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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. John W Dean, who served as Mr Nixon's White House . 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. They don't know whether to hire lawyers or not, how they're going to pay for them if they do. He's penned five books about Watergate and 10 books in total; including his most recent tome, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers. In the 1979 TV mini-series Blind Ambition, Dean was played by Martin Sheen. The books present documents, reliable sources, and official Watergate testimony by John Dean as persuasive arguments. And youre gonna have the clemency problem for the others. 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. Dean's first wife is Karla Ann Hennings, whom he married in 1962. 1 AND 182.). But he was told by his immediate boss, John Ehrlichman, that his post-White House career would be difficult if he left. 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. 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. Dean was the first administration official to accuse Nixon of direct involvement with Watergate and the resulting cover-up in press interviews. John Dean. untenable at some point. 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. Following my testimony before the Senate in 1973, the American Bar Association began to look anew at its code of legal ethics. 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. 171-181). John Dean's third day of testimony at the Watergate hearings in 1973. . On August 2, 1974, Sirica handed down a sentence to Dean of one to four years in a minimum-security prison. In July 1973, evidence mounted against the president's staff, including testimony provided by former staff members in an investigation conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee. 1976); AND IMPEACHMENT OF RICHARD NIXON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY (WASHINGTON, D.C: GOV. On their second break-in, on the night of June 16, hotel security discovered the burglars. Eight years ago, we created a course called The Watergate CLE. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. 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. His testimony during the Watergate scandal helped bring down Nixon. He resides in Beverly Hills, California. In 1992, Dean hired attorney Neil Papiano and brought the first in a series of defamation suits against Liddy for claims in Liddy's book Will, and St. Martin's Press for its publication of the book Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. Michael and John dig deep into Watergate, January 6th, and DOJ. He's penned five books about Watergate and 10 books in total; including his most recent tome, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers. He said he had found information via the Nixon tapes that showed what the burglars were after: information on a kickback scheme involving the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. John Dean, the former White House counsel to Richard Nixon, testified Monday that he sees "remarkable parallels" between Watergate and the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report . Well, John Dean has a new book. This is part one of John W. Dean's testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. . According to Dean, modern conservatism, specifically on the Christian Right, embraces obedience, inequality, intolerance, and strong intrusive government, in stark contrast to Goldwater's philosophies and policies. Let me briefly address the ethics question. I met with Kutak and his commission to provide my own insights. that Nixon's motivation for preventing Dean from getting immunity was to prevent him from testifying against key Nixon aides and Nixon himself. In many ways the Mueller Report is to President Trump what the so-called Watergate Road Map (officially titled Grand Jury Report and Recommendation Concerning Transmission of Evidence to the House of Representatives) was to President Richard Nixon. 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. Items included in the Television News search service. [15], Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice before Watergate trial judge John Sirica on October 19, 1973. The words Nixon used were strikingly like those uttered by President Trump. 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 . And I hasten to add that I learned about obstruction of justice the hard way, by finding myself on the wrong side of the law. Since we began, we have presented over 150 programs throughout the United States, reaching somewhere between 45,000 to 50,000 attorneys. Dean was also receiving advice from the attorney he hired, Charles Shaffer, on matters involving the vulnerabilities of other White House staff. On this episode of the Mea Culpa Podcast, Michael Cohen welcomes back a very special guest, John Dean. [28] On March 31, 2006, Dean testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during hearings on censuring Bush over the issue. A Woman's View of Watergate, which came out in 1975, and I will highlight a few moments. 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. This appears to have been well understood by McGahn and his lawyer, and I have read news accounts that McGahn has explained this concept to President Trump. 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. [9], In late March in Florida, Mitchell approved a scaled-down plan. The mainstream media narrative about Watergate is a grotesque and fantastic distortion of historical fact. 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. It also came out that Gray had destroyed important evidence Dean entrusted to him. In the preface to his 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience, Dean strongly denied Colodny's theory, pointing out that Colodny's chief source (Phillip Mackin Bailley) had been in and out of mental institutions. The burglars' first break-in attempt in late May was successful, but several problems had arisen with poor-quality information from their bugs, and they wanted to photograph more documents. . Dean served as White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until Ap. Dean had had suspicions that Nixon was taping conversations, and he tipped prosecutors to question witnesses along this line, leading to Butterfield's revelations. He was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and sentenced to one to four years in prison. For several reasons I believe he should testify. In 2006, Dean testified before the Senate Judiciary Commit . NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. In that position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent scandal and cover-up . You have the problem of clemency for Hunt. 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. I had some unsolicited offers that I really wanted to explore. You know, the Watergate hearings just over, Hunt now demanding clemency or hes gonna blow. After hearing of Colodny's work, Liddy issued a revised paperback version of Will supporting Colodny's theory. The Mueller Report, like the Watergate Road Map, conveys findings, with supporting evidence, of potential criminal activity based on the work of federal prosecutors, FBI investigators, and witness testimony before a federal grand jury. For whatever reason, President Trump did not follow up with the directive to fire Mueller and McGahn did not resign. After John Dean gave his historic 1973 testimony on the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down the Nixon White House, he wanted to move on with his life. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. He received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) 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. And that destroys the case.. 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. (Following Coxs firing, a dozen plus bills calling for Nixons impeachment or creating a special prosecutor were filed in the House. 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. After four months, however, the Watergate trial judge, John J. Sirica, reduced his sentence to time . . 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. [1] His family moved to Flossmoor, Illinois, where he attended grade school. . Modern American History, 3(2-3), 175-198. Dean also appeared before the Watergate grand jury, where he took the Fifth Amendment numerous times to avoid incriminating himself, and in order to save his testimony for the Senate Watergate hearings.[12]. Records are described at an item level and all records contain brief descriptions and subject terms. March 23, 1973: The McCord letter is made public by Judge Sirica in open court at McCord's sentencing hearing. 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. 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. Each days hearings are broken up into multiple parts, which are linked together and named as such. 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. But Dean understands how its not so easy to walk away from the center of power. In the 1995 film Nixon, directed by Oliver Stone, Dean was played by David Hyde Pierce. The Watergate hearings were produced by the National Public Affairs Center for Television (NPACT), public televisions Washington hub for national news and public affairs programming. 88.). It may just be too hot. 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. (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. June 27, 2022 05:36 PM. 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. Granted immunity, Dean laid out in stunning detail . Dean married Maureen (Mo) Kane on October 13, 1972. In the 1999 film Dick, Dean was played by Jim Breuer. Feb. 1, 2019. In both situations the White House Counsel was implicated in the coverup activity. In short, the firing of FBI Director Comey, like Nixons effort to curtail the Watergate investigation, resulted in the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller. John W. Dean was legal counsel to president Nixon during the Watergate scandal, and his Senate testimony helped lead to Nixon's resignation. [citation needed], Dean continued to provide information to the prosecutors, who were able to make enormous progress on the cover-up, which until then they had virtually ignored, concentrating on the actual burglary and events preceding it. [8][pageneeded], On January 27, 1972, Dean, the White House Counsel, met with Jeb Magruder (Deputy Director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CRP and CREEP) and Mitchell (Attorney General of the United States, and soon-to-be Director of CRP), in Mitchell's office, for a presentation by G. Gordon Liddy (counsel for CRP and a former FBI agent). Gjon Mili . Dean served as White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. 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. Copyright 2008 NPR. Spectators laughed, and soon the senator was "sputtering mad". MUELLER REPORT VOLUME I: The Mueller Reports finds no illegal conspiracy, or criminal aiding and abetting, by candidate Trump with the Russians. 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. [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.