays. Nightclub spending, including more than $5,000 at a New York City lounge, and certain taxi charges were also cited under broad “office” labels.

The same period saw the failed civil fraud case against Trump, in which an appellate court shut down the penalty, later valued at more than $450 million with interest, ruling it excessive while exposing its preposterous scale as political showboating rather than proportionate enforcement.

In April 2025 Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte sent a criminal referral alleging mortgage fraud. Beyond the Norfolk property, claims have involved a long-owned Brooklyn multi-unit building and separate insurance-fraud referrals by Pulte.

In October she was indicted in Virginia on claims she misrepresented the property’s use to obtain better loan terms bank-fraud and false-statement charges tied to the Norfolk property. The case was brought by Lindsey Halligan after the prior prosecutor declined to charge. James called it retribution. In November, Clinton-appointed Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed the indictment, ruling Halligan’s appointment unlawful. These matters, dismissed due to procedural issues, not by examining evidence.

By August 2026, frustration inside the office had surfaced. Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld in the Investor Protection Bureau emailed more than 2,000 colleagues alleging he was ordered to keep pursuing Trump-linked matters after a year-long probe found no crime. In an exclusive New York Post interview, he said his bureau chief indicated the case should be closed but that it was “Tish’s call” and “what Tish wanted, Tish got.”

The email was quickly deleted from the office’s servers and disappeared from the inboxes of more than 2,000 employees. He was placed on leave and terminated September 5. He refused demands to destroy the evidence of improper targeting, citing threats of discipline and possible civil or criminal action. He said protection-detail detectives left a card at his home and banged on his door.

Federal investigators interviewed him and no public charging decisions followed.

The office later released his personnel records under FOIL. Former Cuomo aide Richard Azzopardi called her the “biggest hypocrite in Albany” for doing so, noting her team had previously treated the same tactic as retaliation. Her office called it a personnel matter.

On September 28 she posted that what a Cornell accuser had endured was “horrific and unacceptable” and told “survivors” that “we stand with you.” Governor Hochul appointed her special prosecutor three days later. James described the comments as empathy and said “politics stops at the door in my office.” The underlying case already contained conflicting accounts, including earlier statements from the accuser that some contact was consensual and that “none of the sexual stuff was illegal.” Two defendants moved to remove or disqualify her. An Article 78 petition is set for October 29.

An ethics expert’s report concluded she had a serious, incurable conflict requiring recusal. Jonathan Turley has also urged recusal, arguing that her pre-appointment statements created an appearance of prejudgment and that she has long followed a “sentence first, verdict afterward” approach. He concludes she is “the absolutely wrong person” to lead the investigation.

Now seeking a third term, she faces Trump-backed challenger Saritha Komatireddy. In their October 8 debate she declared, “You don’t have to look at the facts and the law. All you have to do is study what they do. It is illegal in the state of New York.” Komatireddy immediately repeated the line back to the audience.

That moment captured the record. What remains is a pathetic legacy.

Since 2018 the playbook has not shifted. The office’s highest-profile effort remained the failed, politically driven multi-year campaign against President Trump. She supported progressive bail changes and deprioritized routine street crime relative to high-profile cases. That is a record of sustained partisan theater, weaponizing the justice system to target those she named while conducting with public power. It was a clear misuse of the oath and the public power she swore to exercise impartially.

President Trump, on Tuesday, at a truck rally in Wasilla, Alaska, spoke about changes coming to the state’s energy future, announcing that a long-awaited 800-mile natural gas pipeline now has every federal permit it needs and can move forward, and signed onstage pardons for Anchorage diesel shop owners Zachary Czubak and Patrick Fleming.

Czubak, Fleming, and Hanzuk, co-owners of Anchorage diesel shop Arm Rippin Toys, pleaded guilty in 2022 to conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act after removing emissions equipment on at least 37 vehicles; each got five years’ probation and a $66,000 fine with no prison. Hanzuk was pardoned in September and Spurlock earlier in July.

For years, Clean Air Act diesel rules, tightened under Obama and enforced as felonies by the Biden Justice Department, treated Alaska’s remote bush the same as the Lower 48. Federally mandated systems designed for milder climates freeze, clog, trigger limp mode, or shut engines down in extreme cold. This strands drivers, families, and loads hours from help.

When the law was written, no one took into consideration that commercial trucks would shut down in subzero conditions.

The Biden administration began enforcing the rules in Alaska’s freezing terrain. Mechanics who removed or bypassed the failing equipment for reliability rather than power gains were prosecuted as polluters.

The Trump administration has moved toward a broader shift in which it has directed prosecutors to drop remaining criminal “defeat device” cases and has granted clemency to other mechanics previously convicted for similar work. For the mechanics who received them, the pardons remove felony records that carried lasting consequences for employment, firearms rights, and, in Spurlock’s case, military service.

A lasting fix is already in motion under President Trump. The Cold Weather Diesel Reliability Act (S. 3135), sponsored by Republican Senators Dan Sullivan and Cynthia Lummis and advanced by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, directs the EPA to update the rules so manufacturers can stop engines from shutting down or losing power in freezing temperatures and give real relief to trucks operating in extreme cold. A House version of the same bill is ready too.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has already stepped in with guidance telling manufacturers to ease up on the worst DEF-related engine problems.

President Donald J. Trump on Friday asked the Supreme Court to revive his dismissed 2022 civil lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to tie his 2016 campaign to Russia. Justice Clarence Thomas extended the deadline to October 9; Trump’s lawyers submitted the petition that day.

The 2022 Florida lawsuit (Trump v. Clinton, S.D. Fla.) named Hillary Clinton, her campaign, the DNC, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, and others connected to the dossier and Crossfire Hurricane.

The phony 35-page Steele dossier was opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Fusion GPS hired Steele to produce it. The dossier alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, along with salacious claims about Trump himself. Its assertions were later shown to be invented, incorrect, and unverifiable.

The Clinton campaign and DNC later paid FEC fines for failing to properly disclose the payments.

U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida, a Bill Clinton appointee, dismissed the suit in September 2022 after rejecting a motion to disqualify him. He described the complaint as a lengthy political manifesto rather than a viable legal claim and later imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions on Trump and his then-attorney Alina Habba.

The courts rejected the case in 2022 and again in 2025 on procedural grounds, mainly that it was filed too late and failed to meet the legal requirements for a RICO claim, without deciding whether the Russia story was true or false.

The mainstream media used the dossier as a nightly mouthpiece, convincing many Americans that the invented Russian collusion had occurred when, in fact, it had not. This was an attempt to discredit President Trump and his allies while rewriting the history of the 2016 election.

Figures like Adam Schiff and disgraced former California Congressman Eric Swalwell regularly appeared on cable news pushing the collusion narrative, singling out associates including myself. This was a moment when the media revealed their deep state favoritism by failing to examine the document’s weaknesses at the time, something that almost seems orchestrated given the ethical standards journalists are expected to follow.

Later investigative work by Devin Nunes and Kash Patel documented the extent of its bogus and unverified assertions.

It was the brave work of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose declassifications fully exposed the reckless handling of the dossier inside the Intelligence Community. Obama ordered the Intelligence Community to create an Intelligence Community Assessment they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump. These releases documented how senior Obama-era officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and DNI James Clapper, overrode explicit internal warnings from intelligence professionals that the dossier was baseless and unfit for use in assessments or surveillance.

In a July 23, 2025 statement, Gabbard stated: “Not only did CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper and others include the Steele Dossier in the 2017 ICA, they overruled senior Intel officials who warned them it was fabricated and should not be used.” Declassified whistleblower accounts reinforced this, showing pressure on career officials to endorse the ICA’s flawed conclusions despite their documented objections.The records also showed that senior CIA analysts and managers privately warned the dossier was non-credible and unfit for inclusion, yet Brennan and Comey overruled them and ensured a summary appeared in the ICA’s classified annex and was referenced in the main text.

These findings aligned with Special Counsel John Durham’s May 2023 report, which criticized the FBI’s reliance on such thin evidence. The same pattern of reliance on the unverified dossier appeared earlier in the FBI’s surveillance applications, but were ignored. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2019 report found 17 significant errors and omissions in the four FISA applications used to surveil Carter Page, including reliance on the uncorroborated Steele dossier and the omission of Page’s prior CIA relationship. FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith later pleaded guilty to altering an email to falsely state Page was “not a source” for another agency. Trump’s Supreme Court petition cites both Clinesmith’s guilty plea and the Inspector General’s finding of at least 17 significant errors or omissions.

In the Supreme Court petition, Trump’s lawyers argue the statute of limitations should have been paused while he was president, because pursuing the case would have taken time and energy needed for official duties. They say the lower courts wrongly rejected that argument and used it to justify the sanctions. The petition contends review is needed to protect the presidency.

The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling aside, the central claim that drove years of media coverage and official assessments, that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia, has already been substantially undermined by subsequent investigations and declassifications. The Obama Administration’s January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment was not an independent product produced with apolitical analysis. The record now includes the dossier’s Democratic funding and later FEC fines, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s declassifications on the handling of the dossier inside the Intelligence Community, the Inspector General’s documentation of 17 significant FISA errors and omissions, Clinesmith’s guilty plea, and Durham’s criticism of the FBI’s reliance on thin evidence. Follow the paper trail and you will find the media was complacent, performative, and disingenuous to the public.

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/