Special prosecutors are dangerous animals under any circumstances, but their handiwork uncovered this past week should shock everyone who believes in Equal Justice Under Law, the promise engraved in the West Pediment of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. I grant you that it concerns a president who resigned in disgrace over four decades ago, but the same deliberate misrepresentations could be being made today.
I opposed the 2011 effort to unseal Richard Nixon’s 1975 grand jury testimony, taken some 11 months after he had resigned as president. I suspected it was a bald-faced attempt by Watergate’s special prosecutors, bitter about the pardon granted by President Ford, to trap Nixon into making false statements about his involvement in the scandal, thus enabling them to bring new charges of perjury, in spite of that previous pardon.
I also argued that, if his grand jury testimony was to be unsealed, then so also should be grand jury materials involving other Watergate matters — particularly the infamous “Road Map” that transmitted grand jury information under seal to the House Judiciary Committee (HJC). My effort failed and Nixon’s testimony was unsealed by judicial order on November 10, 2011. There were no bombshells. It proved to be a non-event and was quickly forgotten.
My separate effort to unseal the Road Map, however, lay dormant for seven long years, until October 18, 2018, when Chief Judge Beryl Howell ordered its unsealing. I was so confident that this also was a non-event and that I already knew everything worth knowing about Watergate that I didn’t get around to reviewing it until last week — and was astonished at what I found.
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