John Dean: Nixon ‘might have survived if there'd been a Fox News’ — Reprise

POLITICO's Off Message

POLITICO

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4.5 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2018

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

This week, an encore presentation of an interview we first brought you earlier this year. John Dean was the star witness of the Watergate investigation — the counsel to President Richard Nixon who famously flipped and became the prosecution’s star witness in the process that helped take down the president. The Russia scandal is far from over, said Dean, but Trump has advantages that Nixon didn’t. “There’s social media, there’s the internet; the news cycles are faster. I think Watergate would have occurred at a much more accelerated speed than the 928 days it took to go from the arrest at the Watergate to the conviction of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and [John] Mitchell, et al.,” Dean told Off Message host Isaac Dovere in our first episode of 2018. “There’s more likelihood [Nixon] might have survived if there’d been a Fox News.” POLITICO's Off Message podcast is hosted by Isaac Dovere and is part of the Panoply network. Zack Stanton is its producer. Theme music by Podington Bear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. We're off this week, but I wanted to pull one of my favorite old episodes out of the archives.
0:04.8	Enjoy. Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. So much of Watergate, I can't tell you, was just pure blunder and stupidity.
0:16.4	And we're seeing the same thing happen again. Today's guest, John Dean, the former Nixon White House
0:21.5	Council, who was involved in Watergate, turned into a witness, went to jail, and has since
0:26.9	reinvented himself as an investment banker and author living in Los Angeles. Investigations have
0:32.1	obviously been a big part of the first year of the Trump presidency, starting from almost day one.
0:38.5	What did the Russians do?
0:43.9	What role did Trump campaign officials play? Who knew what? When? What was Paul Manafort up to?
0:49.9	Why did Michael Flynn lie to the FBI? How much was President Trump himself involved? Why do you really fire Comey? What else is going on? Or is this all just a case of mess-ups, coincidences,
0:56.1	bad luck, and fueled by sour grapes over losing an election? Or is it conspiracy? Collusion,
1:02.3	cover-up. Not a lot of people have lived through what people in the White House are living
1:06.8	through as this investigation continues. And by the way, we're talking about a House
1:11.0	investigation and a Senate investigation on top of the special counsel investigation by Bob Mueller.
1:16.9	But John Dean has. He was the lawyer, asked to get involved in the Watergate cover-up from the
1:22.2	outset, then asked by Nixon to prepare a report on what happened until he flipped and started
1:26.8	cooperating with the investigators. And he did it while he was still working in the White House.
1:31.8	So he went to jail and he's been writing about what happened and obviously thinking about it
1:35.1	ever since. Obviously, his view of whatever's going on with the investigation into the Trump
1:38.9	campaign and White House is from the outside. But his sense of what people there are going through from his own experiences is one I'm
1:47.1	really glad he was willing to share, even though we couldn't catch up in person.
1:49.8	We did it over the phone.
1:51.4	And now, my conversation with John Dean.
	...

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