Hello, friends, and welcome back to the rabbit hole. I'm your host, Danny, and today we have the pleasure of having Jeff Shepard on the podcast. So during my research for the upcoming Watergate episode, I kept finding interviews that Jeff had given on this topic specifically. So he actually worked in D.C. at the time after graduating from Harvard Law, and he became a White House fellow in

1969, and then he served on President Richard Nixon's White House staff for five years,

including a year as deputy council on the president's Watergate defense team. So like,

if anybody knows the stuff, he knows it. He has written three books and produced two documentary films as well as an off

Broadway stage play about the internal prosecutorial documents he's uncovered, many of which are

posted on his website, www.shepard on watergate.com. It's Shepard without the H, so S-H-E-P-A-R-D,

Shepard on Watergate.com.

And I'll link that in the show notes as well. Hi, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming on the rabbit hole. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. I'm glad to be here, too. This is going to be fun. It is going to be fun. I'm like deep in the rabbit hole about Watergate. So it actually didn't start with Watergate. it started because I started to do, I wanted to look into Operation Northwoods with Cuba. And then I was like, well, I don't want to just do Northwoods. Let's just do like a Cuba episode. Well, then when I was doing the Cuba episode, I started finding all these CIA agents that also worked with Watergate. And I was like, that's weird. So I need to look into Watergate now, too.

So then I went down that rabbit hole and I found you.

And here we are.

Well, Watergate is a very deep rabbit hole.

And in summation for your viewers.

There's only three facts that you can count on in Watergate.

There really was a break-in.

They were caught red-handed.

So there's criminality from the start.

There really was a cover-up because there was worry about who knew about the break-in in advance,

and some pretty senior people on the president's re-election campaign knew what was going on.

And third, Nixon really did resign, the only president on a history to have resigned. But pretty much everything else you've been told is not true. And you've got this difficulty, particularly

people like me who lived through it, who've gone back, looked at the records. And what makes it unique, the special prosecutors, the Watergate

special prosecution force was a specially recruited, highly partisan bunch of Democrat lawyers,

mainly Ivy League lawyers, whose goal in life was to get Nixon.

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