The real story - must read…

January 29, 2020

A must read!!! Omg- won’t spoil it but I can’t believe such a juicy Washington secret could just now be revealed from those who have first hand knowledge.

So you think you know about Watergate...

November 25, 2019

Postgate is a banquet of juicy details for the Watergate history buff. Contrary to what one might expect from the incendiary title, this is not another piece of confirmation bias for the deep-state conspiracy theorist, but rather a thoughtful and thoroughly researched bit of investigative journalism by someone well placed as Mark Felt’s lawyer, who has made an admirable effort to uncover some very significant omissions by what has by now become the Watergate canon.

O’Connor’s first hand role in much of the action is particularly illuminating. Fans of Bob Woodward might find this a particularly disconcerting read, although O’Connor balances critique and praise in a professional manner. While this is a bold rethinking of the Watergate narrative, you won’t find any Nixonian exoneration here, and the quality of the scholarship should appeal to all points of the political spectrum from Left to Right. The big omission from the accepted history is how much evidence there seems to be of CIA involvement, and some lurid goings on in the primitive world of DNC wiretaps- Fasten your seatbelt! But I offer no spoilers here. Read it for yourself. Postgate offers some unexpected answers to some of the persistent Watergate questions, and in doing so, opens many more. I’m looking to more from O’Connor in the future.

IS “FAKE NEWS” REAL? —MUST READ IN CURRENT POLITICAL CLIMATE

November 10, 2019

I preordered this book and when it arrived, could not put it down. In this day where “impeachment” is at the front of every news feed, you owe it to yourself to learn what really happened during the Nixon impeachment process: the past is repeating itself and it is not at the hand of The President.

This book gives insight to what is really behind “fake news” – a cover-up that brought down the Nixon presidency for reasons never fully revealed. In our democracy where we depend upon the media to deliver through factual, unbiased, reporting, this book shows how the news can be manipulated to keep the voting public in the dark. It’s an eye-opener and could not be more timely.

An important read and timely release.

November 7, 2019

If you live in one of the social media echo chambers, and enjoy your daily drivel of reaffirming claptrap, this is NOT the book for you. O’Connor breathes new life into the lost art of investigative journalism, and forces us to question what we’ve previously taken for granted. Did WaPo capitalize on the naiveté of its readers by speeding to foregone partisan conclusions? Did they create the model in use today where conjecture passes for analysis? O’Connor diagnoses the traps in the psychobabble and counsels us on how to recognize them in the future. One need not necessarily agree with every nuance in the book, but through O’Connor’s laser precision in connecting the dots, he reminds us of our civic duty where the press is concerned, to question more and genuflect less.

Read all Amazon reviews here.

Investigative Journalism's Original Sin?

by Jim Rossi, Author, “Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper” | Public Speaker | LinkedIn Top Voice | Fraud Protection | Historian

The following book review was originally published in two parts on LinkedIn HERE and HERE.

Thesis:

Truth triumphed over political corruption during the 1970s Watergate scandal, thanks to the legendary investigative journalism of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Pulitzer prizes and an Oscar-winning film adaptation of Woodstein's book All the President’s Men followed, cementing the Post's "Watergate canon" as historical fact. In the decades since, cable news' 24/7 infotainment, Internet clickbait, phony reporting on the lead-up to the Iraq War, Jayson Blair, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and myriad more mistakes, malpractice, and misconduct from the Washington Post, New York Times, New Republic, Buzzfeed, and more represent an epic fall from the standards for fairness and accuracy set by the Post's Woodward and Bernstein aka Woodstein.

Antithesis:

Lawyer John O'Connor helped his client - former FBI official W. Mark Felt - aka "Deep Throat" - come out publicly fifteen years ago. During the course of researching, co-writing, and promoting Felt's memoir, O'Connor alleges to have discovered an elaborate series of deceptions and misrepresentations at the heart of The Washington Post's Watergate coverage. He went down the rabbit hole, resulting in his new book Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today's Partisan Advocacy Journalism.

"The widely praised Watergate journalism was not an exception to the dishonest reporting frequently put forth by respected outlets," O'Connor writes in the introduction to Postgate; "it was the cause."

Synthesis:

As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 2015-17, faculty presented Watergate as a founding event in investigative journalism, a "canon." Our first reading assignment - finish before arriving for orientation! - was Pentagon Paper whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's memoir Secrets. Ellsberg joined us to discuss.

In subsequent months, my relationship with the J-School's faculty grew more similar to the one between Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. As Donald Trump continued his improbable presidential run, with the news media as his foil, faculty started muttering about another "Watergate" to come. Fast-forward to fall 2019: I couldn't wait to get my hands on my review copy of Postgate. Heresy? Fascinating!

O'Connor makes incendiary claims, but he is no fringe conspiracy theorist. O'Connor served as an Assistant US Attorney in Northern California during the 1970s. When he went into commercial practice while starting a family, he handed off his caseload to an ambitious prosecutor friend: Robert Mueller III. In the years since, he's represented a number of well-known corporations and businesspeople, but he remains best known for his client Deep Throat aka Felt. O'Connor wrote Deep Throat’s “coming out” profile in Vanity Fair in 2005, and co-wrote Felt's memoir A G-Man's Life (2006). Felt lived until age 95, dying in 2008.

O'Connor freely admits that he's not a natural author. To his credit, the book is as concise as possible given Watergate's complexity. He writes with lawyerly, not scholarly precision: laying out his case with evidence, but speaking no ill of his client. Also, importantly, although Postgate's PostHill Press often publishes conservative authors (though not exclusively), O'Connor makes a compelling case that his case against modern investigative journalism is not a partisan one:

"While conservatives attribute this biased reporting to the leftist bent of most journalists, there is a sound argument that conservative investigations are just as biased, albeit perhaps less numerous because of the liberal leanings of a great majority of journalists... So I here do not limit deceptive journalism to the left. The two wildly differing media renditions of the recent Mueller Report serve to confirm this point."

Factcheck: True, in my experiences.

Watergate "canon:" All the President's Men & The Washington Post claim to have told the story "the way it really happened." Did they?

O'Connor is not saying Richard Nixon was innocent, although he believes his research mitigates some of Nixon's culpability regarding Watergate, for which he was forced to resign under threat of impeachment. O'Connor is saying he can prove that the Democratic National Committee and CIA were equally complicit, if not more so, in the much larger scheme of corruption Watergate uncovered. At its core: a call-girl ring under 24/7 surveillance, designed to create incriminating evidence to blackmail politicians. Nixon got left holding the bag.

O'Connor is not new in arguing most of this, as he makes clear by citing an entire historiography of previous Watergate books, both "canon" and heretical. But much of his evidence is new, based on his own experiences with Woodward and the publisher of Felt's memoir, and therefore vital. O'Connor argues that the Washington Post systematically omitted and misrepresented key evidence of that larger conspiracy, acting as a political press for the DNC. Both the Post and DNC had the same chief counsel.

The motive?

"Go along to get along," my graduate adviser admonished me to do at the UC Berkeley Journalism School 45 years later. By following that advice, O'Connor argues, The Washington Post grew from a sleepy regional newspaper into a global multibillion-dollar media empire. Investigative journalists could now bring prop up or bring down governments - relying on anonymous sources within those governments, just like the millionaire-celebrity journalists Woodward and Bernstein had. The opportunities and risks for propaganda grew exponentially, as the DNC avoided their share of blame and the CIA's power over US politics grew unchecked.

The free press is not under siege; they imploded. It is self-inflicted. I saw it up close at UC Berkeley's Journalism School from 2015-17. But as O'Connor writes, maybe it was a Potemkin's Village all along - a carefully crafted facade?

Keep in mind that in the early 1970s, The Washington Post was just a regional newspaper, there was no Internet, and when Watergate broke, the Post held a near-monopoly on the story.

8 Key Allegations

O'Connor, a former California prosecutor turned commercial lawyer, had long studied Watergate as a hobby and surmised Felt was Deep Throat years before finally meeting him. That happened when a Stanford friend of his daughter's turned out to be Felt's grandson.

Shortly after Watergate, Felt's FBI career came to an abrupt end for authorizing warrantless wiretaps on the leftist Weather Underground terrorist group, a common FBI COINTELPRO "black bag" practice at the time the Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional. Someone claiming to be a New York Times reporter outed him. Felt then resigned and was prosecuted despite public support from hundreds of current and former agents, and political leaders ranging up to former President Nixon who testified on his behalf. A jury convicted Felt, who felt like a scapegoat. President Reagan later pardoned Felt, but he retired with massive legal bills. In the 2005, O'Connor and Felt's family convinced Deep Throat, now 91, that he could come out as a hero, resurrect his reputation for his family legacy, and perhaps collaborate on a book with Bob Woodward to leave his kids and grandkids better off.

• But Woodward, whose access to Deep Throat made him rich and famous, was having none of it, O'Connor said. "There will be some surprises," Woodward reportedly told him - three times - then allegedly strung along Felt's family and declined a collaboration destined to be a bestseller that would cement Woodstein's fame as history's greatest investigative journalists. This left O'Connor dumbfounded. Woodstein instead did their own book, The Secret Man.

• After Woodward spurned them, publisher PublicAffairs acquired Felt's memoir, co-written by O'Connor. O'Connor then describes how the publisher - secretly owned and controlled by the Washington Post - didn't like his idea to explore unanswered questions about Watergate "canon." PublicAffairs then allegedly torpedoed their own book via advertising bad reviews, including on the book's own Amazon page; cancelling a book tour and promotional interviews; and a devastating deception about a phantom Book TV event that must be read to be believed.

• Plumber and CIA operative E. Howard Hunt's notebooks, which would have proved extensive CIA involvement and showing that White House involvement in the Watergate break-ins went no higher than White House Counsel John Dean, went missing. As Hunt openly pondered a CIA court defense and requested the notebooks, his wife, allegedly also a CIA operative, died in a plane crash while reportedly carrying hush money to a Watergate informant under FBI protection.

• Days after alleged "6th plumber" Lou Russell rebuffed a Congressional subpoena, Deep Throat met Woodward a garage where he famously warned, "Everyone's life is in danger." The next day, Russell, who had been pondering penning a tell-all, suffered a heart attack. Before dying weeks later, he claimed someone had switched his heart medication. Woodward, O'Connor says, never wrote about any of this, and claimed in All the President's Men nothing came of Deep Throat's warning.

• Prominent Democratic politician Joseph Califano served as general counsel to both the DNC and The Washington Post simultaneously during this period. Every elaborate con needs a lawyer on the inside.

• The "Key" to Watergate: According to O'Connor, The Post did not report on a key found on one of the Plumbers, who nearly got shot by the police while trying to get rid of it during their arrest. That key opened a DNC secretary's drawer, which O'Connor believes is key to proving DNC and CIA involvement in a call-girl ring targeting political heavyweights for blackmail. The Post, according to O'Connor, never even mentioned it. And when O'Connor mentioned it to Woodward years later, he reportedly grew angry and uncooperative.

"It is very, very difficult for us to conclude otherwise that Woodward and Bernstein, presumably on direction from their editors, deliberately concealed the seizure of the key and its significance and thereby concealed perhaps the most significant piece of evidence in our country's biggest scandal."

- John O'Connor

• The Ervin Committee published the House's majority report and up to that time, O'Connor writes, The Post had written little of the DNC's or CIA's involvement, except to exonerate them. The Baker Commission's minority report covered both of their involvement in great detail. Again, this was pre-Internet and few if any of the public would have the chance to read the actual reports. They had to rely on TV, radio, and newspapers - and the Post still held a near-monopoly along with The Ne York Times. Their reporting on the reports would become the de facto public record. O'Connor then describes how the Post allegedly, systematically misrepresented and omitted key facts in the Baker Report - again, not that the Nixon administration was innocent, but that the DNC and CIA were at least equally culpable.

"The Post's treatment of the Baker Report was clever, perhaps brilliant, but in total and considered as a whole, fraudulent."

- John O'Connor

• The New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages later pushed hard for Felt's prosecution, despite the fact he was following long-established policy in tracking The Weather Underground. And both newspapers had a clear conflict of interest, since Woodward's access to Deep Throat had made both newspapers very rich and very powerful. The leadership of both newspapers likely knew he was Deep Throat. O'Connor believes they may have wished to discredit him.

The Washington Post, therefore, according to O'Connor has always been a party press, and never a serious newspaper committed to accuracy. I'm eager to hear what Woodstein, whose work I grew up admiring, has to say about this. So far, crickets.