The framing that Cruz uses to describe one of the greatest Presidents in American history reveals his deep disdain for the country he claims to represent.

During the testimony of former Special Counsel Jack Smith before the Senate late last week, odious Texas Senator Ted Cruz launched an untrue and baseless attack on my mentor, and one of my personal heroes, President Richard Nixon.

Cruz said, “Well, let me say congratulations. Because you have succeeded where Richard Nixon failed, which is weaponizing the Department of Justice and the federal government to go after your political opponents. Congratulations, you are stepping into the shoes of John Mitchell.”

Cruz compared Smith to Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, then said Smith’s abuse was “far greater than John Mitchell,” accused him of being “conscripted as a foot soldier for the DNC,” and called the conduct “the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice.”

The framing that Cruz uses to describe one of the greatest Presidents in American history reveals his deep disdain for the country he claims to represent.

Nixon was not a political marauder seeking revenge on his opponents, nor was he in a position where spying on his opponents was even a necessary act.

When you’re talking about Richard Nixon, you’re talking about potentially the most popular President in the history of the United States, based on election results.

Nixon’s first win in 1968 was narrow. His second was one of the largest landslides in modern presidential history. His job approval was solid, not extraordinary, until the Vietnam settlement briefly pushed it near 70 percent in early 1973.

In 1968 he beat Hubert Humphrey by a hair. Nixon took about 43.4 percent of the popular vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, with George Wallace at 13.5 percent.

The electoral vote was 301–191–46. It was a plurality win in a three-way race, not a mandate.

In 1972 he crushed George McGovern. The final total was about 47.2 million votes (60.7 percent) to 29.2 million (37.5 percent), and 520 electoral votes to 17.

McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia; one Virginia elector defected to Libertarian John Hospers.

Coming out of the 1972 Election, President Richard Nixon had a mandate from the American people, a mandate that pathetic Senator Ted Cruz is trying to erase from history.

But why would Ted Cruz attack Richard Nixon? The answer is simple…

Republicans like Ted Cruz have always existed. Weak, spineless, immoral cowards who stand for nothing, while boasting of their false bravado.

Cruz, an effeminate Canadian-born fraud, and his betrayal of Richard Nixon highlights the divide within the Republican that existed in the days of Nixon, and continues into the days of President Donald Trump.

Richard Nixon represented the working class of this country, the backbone of America. The factory workers, the auto workers, the small businessmen and businesswomen nationwide. They are who elected Richard Nixon, and they were the main focus of Richard Nixon’s policies.

Much like President Donald Trump, Richard Nixon put America and Americans first.

On the other hand, establishment figures like Ted Cruz, who could be compared to any number of Republicrats of the Nixon-era, legislate from an entirely different perspective. Cruz comes from the Bush-era of conservatism.

While Americans that support Donald Trump believe in limited government, free speech, and the Constitution, Republicans like Cruz compromise, and even directly contradict these values, almost always arguing for Big Government, restrictions on free movement and free speech, especially online, and directly arguing against the rights enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

While Ted Cruz may play the part of a patriot, his record reads like that of a paper tiger.

As for his comments specifically relating to John Mitchell, Cruz couldn’t be more wrong.

The Watergate Special Prosecution Force proved that much of the evidence that was used to come after John Mitchell was entirely fabricated.

In a February 6, 1974, memorandum, WSPF lawyer Peter F. Rient identified 20 instances in which John Dean’s testimony before the Senate diverged materially from what was on the tapes. The Rient memorandum did not surface until 1997.

George Frampton, another WSPF lawyer, actually concluded that one key meeting Dean had described, deeply damning to Mitchell, “apparently didn’t take place, adding: “We probably would do well simply to omit Dean’s testimony about this.” In the same document, Frampton wrote about California attorney Herbert Kalmbach, the chief fundraiser of the “hush money” that was delivered to the Watergate burglars and their attorneys. Dean has always maintained that John Mitchell authorized the enlistment of Kalmbach. But the WSPF concluded: “Mitchell’s logs and schedule suggest…Dean exercised somewhat more discretion himself to forge ahead with getting Kalmbach into the picture than he has admitted.”

Ted Cruz obviously has no idea what really happened in Watergate.

Cruz not only has no clue what happened at Watergate, he’s also deeply corrupt.

Cruz told voters he and his wife liquidated their savings to fund his underdog 2012 Senate race. In reality, more than $1 million came from a Goldman Sachs margin loan (his wife Heidi worked there) and a Citibank line of credit.

He reported the money to the FEC as “personal funds” and did not disclose the banks as the source on campaign reports, as required.

The FEC later found the reporting inaccurate. In 2019 his campaign paid a $35,000 fine and signed a conciliation agreement.

Cruz called it an “inadvertent filing error.” The loans themselves were listed on his separate Senate personal financial disclosures, just not correctly on FEC campaign forms.

iHeartMedia produces and syndicates Cruz’s podcast. Between 2023 and 2024, IHeart paid roughly $630,000–$961,000 in “digital revenue” to Truth and Courage PAC, a super PAC whose purpose is getting Cruz reelected. Watchdogs argued this was an illegal corporate contribution or an undisclosed gift.

Cruz has also received luxurious gifts from donors, getting a $76,440 private-jet round trip to Turks and Caicos from Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, a Goldman Sachs executive. Cruz has received charter flights, Astros tickets, concert tickets, and a Longhorns ticket from Texas oil and real-estate donors.

Not only does Ted Cruz operate on a corrupt basis while working as a United States Senator, but he also barely shows up to work.

Reports have been published detailing the fact that in some years, Cruz has missed upwards of 32% of the Senate hearings he was supposed to attend.

Current figures put his absences at eighth-worst in the entire United States Senate, meaning there are only seven Senators who show up to work less than Senator Ted Cruz.

In addition to having one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate, Senator Ted Cruz has also spent the last 10 years being a quiet, yet effective objecting force to President Donald Trump’s agenda in the Senate.

In May 2022 Cruz voted for the roughly $40 billion Ukraine supplemental, which the Senate passed 86–11. In a floor speech he said he would have preferred a smaller, more focused bill, but concluded continued military support was in the U.S. national interest while Ukrainian forces were winning with weapons already supplied.

The 11 Republican “no” votes included Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee. America First critics of open-ended Ukraine funding have pointed to this vote.

Cruz’s support for Ukraine is a prime example of his willingness to stab Republican voters in the back whenever it suits his political career, rather than the desires of his constituents.

Ted Cruz is wrong about a lot of things, but few statements by Cruz have been as egregiously false as his statements about Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Cruz’s history as a traitorous, barely-present neocon that devours the most blatant and disgusting kind of corruption in the Senate is just the cherry on top of his lies.

Thom Tillis, a retiring North Carolina RINO, spent the last few days doing what he would not do in a primary. He bashed the president who carried his state, and shopped a book about it. He took the act to 60 Minutes on Sunday and The View on Monday. The book came out Tuesday.

Tillis has served two terms. He was elected in 2014, sworn in January 2015, and leaves in January 2027. He knows the last general-election result. He is still arguing with it.

Sunday he told Ross Douthat the next Republican nominee cannot be a MAGA candidate, because that candidate could not win a general election. After a tough midterm, he said, Trump will have a heavy hand in the 2028 primary, and the party has to speak frankly about the profile it needs. Asked what was wrong with the president’s pick, he said it works in red MAGA states and will not work in a general. 

Trump won the popular vote in 2024 with about 77.3 million votes, carried all seven swing states, including North Carolina, and took 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 226. In North Carolina, Trump received 2,898,423 votes to Kamala Harris’s 2,715,375, about 51% to 47.8%, wider than his margin in 2020. Tillis is not arguing with a theory. He is arguing with a certified result in his own state, and he is losing the argument.

He knew it was coming, which makes the lecture worse. On October 23, 2024, he told Bloomberg Television that Trump would carry North Carolina by about the margin he won in 2020. The brand he now calls a general-election loser is the brand he was counting on to save his state. Trump won. Tillis is the one fleeing.

He is arguing from the door because the door is the only place he is brave. On June 29, 2025, the day after he and Rand Paul voted against advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill and Trump said he was considering a primary, Tillis announced he would not run again.

Trump called him a talker and a complainer, not a doer. That was generous. Instead of fighting for the seat, he wrote a book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, and booked the two shows that exist to applaud a Republican who hates his own voters. Courage, on his schedule, starts when the primary can no longer hurt him.

It is no mystery. The primary he skipped already answered for him, and not in his favor. Michael Whatley, Trump’s endorsee, the former Republican National Committee chair, won the March 3 nomination with 64.6%. Don Brown, the next closest, took 15.6%. 

The general is against former governor Roy Cooper, who won the Democratic primary with 92% and leads the early polling. Tillis handed his voters a Trump-backed nominee, refused to defend the seat himself, and then went on CBS to say that kind of nominee cannot win. Whatley is on the ballot. Tillis is on a book tour.

Mitch McConnell was his mentor in the Senate, which tells you the ambition and the taste. Tillis named a dog Little Mitch after him, and in 2024 he said Little Mitch evokes the same emotions as Big Mitch, and that there is a reason he named a dog after Mitch. He still has the dog. He also rents McConnell’s carriage house in Washington. He votes with the party when the camera is off and saves the break for the shows that book critics of Trump.

On 60 Minutes he said he is the same conservative he was in 2014, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, for limited government and fiscal restraint. The only difference, he said, between him and people who call themselves true conservatives is that he has a long list of things that were ratified and they do not. The list is the deals that put him at war with the voters who elected him, recited now that those voters cannot retire him.

He claims he is filled with regret. He voted to confirm the Trump Cabinet, including Pete Hegseth. That vote was 50-50. His was the vote that kept the nomination alive, and Vance broke the tie. In the book he calls it the biggest regret of his career and wants Hegseth out. He writes that he also should have stopped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he names Tulsi Gabbard, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Howard Lutnick among the picks he now faults.

On 60 Minutes he called Noem and Hegseth the poster children for people who should never have had the authority they were given, citing a $200 million Homeland Security ad campaign and Noem’s description of people who were shot as potentially domestic terrorists. The regret arrived after the votes, and after the primary he refused to face.

On The View the next day, Whoopi Goldberg noted that he calls Trump a snowflake and still calls him an amazing political talent, and asked what she was missing. Alyssa Farah Griffin asked about his vote to confirm Pete Hegseth, which he now calls the biggest regret of his career. Tillis said he had deferred to his former Armed Services colleagues, that they all made a mistake, and that he hopes Hegseth gets fired. Ana Navarro then asked why he confirmed nominees he had called unqualified, Hegseth and Kristi Noem among them, and why he had just voted for Todd Blanche. He confirmed the people he now criticizes, Hegseth among them, then said the confirmation was a mistake. That is not oversight. That is a man building a second career as the Republican who warned you, after he declined to cast the no vote when it counted.

The same pattern of inconsistency shows up in his account of January 6. On 60 Minutes, Tillis told Douthat the day was despicable, that the people who assaulted police should still be in prison, and that they were there for the president. He was not disgusted enough to convict. He voted against conviction and now says the trial was rushed. He kept the vote that protected his standing in the conference and kept the speech that plays on CBS and ABC. Disgust, like courage, arrived after the risk was gone.

Tillis claims at least 30 Republican senators share his reservations in private and will not say so because Trump would target them in a primary. His line was that martyrs are dead. Then do not call it a principle. Call it a head count. They are not on 60 Minutes or The View. He is, because he is done and he wants the booking.

Tillis will be remembered as a senator who won twice, narrowly both times, and then quit rather than face a third. In 2014 he beat Kay Hagan. In 2020 he survived by 1.8 points, 48.7% to 46.9%, after Cal Cunningham’s affair disclosure. He is not running from a rematch with Cunningham. He is declining the term. That is a thin basis for a lecture on who can win a general. He won a Senate seat twice. He did not win a presidential election. Trump did, including in his state.

Newly released files show the FBI tracked Melania Trump’s and Barron Trump’s travel while planning the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, and later tapped the phone of Susie Wiles, co-campaign manager of Donald Trump’s political operation and now White House chief of staff, the New York Post reported. 

The files come from Plasmic Echo, the classified-documents investigation later handed to special counsel Jack Smith. Nine were declassified or approved for release on September 29 by White House Counsel Will Scharf, and the White House Government Transparency Task Force posted them Monday. Just the News, by John Solomon and Steven Richards, published the Wiles material first.

This was never about missing classified pages. 

Front and center was Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice, which opened a Sensitive Investigative Matter on a former president, timed a search of his home around his wife, Melania, and their minor son, Barron, then kept a line on Wiles while he was running.

Travel, down to the aircraft

A late-May 2022 email among FBI agents, names redacted, lists the steps as the bureau prepared to search Trump’s Palm Beach estate. One item: “Finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel (type of aircraft and specific timeline).”

Another note said any search would be served after the former president left Mar-a-Lago. It went ahead on August 8, 2022, and covered Trump’s office and both of the couple’s bedrooms. Barron was a minor. The checklist treated his movements, and Melania’s, as operational details for when to go in.

The release does not show either as a target. It shows a Biden-era bureau building a raid around a former first lady and a child. On July 13, 2022, an assistant special agent in charge said the Washington Field Office had not established probable cause. The department said it had, and wanted the residence, office, and storage space covered. The agent suggested calling Trump’s attorney again, or speaking with Trump and his counsel, and called the paperwork counterproductive if the goal was to recover the papers. The department “persistently disagreed.” Headquarters proceeded anyway.

Two sign-offs from the top

Plasmic Echo opened with a sign-off from the top. On March 24, 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray sent Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco a request to approve a Sensitive Investigative Matter, because those who might be investigated included a presidential candidate or senior campaign staff. On March 28, Monaco wrote on the memo, “Merrick, I recommend you approve,” and initialed that note. Garland signed the same day.

Wray’s March 24, 2022 memo opening Plasmic Echo. Monaco’s March 28 note, and Garland’s approval, are on the last page. Source: Just the News

A separate May 2022 note, reported by the Post, is the one tied to wiretap approval. Wray warned the investigation could reach top figures from the 45th president’s administration and “could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election.” He urged approval anyway. At the bottom he wrote, “Merrick, I recommend you approve. CW.” The misspelling is in the original. The Post reported Garland approved the wiretaps on that advice.

Susie Wiles’ phone, February to May 2023

Trump announced his 2024 campaign in November 2022 and named Wiles co-campaign manager. From at least February through May 2023, agents monitored her cellphone anyway. The logs cover calls and texts with at least 21 lawyers tied to Trump, labeled Lawyer 1 through Lawyer 21, plus campaign aides, political advisers, and at least five journalists. Most names are redacted. Two are not: Kash Patel, then out of government and now FBI director, and John Solomon, founder of Just the News.

The tool is a pen register and trap-and-trace. It captures who called whom, when, and for how long. Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 3121–3127 it takes a court order, and the standard is relevance to an ongoing investigation, not probable cause. None of the nine includes the order for her line. On February 3, 2023, the FBI also asked Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo to preserve the headers on her email: who emailed whom and when.

Agents logged calls with Trump on a “vanity number,” entered under FPOTUS. A May 19, 2023 entry reads: “2:05 pm The FPOTUS Vanity Number called WILES for 16 minutes and 11 seconds.” The word on that line is not in the files.

On March 9, 2023, Wiles made or received 39 calls. A sample from that evening.

A March 24 email shows how closely they watched. Agents saw Lawyer 7 call Wiles at 2:04 p.m. for 41 seconds. He had first called her at 2:10 p.m. on March 21, and she returned the call at 2:59 p.m. for 1 minute and 34 seconds, the only contact between them since the register began. A late-February note captured an ABC News reporter calling her at 8:48 a.m. for 2:36 seconds. Nothing in that note is evidence. They logged it anyway.

Wiles sat for an FBI interview in Jacksonville on April 7, two lawyers attending. On April 10 the Washington Field Office went back through her calls “to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview.” The April 6–8 log lists reporters from The Washington Post, CNN, and Politico, and a call of more than an hour with the Jacksonville firm Bedell, Dittmar, DeVault, Pillans & Coxe. She also spoke with Trump and several of his lawyers. This does not show a device on their phones. It shows the government reaching past the papers and into the press, using her phone to see who was calling.

A records case does not need the campaign manager’s line to map which reporters dialed her in the days around an FBI interview.

An endorsement is not evidence

The release shows Smith went past the search for the papers and after the campaign itself. A public donor list and political speech are not evidence, but both somehow made the cut at Biden’s DOJ. His team pulled Trump’s Save America PAC filings, including a 72-page FEC Form 3X naming donors and vendors, and monitored political speech on social media.

On February 6, 2023, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien was declining a voluntary interview. Prosecutors told the FBI to check whether he was still endorsing Republicans and whether he had endorsed Trump again. The subject line could not be blunter: “Ambassador O’Brien Has he endorsed Trump again?” Two days later, Smith subpoenaed him.

What happened to the case

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon killed the Florida documents case in July 2024, ruling that Garland’s appointment of Smith violated the Constitution. Smith dropped the appeal after the election. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said Monday: “Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power. Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple. Those responsible must be held accountable.”

The release does not show the content of Wiles’ calls. It does show enforcement turned political, and it shows the trajectory of a weaponized Biden DOJ treating a former first lady’s and a minor’s travel as raid logistics, monitoring a campaign manager’s contacts with defense lawyers and reporters for months, and demanding to know whether a Republican witness had endorsed Trump again. They were tracking a minor. Two sign-offs from the top put that in writing. Wray sent it up. Monaco recommended it. Garland signed, twice, once for the Sensitive Investigative Matter and once for the wiretaps, after writing that disclosure could disrupt the democratic process. Other presidents kept classified papers and did not get a raid built around a wife and a child. Garland signed anyway. The work went on. This was a politicized stunt.

Tim Burchett says he will try to stop New York DSA socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier from taking the oath if she is elected, the New York Post reported. She faces Republican Jomo M. Williams on November 3 in New York’s 13th District, northern Manhattan and the western Bronx.

If she wins, he told the Post he will move in January to block her from being seated, whether Republicans hold the House or not. The tool is Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, the clause that makes each house the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members. A majority can vote, before the oath, not to seat her.

The reason is a deleted tweet from December 2019. It is hers. “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” The post is gone. Burchett is not treating it as a joke. A 48-star flag hangs in his Knoxville office. It covered the casket of an uncle who was wounded in the hedgerows past the Normandy beaches and later died. Burchett’s line is that the same flag buried that man, and that a member-elect who used it as a napkin has already walked away from the oath.

Chevalier is a democratic socialist, a member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which put her up for the seat. In an interview with the DSA’s own magazine, she said those principles are central to her politics, not something she took on for the campaign. Asked what the word means, she has said socialism is the idea that working people should benefit from the wealth they produce, and that workers should have control over their work and their lives through democratic means. 

She points to Social Security and Medicare as socialist policies already in place, and says the system is broken in a district where a large share of children live in poverty. She has denied being a communist and called the question a distraction. Older posts favorable to communist leaders and Marxism are still on record.

That is the politics next to the napkin, not a separate file. 

She was in the 2024 Columbia takeover. She beat Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the primary, with Zohran Mamdani’s backing. She showed up at an anti-Israel rally the day after the October 7 attack, and posted in 2020 that the country was a disgrace and that Joe Biden was a war criminal. The Post also ties her to an anti-Israel group that once said it was fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. Her campaign did not answer the Post.

Congress has tried this before, and the courts shut it down. In 1967 the House refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell, a New York Democrat, over a scandal. In 1969 the Supreme Court said the House had gone too far. If voters elect someone and that person meets the rules written in the Constitution, age, citizenship, and residency, the chamber cannot add a new rule and keep them out. More than 600 election fights sit in the old record. A USC political scientist told the Post those fights stopped mattering about a century ago, and that the last decade is what makes the old move imaginable again.

John Feehery, a former senior House leadership aide, described the practical limit. “If we refused to seat folks in Congress who said things that we strongly disagreed with, nobody in the House would be seated,” he told the Post. He is not defending the tweet. His point is that the House cannot throw out every member it dislikes, or the room would be empty. The rule still stands.

The Supreme Court settled this in 1969, after the House refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell. A member-elect who meets the qualifications written in the Constitution is seated.

Burchett is talking to Democrats, and asking whether one of them will vote no. He noted that Democrats died for the country too. The line he is drawing in public is the flag. On the other side of it is a socialist who says the word is the point, and whose record treats the country as a disgrace.

U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma found that a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when a deputy searched Flock Safety’s license-plate network without a warrant, simply because her rental had California plates. In an October 1 order in United States v. Melisa Susan Kyle, Hill called the system “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.” It is one of the first times a federal court has held that a Flock lookup itself can be a Fourth Amendment search, as reported by 404 Media.

The case started on a highway in Tulsa County. Deputy Freddie Alaniz, a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy and Drug Enforcement Administration task force officer, was parked on the shoulder when a Mazda SUV with California plates drove past. Hill wrote that he pulled onto the road and followed the car “for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate,” and that he ran the plate through Flock at the same time. He later stopped the driver, Melisa Kyle, after he believed he saw both unsignaled lane changes and following too closely, about 30 feet behind another vehicle. Kyle told him the Mazda was a rental.

While he questioned her, Alaniz kept scrolling the history. In her order, Hill wrote that he had access to at least two plate-reader networks, Flock and VehicleManager. VehicleManager is Motorola Solutions’ license-plate platform. Both systems ask for a reason for the query. The reasons he entered were “traffic violation” and “investigation,” when all he knew was that the plate was from California.

The query returned more than 50 records of the vehicle’s whereabouts over about a month. The officer compared her answers to that trail, treated a short California turnaround as a sign of trafficking, and used the history as part of the reason to search the car. Local reporting linked by 404 Media said officers found 91 pounds of meth. Prosecutors charged Kyle with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute.

The judge treated the traffic stop as valid, then suppressed the plate data and everything that followed. She found the officer lacked reasonable suspicion to prolong the stop into a drug investigation. Suppression is not dismissal. 

The holding is not that an officer can never look at a plate. It is that this search reconstructed “the whole of her physical movements” and required a warrant supported by probable cause. Tracking people in public, she wrote, “becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient.”

This order is not a nationwide rule, and it does not bind other courts. Flock was not a party. A company spokesperson told 404 Media the ruling “goes against the overwhelming weight of authority in similar cases across the country, including multiple recent decisions in Oklahoma,” and that Flock expects it to be appealed and overturned. The company said the decision is limited to these facts and does not stop agencies from using the cameras. In late January, a federal judge in Virginia reached the opposite conclusion on Norfolk’s Flock network. Judge Mark S. Davis found the plaintiffs had not shown it could track “the whole of a person’s movements,” Ars Technica reported.

The scale is what makes the Oklahoma order matter even without a nationwide rule. 404 Media has reported more than 100,000 warrantless Flock searches a month from the audit logs it reviewed. A New York Times briefing in August reported 120,000 cameras logging about 20 billion vehicle scans a month. Florida and Texas have already moved to limit the cameras over privacy concerns. A Washington Post review in August found at least 50 officers charged or accused of misusing plate readers, including to stalk women. Flock’s chief executive said the company would add filters to stop that abuse.

Until legislation is in place, the networks will keep running. The Ban Flock Act, released October 2, would bar federal use of license-plate readers and their data and cut grants to governments that keep them, with exceptions for tolls and a later act of Congress that caps retention at 48 hours. It follows the No FLOCK Act in mid-September, which would withhold highway funds from states that do not limit the cameras to listed public-safety uses, and the Flock-Off Act earlier that month, which would cut off federal money for the systems. None is law.

Revisionist historian went to DOJ headquarters to present his case that former president, his associates weren’t treated fairly

WASHINGTON—For nearly two years, the Justice Department has made it a priority to investigate people who previously investigated President Trump. Now it is reaching back in history to consider whether prosecutors mistreated an earlier Republican president: Richard Nixon.

The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation. 

Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: “Watergate As Lawfare.”

The review comes at a moment of renewed interest in the Nixon legacy. Republicans see in the combative former president, who was loathed by the press and besieged by investigations, a historical analogue for Trump. During remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., this summer, Vice President JD Vance made the comparison explicit.

“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people—the same institutions—tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration,” Vance said. “There is a parallel.”

A senior Justice Department official last month invited Shepard to come to Justice Department headquarters and make his case before the Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, an internal watchdog that investigates allegations of misconduct. The office itself is a product of the Watergate era, one of a number of changes aimed at shielding criminal investigations from White House influence.

In 2022, the Justice Department under the Biden administration rebuffed Shepard’s request for an investigation, citing the many years that have passed since the events in question. Current officials wanted to hear him out, the people familiar with the matter said. The review is preliminary, and it isn’t clear whether it will lead to a full-fledged probe, the people said.

“Given his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, he was recently invited to give a presentation,” a Justice Department spokeswoman said, “but that presentation does not constitute an investigation. OPR remains focused on ensuring that Department attorneys meet the highest professional standards.”

The scandal was triggered by a botched 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex, part of the Nixon re-election campaign’s wide-ranging scheme of political sabotage, wiretapping and illegal contributions. Those activities and the coverup that followed forced Nixon to resign in August 1974.

Shepard has served as a sort of godfather for the Watergate revisionists. His scholarship has unearthed a number of primary-source documents which he says show Nixon and his associates weren’t treated fairly.

During his presentation, Shepard showed officials some of those internal documents from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force first led by special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Leon Jaworski took over the probe after Nixon ordered Cox’s firing in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Shepard alleges that Cox and Jaworski violated the due process rights of defendants caught up in the Watergate probe by meeting secretly with the judges overseeing their trial and suppressing evidence from the defense.

Mainstream scholars have long concluded that Watergate generated a genuine constitutional crisis and that Nixon, not those who investigated him, was guilty of a malfeasance which not only doomed his presidency but also led to overhauls that significantly curtailed executive power.

Nixon’s tenure has been of growing interest to Trump, Vance and the larger conservative movement. 

Trump has asked former Nixon aides on several occasions why Nixon resigned rather than fight it out. The current president also has moved to roll back many post-Watergate overhauls, challenging limits on presidential authority to fire inspectors general and career civil servants.

By – https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/decades-after-watergate-justice-department-reviews-whether-nixon-got-a-raw-deal-8e25380f?mod=hp_lead_pos8