"There are elephants crashing around in the forest!"

I apologize for linking to a story written in March, but it is one that I missed, and maybe you did, too. James Rosen writes in the Examiner,

...the academic scholarship published since 1977 has documented in exhaustive detail how the critical wings of the Nixon White House, the National Security Council, the covert operations unit dubbed “the Plumbers,” and Nixon’s campaign arm, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, were all infiltrated by rival power centers in the capital and exploited for intelligence. The people burrowing in came from the military, the intelligence community, and the news media (reports that the Soviet Union also placed moles in the Nixon White House have not been confirmed).

Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee and later President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, never spoke explicitly of a Deep State. But he alluded to it once, in suitably cryptic terms. Reeling from his discovery that the Pentagon had spied on Nixon, and struggling to grasp the large role of the Central Intelligence Agency in Watergate, Baker said: “There are elephants crashing around in the forest.”

The instrument the military men used was the JCS-NSC liaison office, housed in the Executive Office Building and run by a pair of admirals. The late Melvin Laird, the longtime Wisconsin representative selected by Nixon to run the Pentagon, told me in a 1997 interview that before becoming defense secretary in January 1969, he had observed the chiefs building what was, in literal terms, a covert intelligence capability against the White House.

By December 1971, the White House Special Investigations Group, a covert unit called the "Plumbers" formed to plug leaks of classified material to the news media, had uncovered the activities of Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, a stenographer and courier detailed to the JCS-NSC liaison office. After intensive polygraph examination, Radford admitted to having stolen some 5,000 classified documents in 1970-71 from White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and his aides. He'd even rifled through Kissinger’s briefcase while he slept on his official airplane. Radford admitted having passed top-secret documents, via the liaison office, to Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer.

...the CIA’s inspector general reported in 1975, after Nixon had resigned, that CIA agents had been placed in “intimate components of the Office of the President.”

...Why would these institutions have wanted to spy on Nixon? Mitchell had a theory. As he told Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup (1991): “It was his [Nixon’s] personality and his mode of operation that did him in.”

...In the political donations made by Mueller’s staff lawyers, federal filings show, more than $62,000 went to Democrats, only $2,750 to Republicans.

Nixon would have understood. Seven of the top eight lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force had served under Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. In the early 2000s, again using FOIA, I became the first researcher to mine the WSPF's 10,000-page archive: 10,000 pages in all. And while those papers did not contain the kind of sophomoric invective for the incumbent that would later characterize the Strzok/Page texts, the WSPF archive captured the prejudicial bias the Watergate special prosecutors harbored toward their prey.

As Trump surveys the political landscape of 2018, he too can be forgiven for imagining that the Deep State, or something like it, exists. Like Richard Nixon, our 45th president took the oath of office keenly aware that influential figures in the military and intelligence communities deeply distrusted him as an accused colluder with a foreign power, as someone who was not “one of us,” and as a man many said was psychologically unfit for the presidency, whatever voters thought. Both saw their inaugurations marred by rioting. Both would stand eternally accused, whatever the evidence, of capturing the presidency through collusion with a foreign power, and thus be stripped, by media elites that despised them, of all legitimacy. And like Nixon, Trump has been subjected, from the inception of his presidency, to unprecedented leaks of classified material to those elites.

In all this, with the various Russia investigations still unresolved, their ultimate discoveries and outcomes unknown, Trump would do well to internalize the central lesson of Watergate, and perhaps thereby avoid some of the many self-inflicted wounds that Nixon committed during his own death throes against entrenched forces. This lesson Nixon articulated in the final minutes of his presidency, in the maudlin and meandering farewell address he delivered to the White House staff in the East Room on Aug. 9, 1974, shortly before boarding the helicopter that whisked him away from power.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Read more here.