President Trump attacked Watergate figure John Dean on Twitter on Sunday evening, calling the former Nixon White House counsel a “sleazebag” as Dean prepares to testify in front of the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee on Monday.
Over the weekend, Dean, who was President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel from July 1970 to April 1973 and was later jailed, had tweeted “would someone get Trump a dog” saying that Trump “needs a friend so he won’t endlessly vent on Twitter.”
Dean, 80, was embroiled in the Watergate scandal during the early 1970’s but turned on his co-conspirators in exchange for a plea deal and a short prison stint.
Considered by some to be the “hero of Watergate” and by others to be a shameless opportunist, the man known by the FBI as “the master manipulator of the cover-up” has spent the subsequent decades calling scandals in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump worse than Watergate.
Democrats have scheduled a number of congressional hearings this week in an effort to highlight the findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which was released in April. Later this week, the House Intelligence Committee will be holding a hearing meant to highlight the counterintelligence findings in Volume One of Mueller’s report, but Monday’s hearing featuring Dean will focus on Volume Two — possible obstruction of justice.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., defended his decision to bring in a convicted felon and disbarred lawyer by saying last week that Dean’s role in the Watergate scandal could help him shed light on the special counsel’s findings in the Trump-Russia probe.
“Remember, he was the one who broke the back of Nixon’s obstruction of justice, who testified truthfully,” Nadler said last week. “He knows how a White House does it, and he can testify with respect to some of the evidence in the Mueller report and how that relates to his experience with obstruction of justice.”
Mueller’s report did not establish that anyone on the Trump campaign — or any Americans for that matter — criminally coordinated or conspired with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election. And Mueller did not reach a conclusion either way on whether or not Trump had carried out obstruction of justice, but Attorney General William Barr and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein controversially determined that obstruction had not occurred.
Congressional Democrats hotly disagree with Barr, and this week’s hearings are widely considered part of an effort that could lead to impeachment proceedings against Trump. Democrats previously brought Dean in to testify against now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in September 2018.
Trump tweeted Sunday evening that Democrats were “devastated” by the results of the Mueller report, calling its findings a “disaster for them” and claiming that “they want a re-do or do-over.”
“They are even bringing in CNN sleazebag attorney John Dean,” Trump said. “Sorry, no do-overs — Go back to work!”
At the time of the Watergate scandal, the FBI was scathing in its assessment of Dean, describing him as a very shady figure. “The actions of John W. Dean at the White House … were purposefully designed to mislead and thwart the Bureau’s legitimate line of inquiry,” an FBI report from 1974 read. “At every stage of the investigation there were contrived covers placed in order to mislead the investigators.”
The FBI said that Dean “plan[ned] a course of action to thwart the FBI’s investigation and grand jury inquiry” and that his scheming resulted in a “subversion of our [the FBI’s] investigation.”
Dean has described other Republican presidents as worse than Nixon. In 1987 he said that Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal was worse than Watergate, describing the two scandals as “major league matters vs. little league.”
He wrote a 2004 book about George W. Bush titled Worse Than Watergate. And, since at least 2018, Dean has been calling Trump worse than Nixon too, saying that “Trump is Nixon on steroids and stilts” and claiming that Trump “has already exceeded everything that Nixon did.” He opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
The current war of words between Trump and Dean is their latest dust-up. In August 2018, Trump had tweeted: “The failing New York Times wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel [sic], he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT.’ But I allowed him and all others to testify — I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide.”
Dean responded by going on CNN, where he is a contributor, to defend his Watergate actions: “I didn’t snitch. I advised them [the Nixon administration] what I was going to do. I did that and to encourage them to do likewise, we had to end this cover-up. That it was going to be a cancer on the presidency. I had told the president [Nixon] that.”
The original context of Dean’s “cancer” comment in 1973 shows that it was more complicated than he makes it seem in 2019. When top Nixon officials — including Dean — were on the verge of potentially being charged with obstruction of justice, he held a March 21, 1973, meeting with Nixon.
When Nixon asked Dean for his judgment on the Watergate scandal investigations, a recording shows that Dean said that “there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got.” Dean continued: “We have a cancer within — close to the presidency, that’s growing … It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself.” And Dean said that they were “being blackmailed” and that “people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly” as the truth might come out.
Dean also described to Nixon the role that he had played in the Watergate scandal: “How did it all start? Where did it start? It started with an instruction to me from [H. R.] Bob Haldeman to see if we couldn’t set up a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation over at the reelection committee [Committee to Re-Elect the President ].”
He claimed that the Watergate plan spiraled from there: “[Nixon operative G. Gordon] Liddy laid out a million-dollar plan that was the most incredible thing I have ever laid my eyes on: all in codes, and involved black-bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes to weaken the opposition, bugging, mugging teams. It was just an incredible thing.”
Dean was fired by Nixon, pleaded guilty to one felony count of obstruction of justice, and became a star witness for Watergate prosecutors, where his bombshell Senate testimony proved key in bringing media and public attention to the scandal.
Now, more than four decades on, he will attempt to reprise that role.
