Mark Penn writes an excellent summary of Russiagate and the FBI and DOJ’s role
But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is Penn’s resume: “Mark Penn…was chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.”
Did they do something terrible to him? Because he’s certainly left the reservation.
I also recommend this by Victor Davis Hanson, although I don’t think I agree with him that the coup is dead.
It’s been an interesting couple of years, hasn’t it?
Russia-gate is an extension of Water Closet, which is still overflowing and soiling our nation.
Coup is not dead. Not until they are all in prison, and we know that will never happen. Harris, when she is Pres will continue to hound Trump, his family and friends.
Penn is probably an old fashioned Democrat like Pat Caddell. He sees where this is going and doesn’t like it.
Remember the DLC?
A great John Fund column on Caddell.
In September 2016, after Trump won the GOP nomination, Caddell told me that he thought that Trump had a 40 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton, even though he was being vastly outspent and his campaign was unconventional and run by outsiders and novices. As Caddell told The New Yorker at the time: “People didn’t think Trump had the temperament to be president. He clearly wasn’t the best Smith, but he was the ONLY Smith.”
Caddell was referring to his generic polling of a “Mr Smith” based on the movie.
I, too, think that the coup attempt is still ongoing, and won’t be over, completely dead, until:
1. Trump is able to appoint leaders to be in charge of the FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, and State Department who will run all of those involved in this coup attempt out of their positions, and out of those agencies.
2. Those involved in this coup attempt are indicted, prosecuted, found guilty, and put in jail.
VDH is right to identify this as the first such coup attempt in American History, and if there are no penalties for the coup members, if those involved are not clearly and publicly identified and punished–and punished severely–it certainly won’t be the last for the U.S.A., because now such coups–formerly “unthinkable,” are now quite eminently “thinkable,” and have moved into the “realm of possibility.”
And, cliche or not, from now on we will have coup after coup attempt, and the US will join the ranks of all those South American “banana republic,” in which coups are a regular occurrence.
Hopefully Mark Penn is only the first of what will be many classical liberals to leave the reservation and have the courage to acknowledge publicly what is happening to our country.
The Nixon Coup was real.
The difference was that Nixon tried to help the burglars and got himself involved in a coverup. Hillary and Obama would never make a mistake like that because they do not care about “little people.”
Also, unlike Trump,Nixon cared what his enemies thought of him. He was as hated as Trump is today. Nixon just worried about it.
Politico offers: “Why Mark Penn Is Sounding Trumpy”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/31/mark-penn-clinton-strategist-mueller-investigation-donald-trump-219622
Snow on Pine is on target.
Our nation is poised on the brink of the unthinkable.
If the senate does not break the logjam on appointments and if Trump is not reelected in 2020 we will go over the edge with no hope of recovery.
Trump needs the DOJ to go after Clinton’s Uranium One collusion with Russia, the Clinton (bribery) Foundation and its non-legal slush funds, and the illegal server which had a “sham” investigation. Along with those involved in the obstruction of justice.
Indictments. Trials. Maybe some “not guilty” verdicts, maybe all “not guilty”. But America needs the trials.
The scum that rose to the top of the Dem supporting deep state. They all deserve prison, as does HRC.
It’s not too late? to Lock Her Up.
with a nazi like Obergruppenfuhrer Müller
its not a coup
ITS A PUTSCH!!!!!!!!
Ted Clayton:
Well, of course they’re going to say he’s doing it for some sort of revenge and/or fame. But I’ve read a lot of what he’s written, and it’s all smart, on point, and logical. He’s certainly convincing; sounds a lot like Dershowitz in that he is against the special prosecutor in general. He was never an extremist, either.
So at this point I believe he means what he says.
The difference was that Nixon tried to help the burglars and got himself involved in a coverup.
The team worked for Gordon Liddy, who worked for John Mitchell, who worked for Mr. Nixon. Among those with prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary was Gordon Strachan, who was H.R. Haldeman’s secretary. The White House Plumbers was under the direction of Egil Krogh, who worked for John Ehrlichman (a protege Ehrlichman had brought with him from Seattle); Mr. Ehrlichman worked for Richard Nixon. When John Caulfield went to John Dean to tell him that Charles Colson’s plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution was nuts, Dean flew out to San Clemente to remonstrate with John Ehrlichman, who in turn called Colson and shut the project down. John Ehrlichman was perfectly aware of what Colson’s office was up to. Who was it who owned a house in San Clemente?
Neo:
although I don’t think I agree with him (Victor Davis Hanson) that the coup is dead.
The coup is dead when McCabe and others are in jail. As long as deep staters see they can do this without any negative consequence for themselves, they will continue to be potential coup threats.
Tom Grey–Trump can’t go after anyone.
It appears that, once appointed, every person Trump has appointed to head one of these Departments or Agencies has–from the evidence–immediately started to work at guaranteeing the institutional survival and continued prosperity of the organization they were appointed to head (and presumably clean up), by covering everything with a thick, obscuring blanket of fog, refusing, first, Congressional requests, then subpoenas for documents, “sanitizing” documents so severely as to render them useless, refusing to provide witnesses to testify, etc.
In effect, protecting these coup plotters, rather than finding and ridding their Departments and Agencies of these disloyal and seditious Cabal members.
Moreover, we hear vague talk–but no details–of supposed “investigations” that are supposedly going on.
But, from what one can divine from the minuscule amount of information that has been reported, these “investigations” have never resolved anything, pinpointed the guilty, or resulted in any prosecutions.
DOJ IG Horowitz is reported to have supposedly interviewed hundreds of witnesses and he and his investigators are reported to have combed through hundreds of thousands of documents, and he has released one Report, with little effect.
Has anything actually been found out, has any Cabal member of major significance been identified and prosecuted?
Has there even been Horowitz’ acknowledgement that there wasn’t just illegal or unethical conduct by this or that government official—each person and action unconnected to the others, and with no common aim—but that, all involved were actually plotting and trying to carry out an actual “soft” coup?
Back sometime ago we were told that former AG Sessions appointed the US. Attorney for Utah, John Huber—supposedly a bulldog of an investigator and a fine, honorable fellow, who was going to work far removed from the D.C swamp and, thus, much more effectively and without interference—to investigate things and, then, Huber just faded away.
Has Huber found out anything? Has he recommended anyone for prosecution? Has that potential prosecution moved forward to become an actual prosecution?
We do not know.
There are supposedly all sorts of things moving behind the curtain, but we are apparently never to know what they are, signify, or result in.
Washington is a sieve and leaks constantly occur, yet, we have heard no actual, concrete information leak out about the progress or the results of any of these supposed investigations.
Cabal members are free men, free, as well, to malign and slander President Trump on a daily, even hourly basis, but we have heard not one word of detail about or condemnation of any one of these Cabal members leaking out of these seemingly mythical “investigations.”
Could it be that there really are no actual investigations, but that there are, rather, the types of sham “investigations” that Hillary has been subjected to, and that these “investigations” are actually just a gigantic disinformation campaign, meant to deceive and pacify us, eventually to fade away, with no actual public exposure of this coup attempt, or prosecutions?
Who knows?
Its all starting to look like political theater, like Kabuki, to me.
One indication that Congress itself is not serious was when they allowed former FBI director Comey to answer “I don’t remember,” or “I don’t know” to something like 250 separate questions posed to him by members of Congress in a closed door session a few months ago.
Comey may have provided some cynical amusement for some, but he provided no answers to any.
How was Comey allowed to get away with this, to thumb his nose at Congress and, by extension, at the citizens of these United States, without any repercussions, without any penalty?
The members of Congress–when they want to be–are quite ingenious fellows, and I can’t believe that, if they really wanted to punish Comey for his insolence, lies, and deception, they couldn’t find some means to do so.
But they didn’t.
What does that say about the seriousness with which they are pursuing their “investigations?”
Neo,
For sure, Politico is going to sniff & scowl and try to wipe a buggar on anything Trump-positive.
But they can’t hide – even in their own slanted but info-rich piece – that Mark Penn is a free-living figure with quite a diverse history & career to his credit. He’s been a businessman, and ranking executive. He hasn’t been a DC camp-follower who must watch his rep in the Beltway, at all costs.
Like this astute blogger-gal I’m aware of, at a certain point the lines he was supposed to read, the characters of the other actors he was supposed to work with, and the marks they were all supposed to stand on on-stage, failed to be a coherent production any more.
There’s about 20% of us with this ‘problem’. 😉
Snow on Pine “Who knows?”
Only the Shadow….
I agree that this coup is not really dead until the perps go to jail; since they won’t, we will then just be saddled with the Zombie Apocalypse Coup.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-mccabe-and-60-minutes-avoid-discussing-why-russia-factored-in-comeys-firing
“We know that what Trump wanted made public was something very specific about Russia, namely, that Comey repeatedly told the president he was not a suspect in the Russia investigation. Trump was frustrated — over time, ballistic — over the fact that Comey was privately telling him that he was not under investigation, yet making statements that would lead the public to believe Trump was suspected of conspiring in Russia’s hacking operations. Trump wanted Comey to state publicly that he was not a suspect; Comey’s refusal to do so made no sense to the president, especially after Comey gratuitously implied, in his stunning March 2017 House testimony, that Trump was a suspect.”
This coup will not end until 2024 (end of Trump’s 2nd term) or until some big players are under indictment…like Hillary, Comey, Clapper, Strzok/Page, Rosenstein, McCabe, Brennan, Lynch…there are others who ought to be there too I suspect.
I expect no one from that list to see jail time…but to shift the investigative spotlight & draw an indictment would be a big damn deal.
Related: Lara Logan…’blasted the media for dropping even the pretense of being objective, likening some journalists in the mainstream media to “activists” and “propagandists…. [W]e’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today.”‘
https://www.dailywire.com/news/43610/propagandists-emmy-award-winning-journalist-lara-amanda-prestigiacomo
So maybe there is hope. Maybe.
Barry…I’ve been wondering about Ms Logan’s interview in the context of Mark Penn’s raised profile off the plantation. Both will soon become pariah’s of the leftistsphere. They’ll be othered and viewed as traitors if they aren’t already.
No doubt.
On the other hand, maybe this unfortunately rare flash of sanity will precipitate a trend. Will takeoff. Will snowball. As more and more people become unshackled from the mass hysteria.
Will precipitate a “tipping point” as it were….
As, perhaps, those caught up in this mass, mass media-induced insanity will wake up, pinch themselves and ask, “Holy Mackerel! What the heck was that?? Where was I??” (Well, one can dream…)
See Powerblog for more on Logan.
@Snow – sadly, you seem all too correct. I believe we will NOT see Barr going after anyone with indictments that lead to trials.
So the coup plotters get away with this one.
And there will be more in the future.
The tribalist demonization of normal Reps will continue, and includes GOPe Reps who care more about their socialist pro-abortion friends and status among those folks, than about conservative principles.
The slight silver lining is that Trump remains an “underdog”, beset by the Dems, the media, the colleges, the deep state gov’t — all the elite. For Trump, this might help him get reelected in 2020 more than fighting against the slowly losing deep state perps, now almost zombies in continuing to bang about Russia collusion.
The USA needs indictments. It’s not clear that Trump does.
He’s certainly convincing; sounds a lot like Dershowitz in that he is against the special prosecutor in general. He was never an extremist, either.
Penn’s role in there founding of the Democratic Leadership Council is now under attack by the far left of the Democrats.
Nobody farther left than DU.
A SMALL GROUP of billionaire-backed Democrats, part of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus in Congress, has launched a last-ditch effort that threatens to derail Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s election as House speaker.They’ve framed their challenge to Pelosi, a California Democrat, in terms of good government and high-minded bipartisanship. Yet the force behind their campaign is one of the most toxic and notorious partisan warriors the Democratic Party has produced in the past three decades: political and corporate consultant Mark Penn.
Mark Penn is the guy who aligned Bill Clinton with centrist Democrats and made him president. The left hates him because he is trying to return some sanity before 2020.
Pingback:Deep state Coup attempt failed – yet continues like a zombie – Tom Grey – Families, Freedom, Responsibility
When John Caulfield went to John Dean to tell him that Charles Colson’s plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution was nuts, Dean flew out to San Clemente
Artdeco, you have a nice summary of John Dean’s version of Watergate. There is another school of thought that Dean was really the one behind the burglary as he was concerned the Democrats were going to attack his wife for her history as an “escort” in DC before their marriage. I don’t really buy that story either but it is as reliable as Dean’s version, I tend to agree with Pat Buchanan that Nixon often blew off steam by threatening to do something he would retract in the morning. As Pat put it in “Nixon’s White House Wars,” “Some dumb sonofabitch took him at his word and went out and did it.”
I think a good first step in opening up this can of worms would be to declassify those parts of documents that have been improperly redacted. That would demonstrate, I believe, that the redactions were not made for national security reasons, but were made to protect Washington insiders. Trump was going to do that six months ago or more, but for some reason pulled back.
And that is a good part of Trump’s weakness: he is not consistent. I suspect that his children and their spouses are able to change his mind quite easily, and they do so regularly. Sometimes it is to protect him; in the case of the redactions, I just don’t know why anyone in the Executive Branch would have pulled back from that course of action. Whatever the reason, I would strongly counsel against allowing those redactions to stand — they protect wrong-doing and illegality. Let the sunlight in!
The reason the top leadership at the DOJ and FBI were willing to act in an unconstitutional way before the election, I think, is that no one could believe Trump would win. Had Hillary won, all this mess would have just disappeared and their acts would have been forgotten. The “insurance policy”, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr’s acts — all that would have just been ignored and forgotten. It is time to get to the root of all this mess.
Artdeco, you have a nice summary of John Dean’s version of Watergate.
No, that’s John Dean’s summary of an incident which antedated Watergate. You have five other witnesses to one aspect or another of his account: John Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, Charles Colson, John Caulfield, and Anthony Ulaszewicz. How did their account of it differ from his?
I consider Dean an unindicted coconspirator in Watergate and the others were all very concerned in minimizing their role and blaming Nixon.
Dean has successfully rehabilitated himself, at least as far as Democrats are concerned. They all hate Nixon.
I consider Dean an unindicted coconspirator in Watergate and the others were all very concerned in minimizing their role and blaming Nixon.
Dean was indicted and plead guilty. The bill of particulars did not include activity prior to 19 June 1972 and others have said he was seeking information from Liddy’s crew, something to which he did not admit in 1972.
Dean’s account of his conversations with Caulfield, Mardian, and Ehrlichman did not include any conversations with Nixon. Dean met with the President only about 3x between May 1970 and September 1972, all about minor matters. The question isn’t what Dean said to Nixon, but what Ehrlichman said to Nixon. In re to the Dean / Mardian trip to San Clemente, it was Mardian who was scheduled to meet with Nixon, and about a different matter.
I’d forgotten that Dean was indicted and pled out., Good ! He is a lying weasel.
Nixon was a big boy and took his beatings without public complaints like Hillary.
I still prefer Buchanan’s version of the story, plus of course Mark Felt’s admission that he directed the coup.
Neo, I just looked clearly at your title for this post. It should be either “Mark Penn writes an excellent summary” or “Mark Penn’s excellent summary.” I imagine you rewrote it and this slipped by.
Kate:
Yes, thanks. Will fix!
plus of course Mark Felt’s admission that he directed the coup.
The demented nonagenarian copped to being ‘Deep Throat’, not to participating in any coup. I wouldn’t doubt that Felt was a source for WoodStein. That having been said, just prior to Felt’s ‘admission’, I saw a published critique of the passages in WoodStein’s book referring to their meetings with Deep Throat. The critic pointed out that WoodStein’s account of the mechanics of how these meetings were arranged had to be nonsense concocted post hoc.
Here’s an alternate thesis. Deep Throat was a composite, which is why he’s never been identified. Ron Rosenbaum of The Village Voice (who had written a weekly column on the scandal in 1973-74) in 1982 penned an article assessing all the candidates students of Watergate offered for Deep Throat, Mark Felt among them. He offered no conclusions, because none of the candidates quite fit. And, he noted, John Dean and others couldn’t quite settle on a candidate. (Dean at that time thought Alexander Haig).
Nicholas von Hoffman’s thesis on Watergate strikes me as more plausible: the Nixon Administration constructed an off-the-books espionage and dirty-tricks squad because the FBI was unwilling to do that sort of thing for them. It was Hoffman’s belief that J. Edgar Hoover would do that for Nixon’s predecessors, but sensed the ‘split in the ruling classes’ on the VietNam War and begged off. (I’m skeptical of von Hoffman’s thesis inasmuch as what’s been published about Hoover indicates he was an unscrupulous man leading an apparatus in business for itself, not an agent of any of the Presidents for whom he worked). Von Hoffman’s assessments (again, published in 1982) are a satisfactory antidote to much of the hyperventalating about Nixon over the 30-odd years previous; Von Hoffman was also harsh about the news media, whom he thought had acted as political partisans in the Watergate affair. Ben Bradlee and Philip Graham were certainly enmeshed with the Kennedys; one of the four attorneys supervising the prosecution of the Administration’s officials over the period running from the Spring of 1972 to the Fall of 1975 was John Kennedy’s Solicitor-General (hired off the Harvard Law faculty) and another had been on John Lindsay’s staff.
Vladimir Bukovsky explained these phenomena in the upcoming English version of his book, “Judgment in Moscow.” He had found documents in Russia to prove that the reason the horrific crimes of the former Soviet Union and its satellites were not punished like the Nazi crimes were fifty years before was the “Kremlin’s links to and influence over Western political parties, governments, media, and prominent individuals, as revealed in the documents. It was these powerful links, he writes, that prevented any push to prosecute the extreme human rights abuses that took place over the decades of Soviet rule. As a result, the Communist Party and KGB elite were left to regroup and re-establish their power – with new names and new methods, perhaps, but the same goal: to undermine Western democracy.”
It is with sadness, agony, and dread that I see daily evidence of Western democracies turning back to the future. Some people never learn from history and must repeat it no matter how disastrous.
The demented nonagenarian copped to being ‘Deep Throat’, not to participating in any coup.
The whole caper was a coup. Interesting that you don’t see that.
The tapes were the final straw but they just illustrated his social awkwardness.
Black’s biography of him is quite good.
The whole caper was a coup. Interesting that you don’t see that.
Your model of what happened has it that John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, and John Mitchell (all of whom met regularly with the President face-to-face and one of whom had been one of Nixon’s law partners) were supervising three inter-locking sets of people engaged in espionage and / or miscellaneous plots against disgruntled officials and against the political opposition and Nixon knows nothing of it. That Nixon puts his imprimatur on the Huston Plan, but that indicates nothing of Nixon’s general dispositions on how to deal with the political opposition. That Wm. Safire, John Dean, and Henry Kissinger all attest that Nixon was capable of strange and neuralgic reactions to certain sorts of stimuli, but all of it comes to naught and nothing under the table is done.
America is already on a fatal descent fall off the edge. Enjoy the fall. No point worrying about it now. Too late.
Aesop, when there is a Zombie Apocalypse, I will tell you. Until then, it is safe.
A reprint of a recent conversation on the Nixon affair/coup. Funny how Americans are forced to accept this now, when they refused to when I brought up the topic in 2015.
beefrank • 13 hours ago
The biggest ‘MAGA hat’ hoax and media lynching is the Mueller investigation.
ymarsakar • 12 hours ago
They already took down Nixon using similar methods. Americans fell for that one too.
beefrank ymarsakar • 11 hours ago
Not all Americans. But Woodward, Bernstein and ‘Deep Throat’ are ‘heroes’. Oh, yeah. Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt was simply pissed off that he was not chosen as FBI Director by Nixon. Unfortunately, Nixon did not fight has hard as Trump nor have his resources, instincts and perception. Nixon was a good man.
ymarsakar beefrank • 11 hours ago
Felt was pardoned for violating the constitutional rights of a number of Americans by Reagan due to “patriotic national security interests”.
Well, pretty sure Nixon’s plumbers had a national security interest in wire tapping the Demoncrat HQ to see which foreign entity was bribing. Hint: it’s all of them.
The story of Watergate goes far deeper than just Felt’s little axe grinding session.
Felt was in charge of COINTELPRO. Look it up to see why it was problematic. Felt was also responsible for raiding Weather Underground illegally, ultimately culminating in Ayers and Bernadine’s release on all charges and immunity due to double jeopardy… coincidence?
There is quite the relationship and dot connections between Rogue FBI sleeper cells and Leftist revolutionaries.
As for Nixon, he was demoralized when his own cabinet quit on him and took the side of the “reasonable Republican morality squad” that tends to fire squad each other for the lols. Trum has the same issue, although his excuse of “I can trust Demoncrats that worked for Hussein” only flew with naive idiots in the Byzantine world of politics.
Tracy Dick felt personally betrayed when his own allies, loyalists, and side turned on him and sided with the corrupt evil as F Demoncrats. He just gave up, especially after he realized how the military industrial complex, the Pentagon, and basically everybody else in the alphabet soup agencies were spying on him.
Trum had a lot more advantages and stellar constellation support than Tracy Dick ever had. Trum, for example, had an informant tell him the FBI whatevers was spying on his Trum tower. If only Tracy Dick knew that when he turned off the White House recorder… that it wasn’t really turned off because he wasn’t actually in control of it.
Your model of what happened has it that John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, and John Mitchell (all of whom met regularly with the President face-to-face and one of whom had been one of Nixon’s law partners) were supervising three inter-locking sets of people engaged in espionage and / or miscellaneous plots against disgruntled officials and against the political opposition and Nixon knows nothing of it. That Nixon puts his imprimatur on the Huston Plan, but that indicates nothing of Nixon’s general dispositions on how to deal with the political opposition. That Wm. Safire, John Dean, and Henry Kissinger all attest that Nixon was capable of strange and neuralgic reactions to certain sorts of stimuli, but all of it comes to naught and nothing under the table is done.
I think it was a coup but not for the reasons you listed.
It was a coup because of Felt’s connections. Just connect the dots. Almost all the CIA/FBI ex plumbers in Nixon’s goon squad, were trained by Felt’s COINTELPRO. Do you understand what that means? Did Trum understand what it meant to keep Mueller/Comey and other Demoncrats that served the Leftist evil overlord Hussein? Apparently now.
This doesn’t even raise the case where Trum thinks Cuba/American Tea Party/LBJ killed JFK.
The arguments that Stratfor used to argue it was successful coup by Felt is that the FBI had been spying on presidents since Roosevelt. All Directors had been bought off by presidents who knew they were compromised. Nixon violated that unwritten rule. Felt took him down.
We are seeing much the same thing now with Trump and Comey/McCabe. I think Trump has fewer skeletons than they thought. Plus nobody cares if he slept with women not his wife.
I Wrote that blog post when Felt died.
Cabal members are free men, free, as well, to malign and slander President Trump on a daily, even hourly basis, but we have heard not one word of detail about or condemnation of any one of these Cabal members leaking out of these seemingly mythical “investigations.”
Could it be that there really are no actual investigations, but that there are, rather, the types of sham “investigations” that Hillary has been subjected to, and that these “investigations” are actually just a gigantic disinformation campaign, meant to deceive and pacify us, eventually to fade away, with no actual public exposure of this coup attempt, or prosecutions?
Who knows?
You know about the Cabal? Since when?
As for who knows… I would know, for one thing.
I think Trump has fewer skeletons than they thought.
He’s like Reagan, Teflon president. It doesn’t stick. Part of why millionaires don’t use astrologers but billionaires do.
Trum’s fate or destiny is pretty good and can’t be defeated by normal political means. He can always be JFKed or “suicided” however.
The Deep State goes a lot deeper and farther back than most Americans want to believe. Naivety has its price however. Same goes for Trum when he refused to listen to those like me that told him to purge DC and replace all his posts with loyalists and clans men.
Keeping on Comey and Mueller and other Hussein boys? Hahaha. Pull the other one, why don’t you. If Trum hadn’t had fate on his side, he’d be a roasted chicken by now, with Orange Sauce. Instead of a cuckservative, he’d be a cock served on a dish given to Leftist alliance child molestors, Cabal members, and Deep State loyalists.
Oh yea, don’t be surprised when Mark Penn gets “suicided” soon. Heh.
The Mind as Big as a Planet has to consult other planets to predict the fate of President Trump? Who knew?
The arguments that Stratfor used to argue it was successful coup by Felt is that the FBI had been spying on presidents since Roosevelt. All Directors had been bought off by presidents who knew they were compromised. Nixon violated that unwritten rule. Felt took him down.
? Hoover gaslighted Nixon, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Mitchell into running criminal enterprises?
(And Truman and Eisenhower were blackmailed by Hoover?)
Art Deco, since when is investigating Demoncrat HQ for bribery and corruption a criminal enterprise?
When Nixon uses COINTELPRO staff, he should not have been surprised at the behavior of the plumbers. Felt was exonerated for doing the exact same things to people with far less to hide. This is similar to the Iran Contra affair. There is no way for you to know, reliant just on media sources, who is controlling what.