Friday, March 29, AD 2024 6:25am

Stop the Presses: Zombie John Dean Says That Trump is Worse Than Nixon!

The Democrats hoping to impeach Trump had the really bad idea to roll in 80 year old John Dean to claim that Trump is worse than Nixon.  I was all of 17 when John Dean ceased to be relevant in American public life, and Mr. Dean may be unfamiliar to readers much under my current 62 years of age.  He was the slimy White House counsel for Richard Nixon, who quickly turned state’s evidence to save his hide, and thus became a popular figure on the Left.  Since that time, he has developed a cottage industry of lamenting that every Republican President since Nixon is worse than Nixon, a perpetual repeat cycle that makes him a beloved fixture on the loony Left.  Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee hearing his rant gave him a suitable reception:

 

Democrats lamented that none of the networks were giving live coverage to the Dean fiasco.  They were lucky.

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, June 12, AD 2019 4:41am

11 June 2019: Liz Sheld, “Remember, the point of these hearings is to put on a show, have selected segments air on television and disseminated on the internet, hope the public turns to support impeachment and then go forward with impeachment. Sadly for Fat Jerry, the NYC helicopter crash directed media coverage away from the Judiciary’s freak show so he didn’t get the intended media coverage.”

2 June 2019: Some Americans don’t understand the Mueller Inquisition. He was simply doing what he was sworn to do: protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic – the deep state. President Donald J. Trump is the deep state’s greatest threat.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Wednesday, June 12, AD 2019 7:47am

I think the only Republican President since Nixon Dean hasn’t called worse than Nixon is Ford. But Dean was locked up, and didn’t have much to say about anything at the time.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Wednesday, June 12, AD 2019 10:13am

I don’t recall Dean making public attacks on any President other than Nixon and George W. Bush.

Dean was admitted to the DC bar at the end of 1964, if I understand correctly, and landed a position as an associate at a communications law firm in Washington. He was dismissed from his position in February 1966, with the senior partner threatening to take him in front of a disciplinary board. He was cross-examined about this incident by the minority counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee. His account of it in his memoir of the period in his life from 1970 to 1975 was puzzling, because he makes it sound as if all he did was accept an invitation from another associate at the firm to invest in a television station (while the partners in the firm were ‘wheeling and dealing in broadcast stocks’). Critics of Dean maintain that he was representing a client of the firm who was attempting to obtain a broadcast license while conniving off-the-books to cadge the license for himself; if that was the case, the ballistic reaction of the senior partner makes sense.

After his dismissal, he somehow managed to land a position as one of the minority staff counsel on the House Judiciary Committee. Sometime before, during, or after, he floated into the social circle around Barry Goldwater. Barry Goldwater Jr and Richard Kleindienst were personal friends. His subsequent account had it that he decided to learn about street crime because he figured the only road back for the Republican Party was to capitalize on public discontent in re national defense or crime. He contended later that he and others were generating position papers they knew to be rubbish – recommending policy changes that were nothing of the sort.

When Nixon was elected, his connections put him in the pool for a patronage position at the Department of Justice. (Nixon’s personnel system stank, and you can see). So he’s ensconced there as a remora appended to Richard Kleindienst, with the title ‘associate deputy attorney-general’. While in that job, he makes friends with one Egil Krogh. Krogh had been an associate in John Ehrlichman’s law firm in Seattle and Ehrlichman had brought him to Washington when he (Ehrlichman) was tapped for the position of Counsel to the President. After a re-organization at the White House in 1970, Ehrlichman was put in charge of the Domestic Policy staff and they needed a new counsel, so Krogh talks up his buddy Dean. Dean was ambivalent about it and John Mitchell at the Justice Department didn’t encourage him, but he took the job when it was offered. Compare Dean’s background with that of any other person who has held that position in the last 50 years and you can see that Nixon’s personnel system … stank.

Dean’s account of the White House during the period running from 1970 to 1972 may incorporate a great deal of rubbish. Perk mad, shot through with people scheming against each other, and with not a few strange and unscrupulous characters. Defenders of Nixon need to account for how such a decent chap ended up with so many lice crawling all over him.

A number of people with an informed opinion (including Gordon Liddy) have contended for decades that Dean’s account of Watergate is fictional. Dean contends that after Gordon Liddy presented his plans for Operation Gemstone to John Mitchell and Jeb Magruder in January 1972 that they all told Liddy to scale it back and that he Dean wanted nothing more to do with Liddy’s schemes. He said he got back from a vacation in June 1972 and was blindsided by the arrest of James McCord and four others at the Watergate complex. Liddy and others have contended that they were in the Watergate complex doing errands for Dean and he was up to his hips in the activities of Liddy’s staff and fully cognizant of what they were doing.

CAM
CAM
Thursday, June 13, AD 2019 8:48am

John Dean – a weasel then, a weasel now. The cameras loved his attractive, young, platinum haired wife, Mo Dean. A welcome distraction from watching and listening to the whiny, prevaricating Dean testify.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, June 13, AD 2019 12:56pm

John Dean – a weasel then, a weasel now.

If he’d taken the plea bargain and disappeared (a la James McCord and Herbert Kalmbach), taken the plea bargain, and come clean after 1980 (a la Gordon Liddy), or busied himself with some activity that did not incorporate spouting hogwash about domestic political scandals (a la Howard Hunt and Charles Colson), he’d be much less tiresome.

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