Posted on 06/02/2005 6:09:52 AM PDT by Liz
No sooner had The Washington Post confirmed that Mark Felt, the FBI's former No. 2, was its secret Water gate informant nicknamed "Deep Throat" than the frenzy began. Now it's time for everyone — Felt and his family included — to start cashing in.
Bob Woodward just so happens to have been working on a book about Deep Throat — which is now going to be rushed into print, it was announced yesterday. (Last year, he and Carl Bernstein sold their Watergate papers to the University of Texas-Austin for $5 million.)
And the Felt family admits that the road to their father's decision to come clean about his role — after years of denials — began with their thought that there was money to be made.
According to Vanity Fair, which first disclosed his Watergate role, Felt's daughter Joan complained that "Bob Woodward's going to get all the glory from this, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills."
So the decision to end the 30-year-old mystery appears to have less to do with history than with scoring quick cash.
Moreover, it turns out that Felt was motivated to help Woodward not so much by a sense of duty than a desire for payback — he'd hoped to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director and was incensed when he was passed over for L. Patrick Gray, whom he considered a White House pawn.
The same liberals who are now hailing Mark Felt as a principled citizen who did his duty at the risk of his career were far less charitable back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan — in the first such act of his presidency — pardoned Felt, who'd been convicted of approving illegal FBI break-ins during the hunt for radical Weather Underground fugitives.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Bump
Pinz
Silent Coup:
The removal of a president
by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991
http://tinyurl.com/akttx
HILLARY'S WATERGATE SCANDAL
Crime/Corruption News Keywords: HILLARY/ETHICS/WATERGATE
Source: NY Post
Published: 16 August 1999 Author: JERRY ZEIFMAN
Posted on 08/16/1999 09:14:51 PDT by fintan
She violated House and committee rules by disclosing confidential information to unauthorized persons. IN December 1974, as general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, I made a personal evaluation of Hillary Rodham (now Mrs. Clinton), a member of the staff we had gathered for our impeachment inquiry on President Richard Nixon. I decided that I could not recommend her for any future position of public or private trust.
Why? Hillary's main duty on our staff has been described by her authorized biographer as "establishing the legal procedures to be followed in the course of the inquiry and impeachment." A number of the procedures she recommended were ethically flawed. And I also concluded that she had violated House and committee rules by disclosing confidential information to unauthorized persons.
Hillary had conferred personally with me regarding procedural rules. I advised her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader Tip O'Neill and I had previously agreed not to advocate anything contrary to the rules already adopted and published for that Congress. I quoted Mr. O'Neill's statement that: "To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series."
Hillary assured me that she had not drafted and would not advocate any such rules changes. I soon learned that she had lied: She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them.
In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. This, though in our then-most-recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
I also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in our offices. I later learned that the Douglas files were then removed from our general files without my permission, transferred to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff, and were no longer accessible to the public.
The young Ms. Rodham had other bad advice about procedures, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should neither 1) hold any hearings with or take the depositions of any live witnesses, nor 2) conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon - but to rely instead on prior investigations conducted by other committees and agencies.
The committee rejected Ms. Rodham's recommendations: It agreed to allow President Nixon to be represented by counsel and to hold hearings with live witnesses.
Hillary then advocated that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee the right to question witnesses. This unfair recommendation was rejected by the full House. (The committee also vetoed her suggestion that it leave the drafting of the articles of impeachment to her and her fellow special staffers.)
The recommendations advocated by Hillary were apparently initiated or approved by Yale Law School professor Burke Marshall - in violation of committee and House rules on confidentiality. They were also advocated by her immediate supervisors, Special Counsel John Doar and Senior Associate Special Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, both of whom had worked under Marshall in the Kennedy Justice Department.
It was not until two months after Nixon's resignation that I first learned of still another questionable role of Ms. Rodham. On Sept. 26, 1974, Rep. Charles Wiggins, a Republican member of the committee, wrote to ask Chairman Rodino to look into a troubling set of events. That spring, Wiggins and other committee members had asked "that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon." And, while "no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use," Wiggins had just learned that such a study had been conducted - at committee expense - by a team of professors who completed and filed their reports with the impeachment-inquiry staff well in advance of our public hearings.
The report was not made available to members of Congress. But after the impeachment-inquiry staff was disbanded, it was published commercially and sold in book stores.
Wiggins wrote that he was "especially troubled by the possibility that information deemed essential by some of the members in their discharge of their responsibilities may have been intentionally suppressed by the staff during the course of our investigation."
On Oct. 3, Rodino wrote back: "Hillary Rodham of the impeachment-inquiry staff coordinated the work. ... After the staff received the report it was reviewed by Ms. Rodham, briefly by Mr. Labovitz and Mr. Sack, and by Mr. Doar. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful in its present form."
On the charge of willful suppression, he wrote: "That was not the case ... The staff did not think the material was usable by the committee in its existing form and had not had time to modify it so it would have practical utility for the members of the committee. I was informed and agreed with the judgment."
During my 14-year tenure with the House Judiciary Committee, I had supervisory authority over several hundred staff members. With the exception of Ms. Rodham, Doar and Nussbaum, I recommend all of them for future positions of public and private trust.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a37b838fb5c82.htm
Victory For Liddy and Silent Coup
By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid | February 20, 2001
On February 1, a Baltimore jury gave radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy a victory over Maxie Wells, regarded by some as a surrogate for former White House Counsel John Dean, who was expected to testify for her but did not show. Seven of the nine jurors agreed that Liddy had not libeled Wells. The judge declared a mistrial and dismissed the case, saying that no reasonable jury could find Mr. Liddy negligent in making the statements at issue in this case.
Wells sued over statements Liddy had made that the Watergate burglars were sent into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to find photos of call girls believed to be kept in Wells' desk to show to visitors who were looking for a date. Ms. Wells, a secretary at the time, denied that she had such photos, or any connection with prostitution.
She sought damages of $5.1 million dollars.
Ten years ago, Silent Coup, a bestseller by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, challenged the accepted version of the Watergate story. They claimed they had found the real reason for the Watergate break-in. Liddy was one of those directing the operation, but on the 20th anniversary of Watergate, he said he didn't know the real reason for the break-in until he read Silent Coup.
He said the book convinced him that John Dean, who has been given credit for exposing it, was actually the one who ordered it. He said that Dean did so because the name of his girl friend, Maureen Biner, had been was on a list of call girls being used by the DNC that had fallen into the hands of the police. Dean, he claimed, wanted to find out if her photo was among those believed to have been kept in Maxie Wells' desk because he feared the Democrats might have information harmful to him.
Silent Coup built on the foundation laid by Jim Hougan, whose book, Secret Agenda, published in 1984, charged that Wells was arranging dates for Democratic dignitaries, who were the real targets of the break-in. Hougan's testimony was very helpful to Liddy. Colodny and Gettlin had found support for their theory in several contradictory things that Dean had written. Dean had tried to explain some of them by claiming that he didn't write or even read his own book, Blind Ambition. Nevertheless, the media have treated Dean as a respected figure. Liddy called Dean a liar and virtually dared him to sue, which Dean did in 1992. Dean settled out of court with Colodny and Gettlin, but not with Liddy. Last June he dropped the charges against Liddy without prejudice.
Liddy declared victory and again called Dean a liar. That left Maxie Wells' suit against Liddy as the last chance to test the credibility of Dean and Silent Coup in court. Liddy's victory was as much a victory for Silent Coup as for himself. The Washington Post, which has guarded its theory of Watergate by never mentioning Silent Coup, began its report on the end of the Wells' libel suit saying, "The wildcat notion that the Watergate burglary was intended to cover up a call-girl ring was catapulted today out of the realm of fringe conspiracy theories by a deadlocked jury that leaned heavily toward siding with the scenario's leading proponent, G. Gordon Liddy."
Liddy was one of those directing the operation, but on the 20th anniversary of Watergate, he said he didn't know the real reason for the break-in until he read Silent Coup.
Bob Woodward knew (Alexander)Haig in 1969 when Woodward worked at the Pentagon, four years before Woodward said they met.
******
During the trial, Wells' attorney asked Liddy, "Isn't it true that you have considered assassinating Mr. Dean?"
"I wouldn't consider him worth a quarter to buy the cartridge that would propel the bullet to kill him with," Liddy replied.
******
General Haig had been one of journalist Bob Woodward's composite sources for "Deep Throat," the anonymous White House informant that exposed the secret tape recordings of the criminal activities of the Republican president, Richard Nixon. Woodward was a Naval officer at the Pentagon, working as liason between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Haig, Nixon's White House chief of staff. This is according to Colodney and Getlin in Silent Coup,
Silent Coup
"A distinguishing mark of the American coup [as they refer to Watergate] is that it should remain concealed from its victims and history even after its successful execution," he continues. 'It was -- and has been -- a cruel hoax to pretend that the most powerful institutions of the media did not have the wherewithal to uncover this story, not to mention the train of putative historians and writers who have rehearsed the fiction since."
(Fleming's Dick certainly falls within that camp.) "The result has been an American version of treason of the clerks, nothing less than a Constitutional betrayal of trust," concludes Morris. According to Colodny and Gettlin, Woodward was tapped to join a Yale secret society called the Book and Snake, a less well known version of Skull and Bones. Later as a Navy lieutenant, during his secret Pentagon job from 1969-70, he joined the ranks of other famous former Navy briefers like Indiana Senator Richard Lugar and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former CIA deputy director and former NSA chief.
Another former briefer, Fletcher Prouty, author of The Secret Team, wrote that within the government's power centers, "one of the most interesting and effective roles is that played by the behind-the-scenes, faceless ubiquitous briefing officer who sees the important people almost daily." During this time, Woodward traveled to the White House NSC office and had many meetings with General Alexander Haig, fingered as the most likely candidate for Deep Throat. The General's motives in leaking to Woodward and his duplicity while serving as Nixon's chief of staff are a part of history.
In the postscript to the book, the authors write that "the [Washington] Post threatened by the publication of Silent Coup and what it reveals about Woodward's relationship with Alexander Haig, suppressed facts about the book and twisted its coverage hoping to discredit the book before it reached the public."
"Woodward had lied about his Navy career and his briefings of Haig, and the Post, knowing of Woodward's fabrications, then lied to its readers and to hundreds of papers that subscribe to its national wire service in an effort to cover up for Woodward and protect the Watergate myth... [a myth] which sold millions of books and papers, spawned a hit movie, and made investigative reporting seem a profession of glamor and unshakeable integrity," write the Silent Coup authors.
These people make me sick! They are so damn biased that it's running out of every orifice on their body. It stinks to high heaven the way they treat their so-called news coverage of Republicans compared to the criminal Democrats who they make excuses for.
So far as history is concerned, the foregoing is the Watergate story. It would take a further 16 years before anyone was able to revise history and show what had really taken place during those dark Watergate days, was a conspiracy to dethrone a President. In their acclaimed book "Silent Coup", Len Colodny & Robert Gettlin, reveal that a military spy ring working for the Pentagon had penetrated the White House. Opposed to Nixon's foreign policy goals, the spy-ring was engaged in stealing highly sensitive material that could be used to "spoil" emerging policy decisions.
Not least the authors turn history on its head by revealing that Bob Woodward was a former Pentagon Briefing Officer, with high security clearance, who they strongly suspect was involved in the Pentagon spy apparatus. As a young Navy lieutenant Woodward had briefed General Alexander Haig on numerous occasions, while Haig was working as military liaison to Nixon's National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. While Woodward continues to deny this, Admiral Thomas Moorer, a former Joint Chief of Staff at the Pentagon has publicly confirmed it. Significantly, after Woodward left the Navy, he became a junior reporter at the Washington Post. Here, he was be catapulted into journalistic fame by his many stories on Watergate.
More White House Spies?
Not least, some questions have been raised about the loyalty of Alexander Butterfield, the man who revealed that Nixon had bugged the Oval Office. It was this revelation that eventually brought Nixon to his knees. A former career Air Force officer and CIA liaison, Butterfield had chased a White House job and got it. According to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's private secretary, Butterfield had been a "plant" placed inside the White House by another agency - probably the CIA. This view was later shared by H.R. Hank Haldeman. In any event, Butterfield was on extremely close terms to Alexander Haig.
A fabulous book!
Now that's a pretty picture (gag). Bob and Berger......lovely couple.
By the way, I believe that this past action (impeachment documents) by Hillary is one of the most essential reasons why she is loved by the left and is being promoted to the presidency. She has very much paid her dues to the left.
****
By the way, do you happen to know if she had a "power fist" on the back of her gown at her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley? I heard that from a very important conservative talk show host (Jim Quinn), but have been unable to substantiate it. My, that would make a GREAT picture around October of 2008!!!
***
Yes.......... I read Silent Coup about eight times. Woodward is a serious insider. He knows almost everything.
MAY I ask about this..........."Another former briefer, Fletcher Prouty" .... was this the name of the guy who indicated that the JFK assassination had already been written up in newspapers somewhere down near New Zealand at least an hour BEFORE he was shot........or am I wrong?
First of all, a few things need to be made clear.
Clinton was a crook, and he should have been brought down, but you know what, Nixon was too. Just because someone is on our side doesn't mean we absolve them when they break the law. And Nixon, and Haldeman, and all those people broke the law. It is hypocritical for us to criticize the liberals for defending Clinton after everything, if we're just going to go in and defend Nixon.
Clinton and Nixon also have something else in common besides dealing with shady people. Namely, both sold out America to Red China. Nixon in 1972, Clinton for his entire term.
It was because of Nixon that we eventually abandoned the Taiwanese, and that is unacceptable.
Also, I'm from Alabama, so I know a little about this. The Nixon people gave 400 grand to a liberal leaning Democrat so that he could win the 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary. A third of this liberal's campaign budget came from the Nixon administration
President Reagan was a hero, Reagan is someone Republicans should look up to, defend, and everything else.
Nixon doesn't fall into that same category.....
Also, this is my first time on here, so is there anyway you can post on these topics without having to replie to somebody
Prouty was in New Zealand when Kennedy was shot, and believed that the Christchurch Star reported on Oswald's background far too quickly. It smelled to him like a CIA-planted cover story. Researcher David Perry looked at this issue to see whether the initial reports on Oswald and his background contained any suspicious information. He found that all the information in the paper was available in the files of U.S. newspapers and ready to be quickly sent over the news wires. And Bob Cotton, Chief Reporter of the Christchurch Star, has explained how the paper they published that day was the result of journalistic diligence, and not conspiratorial machinations.
Uhhuh.
***
Yep, all true. Nixon should have never referred to Helen Gahagan Douglas as a pinko years and years ago ---- those communist/socialists never forget.
****
I think they're living together in a cozy little Provincetown cottage by the beach.
;-)
I know that cottage----it's painted pink---inside and out (snicker).
Prouty was in New Zealand when Kennedy was shot, and believed that the Christchurch Star reported on Oswald's background far too quickly. It smelled to him like a CIA-planted cover story. Researcher David Perry looked at this issue to see whether the initial reports on Oswald and his background contained any suspicious information. He found that all the information in the paper was available in the files of U.S. newspapers and ready to be quickly sent over the news wires. And Bob Cotton, Chief Reporter of the Christchurch Star, has explained how the paper they published that day was the result of journalistic diligence, and not conspiratorial machinations.
http://tinyurl.com/dgfpj
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