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Long-Secret Watergate Filing Could Provide Mueller Road Map For Trump Evidence

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Federal authorities released on Wednesday a long-secret grand jury “road map” of Watergate evidence that prompted President Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation —and that could provide a precedent for the current investigation of President Trump by a special counsel.

The National Archives released the documents following recent litigation before a federal judge by scholars who successfully argued that the grand jury’s 1974 work is too important to remain secret, especially in view of current investigation of the Trump Administration by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a former FBI director shown in a file photo.

U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell, chief judge of the District of Columbia court, ordered release of the report prepared under the supervision of then-Independent Counsel Leon Jaworski and then-Chief Judge John J. Sirica.

The report is known as the “Sirica road map” because Sirica approved the report’s creation and transmission to lawmakers. The judge regarded such transmission as the best solution to the knotty but rare constitutional problem of what prosecutors should do with extensive grand jury evidence suggesting probable cause that a president committed serious crimes.

Such evidence is normally used to indict a suspect, who is then brought to a criminal trial. Courts have not tested whether a sitting president could be criminally tried and sentenced while in office outside of the impeachment process provided by the U.S. Constitution.

Jaworski and his predecessor, Archibald Cox, had developed evidence sufficient to indict more than 50 persons associated with the Nixon administration and/or the cover-up of a 1972  break-in by Republican and intelligence operatives of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC.

But the prosecutors finessed the constitutional issue of whether a president can be indicted in office by passing the “Sirica road map” to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. The committee used the materials to begin drafting articles of impeachment against Nixon that citing his administration’s actions in covering up Watergate-related crimes by additional crimes, such as obstructing justice.

Nixon resigned office after fellow Republicans advised him that he could no longer count on enough GOP support to thwart an impeachment vote in the House conviction in the U.S. Senate after a trial of charges brought by the House.

Mueller, a “special” counsel slightly different than the “independent” counsel during the Watergate or Kenneth Starr’s “Whitewater” probes of President Clinton and his administration during the 1990s, has functioned in somewhat similar fashion by amassing evidence much like the plea deals or other inducements to obtain evidence against Trump administration personnel and their allies.

Mueller’s probe began with a focus on suspected Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election but has expanded to cover a number of arguably related topics, including potential obstruction of justice in covering up evidence and otherwise seeking to thwart investigation.

A significant part of the Watergate materials became public via criminal trials and other proceedings in the 1970s but some material was restricted because of the traditional secrecy of grand jury materials.

Geoffrey Shepard, a California lawyer who once worked for Nixon, years ago sought release of the materials via litigation before U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, DC. But the case languished until a team of three legal experts filed a parallel action two months ago that led the Howell, the chief judge, to assume control of the litigation and move for prompt release via the Archives.

The three scholars, as described in their pleadings and commentaries, were Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes; Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University law professor who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush; and Stephen Bates, a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who co-wrote the Starr report with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh years before his rise to the Supreme Court, as well as other members of Starr’s team.          .

Their reports on the litigation published by the blog Lawfare are excerpted below, as are such other commentaries as a Washington Post news story.

President Richard Nixon in the White House Oval Office (Photo via Wikimedia and the National Record and Archives Administration).


Source: https://www.justice-integrity.org/1572-long-secret-watergate-filing-could-provide-mueller-road-map-for-trump-evidence


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