Bag Man

I decided to listen to Rachel Maddow's series about Agnew's corruption investigation, and in Episode 4, there's a little gem in the infamous Nixon tapes that were being made at the time.

(I also realized I could read the episode transcripts.)

This was the Summer of 1973. The Senate Watergate hearings were on TV every day. The Watergate cover-up was starting to unravel around Richard Nixon. Nixon had just fired his Chief of Staff HR Haldeman, his White House Counsel John Dean, his Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, his top Domestic Aide John Ehrlichman... it was all supposedly to clean house from the Watergate mess.

But right then at the same time, Nixon and Agnew decided to undertake a whole separate effort to interfere with a totally unrelated investigation into Agnew.

[...]

AGNEW: Glenn Beall's the only way to influence this.

NIXON: The senator?

AGNEW: Yes.

[...]

HAIG: So, if Beall can get his brother – who’s the U.S. Attorney, who we appointed, who’s a Republican, but who’s turned this thing over to two fanatical prosecutors-- but if he just sits in on them and supervises this--

[...]

Nixon and [his new Chief of Staff Al] Haig are devising this plan, in secret, to interfere with this ongoing investigation. They then start putting this plan into action.

But the middle man they end up using-- the guy who they drag into this obstruction scheme-- ultimately isn’t Mel Laird [their original choice]. Who they end up using for this obstruction effort is the Chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time. A man by the name of... George Herbert Walker Bush.

[...]

HAIG: He isn’t here, so I did it through George Bush on the first run.

NIXON: That’s good, that’s good.

This didn’t ever stick to George HW Bush... maybe because these audio tapes have just been collecting dust for the last four decades. But George Bush was brought in to a potentially criminal effort organized and directed by the then-President of the United States Richard Nixon to obstruct an ongoing investigation into his Vice President.

And George Bush did it.

[...]

U.S. Attorney George Beall ended up donating his papers to Frostburg State University in Maryland. And if you go to those archives, you can now see an official “memo-to-file” that U.S. Attorney George Beall wrote that Summer of 1973.

[...]

This is what he wrote in the file: “With respect to conversations with my brother Glenn, the discussions were most superficial and very guarded. He occasionally mentioned to me the names of persons who had been to see him or who had called him with respect to [this] investigation. Names of persons that I remember him telling me about included Vice President Agnew ... and George Bush.”

Also, if you check out this series, you'll understand why George Conway is recommending it: there are so many, many parallels between Agnew and Trump, including their demeanor and the manipulation of their true believers, including denegration of the press and the DOJ.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.