Near the end of Nixon’s second and final day on the stand, the examination strayed into a subject that wasn’t listed on the agenda. This prompted Nixon to admonish his interrogator, “I would strongly urge the special prosecutor: Don’t open that can of worms.” More extraordinary still, the prosecutors agreed.
In the avalanche of official disclosure that defined the 1970s, what remained so sensitive that even the special prosecutors wouldn’t touch it?
The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own. The classified portion of the grand jury transcript, obtained by Times Opinion, bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the “deep state.”
Seated in a small Coast Guard station in June 1975, Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but that he himself, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.