Back in 2012, when our host was still actively blogging here, the public finally learned the identity of the source Bob Woodward referred to as Deep Throat.  While some were deeply skeptical of Felt’s claim, Bob Woodward confirmed it.  This is of currency and relevance due to the current sorry state of the DoJ/FBI (and rest of the civilian intelligence establishment¹).  We find ourselves not so much with a reiteration of Watergate, than with a reversed and inverted simile (Watergate as The Wrath of Khan, our current debacle as Into Darkness).

POLITICIZING THE FBI: HOW JAMES COMEY SUCCEEDED WHERE RICHARD NIXON FAILED

By John D. O’Connor [The attorney who revealed Mark Felt as Watergate’s Deep Throat], the Daily Caller

A little over 40 years ago, Richard Nixon went from a landslide re-election winner to a president forced to resign in disgrace. Nixon’s downfall was the direct result of his unsuccessful attempts to politicize through patronage of an independent, straight-arrow FBI. The commonsense, ethical lesson from this for all government officials would be to avoid attempts to use our nation’s independent fact-finder as a partisan force.

There is as well, of course, a more perverse lesson to be learned from Nixon’s downfall at the hands of an independent FBI, to wit: there is much power to gain by politicizing the Bureau, but only if its upper-leadership team is all on partisan board. Emerging evidence increasingly suggests, sadly, that this was former FBI Director James Comey’s leadership strategy in our country’s most sensitive investigations.

I do not share Mr. O’Connor’s high opinion of his client.  Neither do think highly of Richard M. Nixon.  Finding myself pressed by the shape of current circumstances I must reluctantly confess that both have risen on my relative list due to the particularly vile excesses of B. Hussein Obama and his Administration.

Richard Nixon made it a practice to spy on his political opponents.  He was not alone in this, in that the effectively autonomous founding Director of the FBI made it a practice to use his agency to spy on friend and foe alike.  On Hoover’s death in May 1972, Nixon tried to shape the FBI to his will.  We will never know for a certainty how much of this was Nixon’s desire to expand his own powers, and how much was an attempt to rein in a Federal Agency which had never been responsive to the President nor to Congress.

It does appear clear that Mark Felt believed he should have succeeded J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI, and that he had no intention of allowing President Nixon to reduce the independence of the Bureau.

B. Hussein Obama, who inherited far more expansive intelligence tools than those available to Richard Nixon and who further expanded those tools, made Nixon’s scope and depth of domestic spying pale in comparison.  He not only spied on domestic opponents, he spied on the leaders of friendly foreign powers and on members of the press whose reporting he found to be problematic.  He was further empowered in his domestic spying by a fawning press corps and a Federal Bureaucracy which had grown to believe that they, and not the Elected Officials for whom they worked, should set policy.

Our Republic is at a cross roads.  These interlocking scandals have revealed Officials from the President down to the civil servant level have failed in their duty to uphold the Constitution.  The first step in remedying this is to hold all those officials who have failed in their duty to account.

¹ It seems the only Federal Intelligence entity which upheld their oaths of office in this matter was the most secretive of all, the NSA.