GOP lawmaker: Nixon was ‘couped out of office,’ ‘framed’ during Watergate

Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) said Thursday that former President Nixon was “absolutely couped out of office” and added that he was “framed” during the infamous Watergate scandal .

“We now know more about the deep state and its power and ability to literally change things at the top,” the lawmaker said during his remarks at the Nixon Foundation’s annual Grand Strategy Summit in Washington.

“An interesting aspect of this as it relates to Richard Nixon — he knew all of this,” Moore continued. “He knew it, and he stayed quiet about it. Because he didn’t want to erode the confidence of the American people in our system of governance and our institutions.”

“The truth is now out there, so I think people feel a bit more liberated to talk about Richard Nixon and what an amazing president he was in this country,” he concluded.

The congressman’s remarks refer to a Wall Street Journal report that found the Department of Justice (DOJ) opened a review into whether the special prosecutor’s office committed misconduct while investigating the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, citing people familiar with the matter.

Former Nixon aide Geoff Shepard was also reportedly invited by a senior DOJ official to give a presentation at the department’s headquarters, per The Wall Street Journal. Shepard has repeatedly asserted since the 1972 scandal that Watergate was a plot to hide who Nixon’s Democratic donors were in his reelection campaign.

Moore compared President Trump to Nixon, who, he said, “faced this in his first term with the fake Russia collusion hoax and all that.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in 2020, finding significant contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the 2016 election.

“Russia and other countries took advantage of the Transition Team’s inexperience, transparent opposition to Obama Administration policies, and Trump’s desire to deepen ties with Russia, to pursue unofficial channels through which Russia could conduct diplomacy,” the report reads, noting that this made the “transition open to influence and manipulation.”

The report followed a 22-month investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller about possible collusion.

Trump bashed “ Radical Left Wing Media ” on social media in 2019 for “knowingly getting the Russia Collusion Delusion story so wrong” while Mueller was conducting his investigation.