A documentary from Michael Patrick Leahy Investigates, featuring Geoff Shepard
The Deep State first tried to take down a sitting President of the United States more than half a century ago.
It took more than two years of effort after the June 17, 1972 Watergate burglary, but on August 8, 1974 they succeeded, when President Richard Nixon announced from the Oval Office that he was resigning from office the following day at noon. Nixon was the first president in American history to resign from office.
21 months earlier, in November 1972, Nixon had been re-elected to a second term as president in one of the greatest electoral college landslides in the history of our country. Nixon won 49 states. His Democrat opponent, Senator George McGovern, won just one state – Massachusetts – and the District of Columbia, our nation’s capital.. The final Electoral College results were overwhelming: 520 for Nixon, just 17 for McGovern. And in the popular vote, 60 percent cast their ballots for Nixon, with only 37 percent for McGovern.
But less than halfway through his term in office, Richard Nixon was gone.
Why? Not because of Watergate. Not because of a smoking gun.
No; it was: Secret meetings between judges and prosecutors; evidence hidden from defense attorneys; biased juries; an unaccountable prosecution force packed with political enemies, Congressional leaders who were out to get the president, and a dishonest media.
The Deep State took Richard Nixon down by unprecedented prosecutorial misconduct, withholding of exculpatory evidence, reprehensible judicial misconduct that included many prohibited secret ex-parte meeings with prosecutors, massive violations of Fifth Amendment due process rights and Sixth Amendment fair trial rights, and the one-sided dishonest reporting by ALL of the dominant media outlets of the day—CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and Newsweek Magazine.
All told, a corrupt judiciary and unaccountable prosecutors violated the due process rights of Nixon and the Watergate defendants more than a dozen times. We will document all those due process violations—something that no one else has ever done in more than half a century.
This is how the Deep State took down a president — and created the playbook they’ve used ever since.
Michael Patrick Leahy, is an investigative journalist, author, radio show host, and CEO of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Estimated run time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
$5.99
