john dean watergate testimony

The examples that follow are illustrative rather than exhaustive, and before turning to obstruction of justice, I must make brief mention of the underlying events to place the material in context: MUELLER REPORT VOLUME I: The underlying crimes were a Russian active measures social media campaign and hacking/dumping operations, which Mueller describes as a sweeping and systematic effort to influence our 2016 presidential election. He's penned five books about Watergate and 10 books in total; including his most recent tome, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers. . Mr. Trump asked Comey to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation by saying so to the public. VS. HALDEMAN, 559 F.2D 31 (D.C. CIR. But the litigation gave Dean access to files from the Watergate special prosecution archives, intensifying his expertise, and he entered the pundit class that emerged when cable news expanded in the mid-1990s. The case of Dean vs. Liddy was dismissed without prejudice. Search by keyword or individual, or browse all episodes by clicking Explore the Collection below the search box. a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH. First off . While I was an active participant in the coverup for a period of time, there is absolutely no information whatsoever that Trumps White House Counsel, Don McGahn, participated in any illegal or improper activity to the contrary, there is evidence he prevented several obstruction attempts. The Jan. 6 committee's hastily scheduled hearing for Tuesday "better be a big deal," said a key Watergate scandal figure. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, also refused to fire Cox and also resigned, with the next man in succession, Solicitor General Robert Bork carrying out the presidents order to terminate Cox. [21] This theory was subsequently the subject of the 1992 A&E Network Investigative Reports series program The Key to Watergate.[22][23]. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Dean's testimony before the House was watched by some 80 million Americans. In the 1999 film Dick, Dean was played by Jim Breuer. . In that position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent scandal and cover-up . Its the White House in the remarkable city at the top of the government. In an exchange with me on March 21, 1973, Nixon conceded such a use of the pardon power was improper: DEAN: Well, thats the problem. John Dean Predicts Criminal Case Against Trump After 'Powerful' New Testimony. . He spent his days at the offices of Jaworski, the Watergate Special Prosecutor, and testifying in the trial of Watergate conspirators Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson, which concluded in December. Michael and John dig deep into Watergate, January 6th, and DOJ. The Watergate Hearings Collection covers 51 days of broadcasts of the Senate Watergate hearings from May 17, 1973, to November 15, 1973, and seven sessions of the House impeachment hearings on May 9 and July 24 30, 1974. . As Dan mentioned, in the summer of 1973, former White House counsel John Dean testified as part of the Senate's investigation into the Watergate break-in. The materials were contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) by the Library of Congress in 2017. Reaction to Liddy's plan was highly unfavorable. John Dean, President Richard M. Nixon's former . This press statement put a coverup in place immediately, by claiming the men arrested at the Democratic headquarters were not operating either in our behalf or with our consent in the alleged bugging attempt. June 17, 1972. I was always interested in government. Speaking of Betty Gilpin, John Dean is practicing his testimony, and Mo is advising him. untenable at some point. Because, you know, after everybody PRESIDENT: Thats right. [44][45], In early June 2019, Dean testified, along with various U.S. attorneys and legal experts, before the House Judiciary Committee on the implications of, and potential actions as a result of, the Mueller report. Model Rule 1.13 provides that a lawyer representing an organization represents the entity and not the individuals running the entity. .they should call the FBI and say that we wish for the country, dont go any further into this case, period. His testimony during the Watergate scandal helped bring down Nixon. Well, John Dean has a new book. [32], On September 17, 2009, Dean appeared on Countdown with new allegations about Watergate. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. For those of you who lived through Watergate, his name is synonymous with the political intrigue of the 1970s. So this means that John Dean either lied under oath or is lying to his readers in his autobiography. In reissuing Blind Ambition, which spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list and has been out of print for over two decades, author John Dean has added a powerful new Afterword, an extended essay in which he explains with the new clarity why (and how . John Dean's third day of testimony at the Watergate hearings in 1973. . The program also includes one of the few current day public figures who can fully understand what Dean went through Trumps former longtime attorney Michael Cohen, who went to prison for tax evasion and campaign finance violations. Haldeman and Chief Advisor for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, two of President Nixons closest advisors, who denied there was any White House wrongdoing; Alexander Butterfield, a former minor White House aide who revealed the existence of a secret audio tape-recording system that documented Oval Office conversations; and Rep. Barbara Jordan, a freshman member of the House Judiciary Committee, whose eloquent opening statement at the impeachment proceedings resonated throughout the hearing room and the nation. When Nixon learned that Dean had begun cooperating with federal prosecutors, he pressed Attorney General Richard Kleindienst not to give Dean immunity from prosecution by telling Kleindienst that Dean was lying to the Justice Department about his conversations with the president. Was he hard-nosed and tough? John Dean, while not a fact witness . Certain aspects of the scandal came to light before Election Day, but Nixon was reelected by a landslide. On April 17, 1973, Nixon told Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen (who was overseeing the Watergate investigation) that he did not want any member of the White House granted immunity from prosecution. Mr. JOHN DEAN (Former White House Counsel): What I had hoped to do in this conversation was to have the president tell me we had to end the matter now. President Richard Nixon speaks on the White House lawn prior to his trip to China in 1972. In July 1970, he accepted an appointment to serve as counsel to the president, after the previous holder of this post, John Ehrlichman, became the president's chief domestic adviser. In 2006, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating George W. Bush's NSA warrantless wiretap program. His testimony during the Watergate scandal helped bring down Nixon. For those of you who lived through Watergate, his name is synonymous with the political intrigue of the 1970s. When Cox refused this arrangement, Nixon ordered his Attorney General to fire Cox, which Richardson refused to do and resigned himself. Part of his decision to cooperate with investigators was self-preservation, as he believed he was being set up to take the fall for the White Houses handling of the scandal. After we settled the case, I started agreeing to do television, Dean said. He is mentioned in the report on 529 occasions, and based on the footnotes he was interviewed at various lengths by the FBI on not less than 9 occasions: July 24, 2015, December 11, 2015 and April 1, 2016 (thus three occasions before Mr. Trump was elected), and July 7, 2017, January 19, 2018, February 16, 2018, March 2, 2018, October 22, 2018, and March 20, 2019 (and on six occasions after Mr. Trump was elected). Watergate Lawyer John Dean Predicts Legacy Of Jan. 6 Investigation Into Trump. Dean had originally been a proponent of Goldwater conservatism, but he later became a critic of the Republican Party. Despite Deans courageous decision to testify against a sitting president, the series does not give him a free pass for his role in the Nixon administrations nefarious activities. at 257-258 (discussing relationship between impeachment and criminal prosecution of a sitting President)., Today, you are focusing on Volume II of the report. He studied at Colgate University and the College of Wooster in Ohio before earning a Juris Doctor (J.D.) [13] It was alleged[who?] Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Collins, the last time I appeared before your committee was July 11, 1974, during the impeachment inquiry of President Richard Nixon. 9 Jun 2017. John W. Dean was legal counsel to president Nixon during the Watergate scandal, and his Senate testimony helped lead to Nixon's resignation. [34], Dean later emerged as a strong critic of Donald Trump, saying in 2017 that he was even worse than Nixon. Thats for sure. 171-181). His co-editor was Goldwater's son Barry Goldwater, Jr.[31], Historian Stanley Kutler was accused of editing the Nixon tapes to make Dean appear in a more favorable light. Shortly after Watergate, Dean became an investment banker, author and lecturer based in Beverly Hills, California. Don McGahn represented the Office of the Presidency, not Donald Trump personally. As Watergate broke, Haldeman and John Ehrlichman trusted their bright attorney to control the political fall out after the burglars were arrested, part of which involved him paying them large sums of money. Rule 1.13 further provides that when an attorney representing an organization encounters ongoing crime or fraud, he or she must first try to solve the problem within the organization, by going up the ladder to the highest authority that can address the problem. in 1961. In 1991, the publisher released Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, which included an unfounded allegation that Dean ordered the break-in to remove information about a call-girl ring that serviced Democratic Party members. But on March 21, 1973, he went to the Oval Office and told Nixon there was "a cancer " on the presidency that would take them all down they didn't . Dean tried to leave the White House in September 1971, a year after he arrived and well before the Watergate break-in. Senator Barry Goldwater, in part as an act of fealty to the man who defined his political ideals. It also led to the creation of the PBS NewsHour.. The words Nixon used were strikingly like those uttered by President Trump. He shares his story in the series "Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal." It . But there is no question Mr. McGahn was a critical observer of these activities. In his testimony, Dean asserted that Nixon covered up Watergate because he believed it was in the interest of national security. [33], In speaking engagements in 2014, Dean called Watergate a "lawyers' scandal" that, for all the bad, ushered in needed legal ethics reforms. [5], Dean was employed from 1966 to 1967 as chief minority counsel to the Republicans on the United States House Committee on the Judiciary. [6], Dean volunteered to write position papers on crime for Richard Nixon's presidential campaign in 1968. Dean served as White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. Silent Coup alleged that Dean masterminded the Watergate burglaries and the Watergate coverup and that the true aim of the burglaries was to seize information implicating Dean and the former Maureen "Mo" Biner (his then-fiance) in a prostitution ring. (Following Coxs firing, a dozen plus bills calling for Nixons impeachment or creating a special prosecutor were filed in the House. Dean's testimony to the Senate the year before implicated Nixon in the Watergate affair. His coverage of the television industry has appeared in TV Guide, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Fortune, the Hollywood Reporter, Inside.com and Adweek. 62-77): President Trump called Director Comey multiple times, against the advice of Don McGahn, to have him confirm that he, Trump, was not personally under investigation. By April 15, Nixon tried to tell me he was kidding about finding $1 million in hush money to pay the burglar defendants to maintain their silence. Had I known the trouble I was in, I would have never married her.. The following year, he became an associate deputy in the office of the Attorney General of the United States, serving under Attorney General John N. Mitchell, with whom he was on friendly terms. Like Comey, Cox was charged with investigating wrongdoing by the President and his advisors and Cox refused an ultimatum from the White House to limit his access to the secret White House tapes by accepting written transcripts, prepared by the White House and verified by a near deaf senior member of the U.S. Senate, former judge John Stennis, rather than allowing Cox to listen to the tapes. Before that, I am so deep in the weeds of Watergate. ART. WATERGATE: The Comey firing echoes Nixons firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973. They don't know whether to hire lawyers or not, how they're going to pay for them if they do. 74-CCC-7004)", Doing Legal, Political, and Historical Research on the Internet: Using Blog Forums, Open Source Dictionaries, and More, "John Dean's Role at Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud", "Watergate's lasting legacy is to legal ethics reform, says John Dean", "John Dean helped bring down Richard Nixon. Dean's first wife is Karla Ann Hennings, whom he married in 1962. Dean commented on the removal in colorful terms, saying it "seems to be planned like a murder" and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller likely had contingency plans, possibly including sealed indictments. [25] Three years later, Dean wrote a book heavily critical of the administration of George W. Bush, Worse than Watergate, in which he called for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for allegedly lying to Congress. . The book claimed Dean had learned about the operation from his wife. Five men are arrested while trying to bug the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate, a hotel and office building in Washington, D.C. A day later, White . John W. Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, reflects on the much-anticipated testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. John Dean, who served as White House counsel to President Richard Nixon and played a key role in the Watergate hearings in the 1970s, compared the findings in the Mueller report to Watergate . Specifically, the burglars were interested in information they thought was held by DNC head Lawrence F. O'Brien. [29], Dean's 2007 book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches is, as he wrote in its introduction, the third volume of an unplanned trilogy. Again, McGahns testimony about these events, which are described in detail in the Mueller Report, are important for Congress to understand and, as noted later, claims of executive privilege or attorney-client privilege have been waived (because of disclosure of the Mueller Report authorized by President Trump, and the so-called crime-fraud exception to all privileges). The day following Flynns resignation, President Trump in a one-on-one Oval Office conversation with Director Comey said, I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go., WATERGATE: In a like situation, when President Nixon learned of his re-election committees involvement in the Watergate break-in, he instructed his Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, to have the CIA ask the FBI not to go any further into the investigation of the breakin for bogus national security reasons. In Watergate, the lesson learned was that no person, even the President, was above the law. April 6, 1973: White House counsel John Dean begins cooperating with federal Watergate prosecutors. Haldeman and Chief . In the 1979 TV mini-series Blind Ambition, Dean was played by Martin Sheen. MCGAHNS DILEMMA TESTIFYING BEFORE THIS COMMITTEE. This is based on my count of FBI 302 reports cited in the Mueller Report. It's written with Bob Altemeyer, and it's titled Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. 1976); AND IMPEACHMENT OF RICHARD NIXON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY (WASHINGTON, D.C: GOV. For high school, he attended Staunton Military Academy with Barry Goldwater Jr., the son of Sen. Barry Goldwater, and became a close friend of the family. John Dean, former counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, testifies before the Senate committee on the Watergate hearing in D.C. on June 27, 1973. On February 28, 1973, Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his nomination to replace J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI. John Dean. Watergate-John-Dean-June-25-1973 . In this latest book, Dean, who has repeatedly called himself a "Goldwater conservative", built on Worse Than Watergate and Conservatives Without Conscience to argue that the Republican Party has gravely damaged all three branches of the federal government in the service of ideological rigidity and with no attention to the public interest or the general good. Items included in the Television News search service. DEAN: Im not sure that youll ever be able to deliver clemency. In the summer of 1973, the Watergate hearings held the country spellbound. Gray said he had given FBI reports to Dean, and had discussed the FBI investigation with Dean on many occasions. In both situations the White House Counsel was implicated in the coverup activity. . Such testimony against Nixon, while damaging to the president's credibility, had little legal impact, as it was merely his word against Nixon's. [1] His family moved to Flossmoor, Illinois, where he attended grade school. . The turning point came with the testimony of former White House counsel John Dean, whose weeklong account of Nixon's . Further compounding the situation in 2018, in response to press reports that McGahn had considered resigning over the direction to fire Mueller, Trump asked another White House official (Rob Porter, also an attorney serving as Staff Secretary) to tell McGahn to dispute the story and create a false record stating that he had not been ordered to have the Special Counsel removed. PRESIDENT: You cant do it, till after the 74 elections, thats for sure. The investigation revealed that Nixon had a tape-recording system in his offices and that he had recorded many conversations. The Oval Office exchange between the President and Haldeman was on June 23, 1972, six days after the after the arrests at the Watergate complex. In that posit. [11], On March 22, 1973, Nixon requested that Dean put together a report with everything he knew about the Watergate matter, inviting him to take a retreat to Camp David to do so. I would like to address a few of the remarkable parallels I find in the Mueller Report that echo Watergate, particularly those related to obstruction of justice. Stay up to date on new exhibits, special collections, projects, and more. John W Dean, who served as Mr Nixon's White House . PRINTING OFFICE, 1974); AND SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER, III, REPORT ON THE INVESTIGATION INTO RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE IN THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, VOLUMES I AND II (WASHINGTON, D.C: GOV. I had some unsolicited offers that I really wanted to explore. Since we began, we have presented over 150 programs throughout the United States, reaching somewhere between 45,000 to 50,000 attorneys. DEAN: Thats right. Blind Ambition was ghostwritten by future Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch[20] and later made into a 1979 TV miniseries. And by early February 1974, this Committee formally commenced impeachment proceedings.) In June 1973, as a young lawyer on Capitol Hill, I watched White House counsel John Dean testify before Sen. Sam Ervin's Watergate Committee from the row of seats behind the senators. He had only a limited attorney-client privilege when interacting with the President and advisors and the privilege belongs to the Office in any event. Now, 40 years later, then some, Dean will return to Capitol Hill to testify before a different Congress about a different president. Former White House Counsel John Dean's testimony in the Watergate investigation helped topple Richard Nixon's presidency. Spectators laughed, and soon the senator was "sputtering mad". Dean was later incarcerated for 127 days at an Army base after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice and was in witness protection for 18 months to shield him from ongoing death threats. Dean was born in Akron, Ohio, and lived in Marion, the hometown of the 29th President of the United States, Warren Harding, whose biographer he later became. In short, the firing of FBI Director Comey, like Nixons effort to curtail the Watergate investigation, resulted in the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller. For a short amount of time, President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen was set to appear before the House Oversight Committee to give public testimony relating to . Dean has written several books related to Watergate and the overreach of presidential powers. The committee had voted to grant him use immunity (doing so in a divided vote in a private session that was then changed to a unanimous vote and announced that way to the public). Yes, Dean and Mo are still married. 24-48): When President Trump learned that his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn lied to the FBI and others about his telephone conversations with the Russian Ambassador to the United States regarding U. S. sanctions imposed because of Russias election interference, he met with FBI Director James Comey at a private White House dinner and asked for Comeys loyalty. 6; cf. Michael and John dig deep into Watergate, January 6th, and DOJ. In addition, it has long been the rule there is no executive privilege attached to criminal or fraudulent activity. But Deans inside knowledge on how the bungled burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, ultimately revealed an organized-crime-type mind-set within the Nixon administration has kept him on the contact list of TV news guest bookers for decades. John Deans statement to the House Judiciary Committee on June 10, 2019, as prepared for delivery. Chapter 14 in the book titled "The Lies, The Thefts," divulges the entire memorandum John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Domestic Affairs Advisor, wrote to Treasury Secretary David M. Kennedy and makes for an interesting read. I never dreamed I would have to live in this bubble, Dean, 83, said in a Zoom interview from his Beverly Hills home. Yeah. Records are described at an item level and all records contain brief descriptions and subject terms. [42][43], On November 7, 2018, the day after the midterm elections, Trump forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. [citation needed], On April 6, Dean hired an attorney and began cooperating with Senate Watergate investigators, while continuing to work as Nixon's Chief White House Counsel and participating in cover-up efforts, not disclosing this obvious conflict to Nixon until some time later. After hearing of Colodny's work, Liddy issued a revised paperback version of Will supporting Colodny's theory. John Mitchell, Nixon's most trusted adviser and former attorney general, had taken charge of the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP) and authorized the Watergate break-in on 17 .

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