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Notes -
Recently I listened to a very interesting podcast with Geoff Shepard. Here is part 1 and part 2. Shepard was a very young, junior staffer in the Nixon White House who in the past years has done a great deal of archival research and wrote a few books on Watergate. His take is that Nixon was basically innocent of any real crimes, and got railroaded by a gang of prosecutors and judges who ran roughshod over normal due process and distorted every shred of evidence to make Nixon look bad. You can listen to the podcast for more, or read his book "The Nixon Conspiracy." After paying very close attention to the Trump-Russia investigation, his description of what happened to Nixon sounds very familiar...
I'm not sure I'd call it a deep state conspiracy, which makes it sound like a Hollywood-style thing where the Deep State is doing something that the mainstream press would find criminal. It was a Deep State conspiracy plus a press pile-on of every establishment-type who hated Nixon, from the journalists to the judges.
I'm not sure if it is significant if Woodward was actually a CIA agent at the time. The Washington Post has long been know to basically be the stenographers for the security state, whether or not the journalist is actually on the payroll, or has simply made a bunch of friends in order to get fed stories, may not make much a difference.
It does seem significant that just a few years later Woodward's partner, Bernstein, published a long piece on the CIA infiltration of the media -- https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977 -- was he trying to get something off of his conscience?
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