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What would "fighting back" involve? Are you suggesting that you know something Nixon's advisors didn't, and that he had a way of avoiding Senate conviction? Or are you suggesting that he stage a coup to remain in office despite the Senate voting to remove him? (SecDef Schlesinger and NSA Kissinger had already taken steps to prevent orders to stage a Latin America style coup reaching the military)
We now know that Woodward and Bernstein were stenographers and that Mark Felt (aka "Deep Throat") was a swamp insider trying to remove Nixon for swampy reasons. But that doesn't matter as a matter of law or politics - in 1974 the Republican caucus in the Senate wasn't prepared to support a President who swore like a sailor while plotting the cover up of an outrageous piece of ratfucking in an election he would have won anyway. If you are caught red-handed committing a crime, attacking the motives of the prosecutor is not convincing to anyone who wasn't supporting you anyway.
Nixon did find a way of turning a vast electoral victory into a way to lose - but that was staging the Watergate burglary in the first place. That is what I don't understand - why did he do it? With McGovern as the Democratic candidate, the 1972 election was basically in the bag without the information he was hoping to get from the bug tape. The trifecta of committing a serious crime, getting caught, and having powerful enemies is not usually recoverable, and I don't see how it would have been for Nixon.
Is there a reason to rule out the possibility the burglary was staged on the orders of someone else-probably someone high at CIA since the people involved were CIA in order to frame Nixon ?
Yes - the burglars had been recruited by Liddy and Hunt, and paid by Liddy, who was personally loyal to Nixon and not to the Deep State - as demonstrated by his willingness to commit crimes for Nixon (including the burglary of Ellsburg's shrink). Hunt had a CIA background and it is within the realms of plausibility that the CIA was using him, but Liddy had left the FBI on bad terms in 1962 and had been pursuing a career in right-wing Republican politics ever since.
Following the money tells us that the CRP (which was not a deep state organisation) knew that they were hiring Liddy and Hunt to carry out criminal black-bag ops. Even if Hunt did entrap Liddy into the Watergate burglary on behalf of the CIA, it would be a case of anundercover Fed sabotaging a criminal group by convincing them to take on a bigger job than they were capable of, not a false flag op.
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nixon did not stage the watergate burglary and didn't even know about it in the first place
your version of events isn't supportable any longer (and wasn't supportable at the time either for anyone in the know), it's time to update your understanding of what happened
The whole reason why there was a scandal is that the Watergate burglars were paid to do it by the Nixon campaign. I agree with you that Nixon didn't know that that specific burglary was being committed until the burglars got caught. But Nixon would have known about and approved of the high-level decision to hire Liddy and Hunt to ratfuck the McGovern campaign. Given their history as part of the Plumbers, he would also have known that they would commit crimes in order to do so. That is the decision I don't understand - why did Nixon (or his loyalists on the CRP) organise a criminal conspiracy to run up the score in an election they were going to win anyway.
One possible answer is that Liddy has claimed that the Watergate burglary was ordered for personal reasons by John Dean, but this doesn't make sense because the money came from the CRP, which Dean didn't sit on, and the only evidence for it is the testimony of crooks.
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Having the entire staff of FBI and CIA rounded up and shot for starters. I find it kind of telling that a inveterate leftist like Oliver Stone and pair of a life-long conservatives like my grandparents seemed to have come to a mutual agreement on who Richard Nixion was and who the real enemy was.
Who by? The army wouldn't have obeyed the order, and the FBI and CIA comfortably outnumbered Nixon's personal militia. I agree that the plumbers would have made the hit on Felt if asked, but Felt wasn't freelancing - he was working on behalf of the Deep State. Given the high probability of getting caught, I can't see where in the scandal "whack Felt" is a better percentage than "try to retain the support of 34 Republican senators based on partisan loyalty". It is a minority view among Watergate scholars, but the idea that Nixon could have retained the support of 34 Republican senators if there was less "expletive deleted" on the tapes isn't fringe.
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Burning all the intel agencies (Watergate was an op by one against him) to the ground.
Because everyone did it all the time. He was the first one who the FBI decided it was worth launching an operation to take out for what was, bog standard politics.
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