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Dean is now the last man standing from that era, He is the last connection between this nation's authoritarian past and present. 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 . At first, he shredded incriminating files. I always envisioned going in and out of government. It's written with Bob Altemeyer, and it's titled Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. (Following Coxs firing, a dozen plus bills calling for Nixons impeachment or creating a special prosecutor were filed in the House. 90- 98): According to Mueller, in addition to McGahn, President Trump pressured former campaign aide Cory Lewandowski and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to curtail the Special Counsels investigation through Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from the investigation. Dean cites the behavior of key members of the Republican leadership, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist, as clear evidence of a relationship between modern right-wing conservatism and this authoritarian approach to governance. Former White House counsel John Dean, a key figure in the Watergate scandal that toppled former President Richard Nixon, testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing titled, "Lessons from . .they should call the FBI and say that we wish for the country, dont go any further into this case, period. An obstruction of justice conviction prevented the former White House counsel from practicing law in Washington, D.C., and Virginia. 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. A Woman's View of Watergate, which came out in 1975, and I will highlight a few moments. His first memoir, Blind Ambition, was turned into a TV movie in 1979. John W. Dean was legal counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, and his Senate testimony lead to Nixon's resignation. He said, "It's a nightmare. Accordingly, I gave considerable thought to how I would present this situation to the president and try to make as dramatic a presentation as I could to tell him how serious I thought the situation was if the cover-up continue. Former White House Counsel John Dean, who was a key figure in the Watergate scandal, arrives to testify before the House Judiciary Committee as the panel seeks to compare the investigations during President Richard Nixon's administration and that of President Donald Trump, on Capitol Hill Monday. Watergate-John-Dean-June-25-1973 . He has been a go-to talking head whenever a presidential scandal is brewing, and the twice-impeached Donald Trump whose desperate attempt to stay in the White House after losing the 2020 election remains under investigation has kept him busy as a CNN contributor. Dean has been particularly critical of the party's support of Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and of neoconservatism, strong executive power, mass surveillance, and the Iraq War. This is based on my count of FBI 302 reports cited in the Mueller Report. Bob, as a leading legal scholar, was asked to chair an ABA commission to reconsider the ABAs Code of Professional Conduct in light of the Watergate scandal. Armed with newspaper articles indicating the White House had possession of FBI Watergate files, committee chair Sam Ervin asked Gray what he knew about the White House obtaining the files. [42][43], On November 7, 2018, the day after the midterm elections, Trump forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Collins, the last time I appeared before your committee was . Vintage video clips supplement Deans story in the CNN series, showing the news divisions of the three major broadcast networks ABC, NBC and CBS at the peak of their powerful hegemony in the 1970s. Accuracy and availability may vary. The Mueller Report offers a powerful legal analysis that, notwithstanding the fact the pardon power is one of the most unrestricted of presidential powers, it cannot be used for improper purposes. Senator Russell Feingold, who sponsored the censure resolution, introduced Dean as a "patriot" who put "rule of law above the interests of the president." I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency. Liddy was ordered to scale down his ideas, and he presented a revised plan to the same group on February 4, which was also left unapproved. The coverage includes testimony from James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, two of the men arrested for breaking into the Watergate complex; John Dean, White House counsel from July 1970 to April 1973, who detailed the extent of the Nixon administration's involvement in the burglary and subsequent cover-up; Chief of Staff H.R. Petersen provided Nixon with confidential information from the prosecutors and the grand jury proceedings. Richard Nixon resigned as president the next year. Modern American History, 3(2-3), 175-198. June 17, 1972. John Dean III, a former White House aide in the Nixon administration, is sworn in by Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) before testifying on Capitol Hill in this June 25, 1973. The hearings, recorded by the National Public Affairs Center for Television (NPACT), were broadcast each evening in full, or gavel to gavel, by PBS stations across the nation, so that viewers unable to watch during the day could view the complete proceedings at home. Had I known the trouble I was in, I would have never married her.. But Dean understands how its not so easy to walk away from the center of power. The turning point came with the testimony of former White House counsel John Dean, whose weeklong account of Nixon's . [5], Dean was employed from 1966 to 1967 as chief minority counsel to the Republicans on the United States House Committee on the Judiciary. Dean a young, highly ambitious, Porsche-driving, tassel-loafer-wearing lawyer when he joined the ultra conservative Nixon minions ended up getting fired in 1973 once it became clear he would implicate the president in the cover-up. II, P. Petersen informed Nixon that this could cause problems for the prosecution of the case, but Nixon publicly announced his position that evening. Dean married Maureen (Mo) Kane on October 13, 1972. PRESIDENT: No, it would be wrong. Nixon met with me privately on the evening of April 15, 1973, to try to influence how I would relate the events, particularly our conversation of March 21, 1973, when I warned him of the cancer on the presidency. In the March 21 conversation, I tried to convince him to end the coverup, pointing out that paying hush money and dangling pardons constituted obstruction of justice, and that people were going to go to jail, myself included. Weekend Edition revisits audio from Dean's testimony. Dean frequently served as a guest on the former MSNBC and Current TV news program, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and The Randi Rhodes Show on Premiere Radio Networks. In the summer of 1973, former White House Counsel John Dean testified as part of the Senate's investigation into the Watergate break-in. Model Rule 1.13 provides that a lawyer representing an organization represents the entity and not the individuals running the entity. 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 . They don't know whether to hire lawyers or not, how they're going to pay for them if they do. This sparked a sharp debate with Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who repeatedly asserted that Nixon authorized the break-in at Democratic headquarters. June 1, 2022 1:43 PM PT. After the burglars' arrest, Dean took custody of evidence and money from the White House safe of E. Howard Hunt, who had been in charge of the burglaries, and destroyed some of the evidence before investigators could find it. Such testimony against Nixon, while damaging to the president's credibility, had little legal impact, as it was merely his word against Nixon's. Hence, it is now clear that White House Counsel represents the Office of the Presidency and not the current occupant of that office. Murdoch has survived scandal after scandal. Legal experts weigh in, ChatGPT who? Mr. McGahn is the most prominent fact witness regarding obstruction of justice cited in the Mueller Report. [30], In 2008, Dean co-edited Pure Goldwater, a collection of writings by the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. Items included in the Television News search service. 6; cf. (See U.S. 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. When Dean read that testimony in the summer of 1973 in front of a massive TV audience, he became the face of the Watergate conspiracy for most of America, according to Garrett Graff, author of Watergate: A New History.. (See Separation-of-Powers Principles Support the Conclusion that Congress May Validly Prohibit Corrupt Obstructive Acts Carried Out Through the Presidents Official Powers, MUELLER REPORT, PP. Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Dean also asserts that Nixon did not directly order the break-in, but that Ehrlichman ordered it on Nixon's behalf. Specifically, the burglars were interested in information they thought was held by DNC head Lawrence F. O'Brien. 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. . June 27, 2022 05:36 PM. Dean, an executive producer on the CNN project, helped wrangle some of the participants, including Alexander Butterfield, now 96, the deputy chief of staff who dropped the bombshell that Nixon had a taping system in the White House, which ultimately led to the presidents resignation in August 1974. The mainstream media narrative about Watergate is a grotesque and fantastic distortion of historical fact. In 1973, John Dean was the star witness in the Watergate hearings. Rep. Collins calls John Dean the 'godfather' of obstruction of justice, John Dean considers Watergate a roadmap for Mueller Report. Similarly, when President Nixon met with me on April 15, 1973, after my break with the White House, he raised the concern about the Hunt pardon again. For those of you who lived through Watergate, his name is synonymous with the political intrigue of the 1970s. 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. John Wesley Dean III (born October 14, 1938) is an American former attorney who served as White House Counsel for U.S. President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. . The Mueller Report also refers to corroboration of McGahn as a witness in that he made contemporaneous notes on occasions (e.g., MUELLER RPT, VOL. 88.). [21] This theory was subsequently the subject of the 1992 A&E Network Investigative Reports series program The Key to Watergate.[22][23]. 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. I dont think its an emotion that Donald Trump could ever muster.. In 2006, Dean testified before the Senate Judiciary Commit . Dean is known for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal and his subsequent testimony to Congress as a witness. 98-103): According to the report, in June 2017 after emails setting up a June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians became known in the White House, the President engaged in efforts to prevent disclosure of the emails and then dictated a false or misleading statement characterizing the meeting as about adoptions in order to protect his son, Don, Jr. WATERGATE: On the weekend that the Nixon reelection committee men were arrested in the DNC offices at the Watergate, Nixons campaign manager, and former attorney general, John Mitchell, along with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman and former White House Counsel, John Ehrlichman, drafted a false press release about the men arrested at the Watergate. Dean's testimony to the Senate the year before implicated Nixon in the Watergate affair. [2] He attended Colgate University and then transferred to the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he obtained his B.A. Senator Barry Goldwater, in part as an act of fealty to the man who defined his political ideals. John Dean was born in Akron, Ohio, and spent a significant part of his life in Marion. This is a taped except of Dean as he recalled that meeting with President Nixon. Former White House Counsel John Dean's testimony in the Watergate investigation helped topple Richard Nixon's presidency. John Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon who was once dubbed the "master manipulator" of the Watergate scandal by the FBI, predicts . . Now, 40 years later, then some, Dean will return to Capitol Hill to testify before a different Congress about a different president. The Jan. 6 committee's hastily scheduled hearing for Tuesday "better be a big deal," said a key Watergate scandal figure. John Deans statement to the House Judiciary Committee on June 10, 2019, as prepared for delivery. All rights reserved. Dean retired from investment banking in 2000 while continuing to work as an author and lecturer, becoming a columnist for FindLaw's Writ online magazine. 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. They don't know what they're looking at. WASHINGTON, June 27 Following is the transcript of a White House memorandum analyzing John W. Dean's. testimony on Watergate, as read during the Senate Water gate committee's hearings to day by . OLC Op. In the 1995 film Nixon, directed by Oliver Stone, Dean was played by David Hyde Pierce. John Wesley Dean III (born October 14, 1938) is an American former attorney who served as White House Counsel for U.S. President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. WATERGATE: Nixon used the possibility of presidential pardons to keep witnesses from fully testifying in legal proceedings, a practice that was condemned in the Articles of Impeachment drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. McGahn decided he would resign rather than carry out the orders, not unlike Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus when they refused to fire Cox. Don McGahn represented the Office of the Presidency, not Donald Trump personally. Every and the District of Columbia have adopted a version of these rules. [15], Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice before Watergate trial judge John Sirica on October 19, 1973. His silence is perpetuating an ongoing coverup, and while his testimony will create a few political enemies, based on almost 50 years of experience I can assure him he will make far more real friends. Later Nixon worked directly with Henry Petersen, the top Justice Department official in charge of the Watergate investigation, once I had broken with the White House. The books present documents, reliable sources, and official Watergate testimony by John Dean as persuasive arguments. DEAN: . Dean tried to leave the White House in September 1971, a year after he arrived and well before the Watergate break-in. Mea Culpa welcomes back a very special guest, John Dean. John Dean Predicts Criminal Case Against Trump After 'Powerful' New Testimony. 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 . [26], His next book, released in 2006, was Conservatives without Conscience, a play on Barry Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative. Dean's testimony to the senators and at the 1974 trial of the chief conspirators (excepting the President) did not get him totally off the hook. Fifty years later, that's how John Dean, the former White House counsel whose marathon testimony before the US Senate's Watergate Committee tipped the dominoes toward the ultimate resignation . Shortly after Watergate, Dean became an investment banker, author and lecturer based in Beverly Hills, California. You know, the Watergate hearings just over, Hunt now demanding clemency or hes gonna blow. When Cox refused this arrangement, Nixon ordered his Attorney General to fire Cox, which Richardson refused to do and resigned himself. The press statement was false. First off . Blind Ambition was ghostwritten by future Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch[20] and later made into a 1979 TV miniseries. Dean's lawyer moved to have his sentence reduced and on January 8, Sirica granted the motion, adjusting Dean's sentence to time served, which was four months. [37][38], In September 2018, Dean warned against Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the United States Supreme Court,[39][40][41] a main concern being that the appointment would result in "the most presidential-powers-friendly court" in modern times. Well, John Dean has a new book. He's penned five books about Watergate and 10 books in total; including his most recent tome, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers. Howard Hunts lawyer sought assurances through Nixons Special Counsel Chuck Colson that Hunt would not spend years in prison if he pled guilty in the trial before Judge Sirica in January 1973. Elizabeth Holtzman, a former member of Congress who served on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, said in her interview he was an essential part of the criminal enterprise. Dean himself talks about how he crossed a moral line early in his White House tenure. But he was told by his immediate boss, John Ehrlichman, that his post-White House career would be difficult if he left. While Nixon had a dangerous lust for power, Dean still believes the 37th president and the only one to ever resign still compares favorably to Trump. Dean is a pretty good gem," Nixon confided to Haldeman on March 2, 1973. It's an unpleasant place. Liddy presented a preliminary plan for intelligence-gathering operations during the campaign. April 6, 1973: White House counsel John Dean begins cooperating with federal Watergate prosecutors. "I think a criminal case is going to come out of it," Dean predicted on CNN on Tuesday after hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan . He was trying to shape my future testimony. WATERGATE: President Trump repeated efforts to have Attorney General Sessions reverse his recusal un-recuse himself to take control of the Special Counsels investigation parallels President Nixons attempt to control the FBI investigation through his former White House Counsel John Ehrlichman. After four months, however, the Watergate trial judge, John J. Sirica, reduced his sentence to time . He shares his story in the series "Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal." It . . Following my testimony before the Senate in 1973, the American Bar Association began to look anew at its code of legal ethics. HANSEN: John Dean's testimony would prove to be prophetic - perhaps even self-fulfilling. It also came out that Gray had destroyed important evidence Dean entrusted to him. His testimony attracted very high television ratings since he was breaking new ground in the investigation, and media attention grew apace, with more detailed newspaper coverage. Mueller refutes the dubious contention that when the president exercises his Constitutional powers, he is not subject to federal criminal laws. 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. II, P. 52), and McGahn is the only witness that the Special Counsel expressly labels as reliable, calling McGahn a credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House. (MUELLER RPT, VOL. His testimony during the Watergate scandal helped bring down Nixon. The image of her calmly seated behind her husband throughout the hearings became one of the most memorable tableaus of the 1970s. 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. John Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon who was once dubbed the "master manipulator" of the Watergate scandal by the FBI, predicts former President Donald Trump may finally be about to face some serious consequences. Search by keyword or individual, or browse all episodes by clicking Explore the Collection below the search box. I also told him that it was important that this cancer be removed immediately because it was growing more deadly every day. 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. For those of you who lived through Watergate, his name is synonymous with the political intrigue of the 1970s. 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. 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 . I was always interested in government. Was he hard-nosed and tough? [citation needed], On June 25, 1973, Dean began his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. We believe Don McGahn is not in a conflict situation in testifying to this Committee, for his duty is to protect the Office of the Presidency, sometimes against the very person in charge of it. First, he is a key witness in understanding the Mueller Report. In that position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent scandal and cover-up . 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. (1981). Michael and John dig deep into Watergate, January 6th, and DOJ. The materials were contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) by the Library of Congress in 2017. PRESIDENT: Thats a problem. He received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) Dean finally replied, "You're showing you don't know that subject very well." 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. For those of you who lived through Watergate, his name is synonymous with the political intrigue of the 1970s. Evidence: In a taped interview for the book "Silent Coup", when Dean was . Dean's first wife is Karla Ann Hennings, whom he married in 1962. Desperate mountain residents trapped by snow beg for help; We are coming, sheriff says, Newsom, IRS give Californians until October to file tax returns, Californias snowpack is approaching an all-time record, with more on the way, Column: A transgender patients lawsuit against Kaiser is a front for the conservative war on LGBTQ rights, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President,, Nixon hated PBS, but his Watergate scandal gave the fledgling network a major hit, From Chris Rock to the SAG Awards. [9], In late March in Florida, Mitchell approved a scaled-down plan. 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. The coverage includes testimony from James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, two of the men arrested for breaking into the Watergate complex; John Dean, White House counsel from July 1970 to April 1973, who detailed the extent of the Nixon administrations involvement in the burglary and subsequent cover-up; Chief of Staff H.R. PRINTING OFFICE, 2019). [24] Also in 2006, Dean appeared as an interviewee in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, about the Nixon administration's efforts to keep John Lennon out of the United States. He's penned five books about Watergate and 10 books in total; including his most recent tome, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers. MUELLER REPORT RE EFFORTS TO PREVENT OR DISTORT DISCLOSURE OF THE JUNE 9, 2016 TRUMP TOWER MEETING (PP. For whatever reason, President Trump did not follow up with the directive to fire Mueller and McGahn did not resign. You have the problem of clemency for Hunt. On their second break-in, on the night of June 16, hotel security discovered the burglars. Dean is known for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal and his subsequent testimony to Congress as a witness. 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. President Richard Nixon speaks on the White House lawn prior to his trip to China in 1972. Marshals and kept instead at Fort Holabird (near Baltimore, Maryland) in a special "safe house" primarily used for witnesses against the Mafia. Neither of the two volumes are formally titled, but the first sentence of the second paragraph, on page 1 of Volume II states its focus: Beginning in 2017, the President of the United States took a variety of actions towards the ongoing FBI investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election and related matters that raised questions about whether he had obstructed justice. Volume II concludes on page 182: [I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. However, the Special Counsels office was unable to reach that conclusion, so the report neither alleges criminal behavior by the president nor, as the report states, does it exonerate him. (SEE MUELLER REPORT, VOL. [15] A sharp critic of studying memory in a laboratory setting, Neisser saw "a valuable data trove" in Dean's recall. If it was a county sheriff they wouldnt [stay], Dean said. For several reasons I believe he should testify. [34], Dean later emerged as a strong critic of Donald Trump, saying in 2017 that he was even worse than Nixon. He could be embarrassed. Weekend Edition revisits audio from Dean's testimony. Continue reading. There is no one alive closer to the Watergate scandal than Dean, and now he offers a definitive and deeply personal look at the events that changed his life forever in the four-part documentary series Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal. The program premieres Sunday on CNN. a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH. Yeah. Paperback. Dean was also receiving advice from the attorney he hired, Charles Shaffer, on matters involving the vulnerabilities of other White House staff. In his testimony, he implicated administration officials, including Mitchell, Nixon, and himself. Former Trump officials have been criticized for waiting to express their misgivings over what was happening in the White House until after they left and made book deals. Its a fascinating place to see whats going on.. "My feelings about Mr. Nixon remained the same until his death a tangle of familial echoes, affections, and curiosities never satisfied," Leonard Garment wrote in his 1997 autobiography, Crazy Rhythm: From Brooklyn and Jazz to Nixon's White House, Watergate, and Beyond.At first blush, Garment appeared an odd match for President Richard M. Nixon, the former a liberal Republican who .