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In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself.

All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.

Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House.

What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars.

In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”

On June 17, 1971 — exactly one year before the Watergate break-in — Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.

“You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting. “Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions.

“Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said. “Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

Though Ellsberg was already under indictment and charged with espionage, the team headed by Hunt and Liddy broke into the office of his psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement.

“You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman on June 29, 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”

In a July 3, 1971, conversation with Haldeman, he said: “The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a Garment [White House counsel Leonard Garment] and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire [presidential speechwriter William Safire], and, by God, they’re exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”

In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”

John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and confidante, met with Liddy at the Justice Department in early 1972, when Mitchell was attorney general. Liddy presented a $1 million plan, code-named “Gemstone,” for spying and sabotage during the upcoming presidential campaign.

In Nixon’s third war, he took the weapons in place — the Plumbers, wiretapping and burglary — and deployed them against the Democrats challenging his reelection.

Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party;

Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.

Mitchell approved a $250,000 version, according to Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager. It included intelligence-gathering on the Democrats through wiretaps and burglaries.

They discussed a secret $350,000 stash of cash kept in the White House, the possibility of using priests to help hide payments to the burglars, “washing” the money though Las Vegas or New York bookmakers, and empaneling a new grand jury so everyone could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Finally, they decided to send Mitchell on an emergency fundraising mission.

On Oct. 10, 1972, we wrote a story in The Post outlining the extensive sabotage and spying operations of the Nixon campaign and White House, particularly against Muskie, and stating that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event. The story said that at least 50 operatives had been involved in the espionage and sabotage, many of them under the direction of a young California lawyer named Donald Segretti; several days later, we reported that Segretti had been hired by Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary. (The Senate Watergate committee later found more than 50 saboteurs, including 22 who were paid by Segretti.)

A favored dirty trick that caused havoc at campaign stops involved sweeping up the shoes that Muskie aides left in hotel hallways to be polished, and then depositing them in a dumpster.

In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, Patrick Buchanan and another Nixon aide wrote: “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.”

“I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman in April 1971. According to Haldeman’s 1994 book, “The Haldeman Diaries,” the president also wanted to have Kennedy photographed in compromising situations and leak the images to the press.

On Sept. 8, 1971, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all the likely Democratic presidential candidates, as well as Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”

The arrest of the Watergate burglars set in motion Nixon’s fourth war, against the American system of justice. It was a war of lies and hush money, a conspiracy that became necessary to conceal the roles of top officials and to hide the president’s campaign of illegal espionage and political sabotage, including the covert operations that Mitchell described as “the White House horrors” during the Watergate hearings: the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the Ellsberg break-in, Liddy’s Gemstone plan and the proposed break-in at Brookings.

In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the arrests at the Watergate, Haldeman warned Nixon that “on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.”

Haldeman said Mitchell had come up with a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation.

Nixon approved the scheme and ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

On March 21, 1973, in one of the most memorable Watergate exchanges caught on tape, Nixon met with his counsel, John W. Dean, who since the break-in had been tasked with coordinating the coverup. “We’re being blackmailed” by Hunt and the burglars, Dean reported, and more people “are going to start perjuring themselves.” “How much money do you need?” Nixon asked.

“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied. “And you could get it in cash,” the president said. “I, I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.”

Mitchell later denied approving the plan. He testified that he told Magruder: “We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it.” By his own account, he did not object on the grounds that the plan was illegal.

Nixon’s final war, waged even to this day by some former aides and historical revisionists, aims to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the president’s record. Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal.

In his 1978 memoir “RN,” Nixon addressed his role in Watergate: “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.” Twelve years later, in his book “In the Arena,” he decried a dozen “myths” about Watergate and claimed that he was innocent of many of the charges made against him. One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times.

Even now, there are old Nixon hands and defenders who dismiss the importance of Watergate or claim that key questions remain unanswered.

By August, Nixon’s impending impeachment in the House was a certainty, and a group of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater banded together to declare his presidency over. “Too many lies, too many crimes,” Goldwater said. On Aug. 7, the group visited Nixon at the White House. How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked. “I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”

In his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin, a revered constitutionalist respected by both parties, posed a final question: “Why was Watergate?” The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”

Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes — and what they reveal — will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.

By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.

“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.” His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself.

McDonnell's case centered around the question of what constitutes the scope of an "official action" under federal corruption law. He received gifts, money and loans from Jonnie R. Williams, the CEO of a Virginia-based company, the government said, in exchange for official acts seen as favorable to Williams and his business.

But his lawyers responded that his actions were limited to routine political courtesies and he never put his thumb on the scale by exercising government power on William's behalf.

Writing for the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts set a clear definition of the term "official action" and how it can be used in corruption convictions."In sum, an 'official act' is a decision or action on a 'question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy," Roberts wrote. "Setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event (or agreeing to do so) -- without more -- does not fit that definition of an official act."Roberts also said that political corruption can still be prosecuted by the government, and noted that McDonnell's actions were "distasteful."

White collar criminal defense attorney Barry Pollack was not surprised that the government dropped the case after the Supreme Court ruling. "I think the Supreme Court case made it pretty clear that the government would have an uphill battle if it attempted to retry the case," he said.

"Even with the court's unfortunate decision, the Justice Department had a chance to show it was not deterred and to build on aggressive precedent set by the conviction of then-Congressman (Chaka) Fattah and other recent prosecutions," Bookbinder said. "Instead, the department sent a clear signal that they it would not aggressively enforce corruption laws to hold public officials accountable when they abuse their office. It is our hope that they do not pass on prosecution next time, because rest assured, there will be a next time."

Another important milestone in the Levinson case was a semantic change in how his vanishing was publicly characterized by the U.S. government. President Barack Obama had described Levinson as "missing in Iran," which angered members of his family. But Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the first to say Levinson was "abducted," which Joe Biden's Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, also adopted in a statement Tuesday following a phone call to Levinson's family.

"We won't give up, because we don't give up on family, and Bob, his wife Christine, and all of their children will always be part of our FBI family," Wray wrote.

Dole announced in February 2021 that he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. During his 36-year career on Capitol Hill, Dole became one of the most influential legislators and party leaders in the Senate

Today’s accessible government offices and national parks, sidewalk ramps and the sign-language interpreters at official local events are just some of the more visible hallmarks of his legacy and that of the fellow lawmakers he rounded up for that sweeping civil rights legislation 30 years ago.

Long gone from Kansas, Dole made his life in the capital, at the center of power and then in its shadow upon his retirement, living all the while at the storied Watergate complex.

He tried three times to become president. The last was in 1996, when he won the Republican nomination only to see President Bill Clinton reelected.

He sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1980 and 1988 and was the 1976 GOP vice presidential candidate on the losing ticket with President Gerald Ford.

Dole could be merciless with his rivals, whether Democrat or Republican.

But when Bush died in December 2018, old rivalries were forgotten as Dole appeared before Bush’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda. As an aide lifted him from his wheelchair, Dole slowly steadied himself and saluted his one-time nemesis with his left hand, his chin quivering.

For all of his bare-knuckle ways, he was a deep believer in the Senate as an institution and commanded respect and even affection from many Democrats. Just days after Dole announced his dire cancer diagnosis, President Joe Biden visited him at his home to wish him well. The White House said the two were close friends from their days in the Senate.

Biden ordered that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff at the White House and all public buildings and grounds until sunset Thursday.

He served as a committee chairman, majority leader and minority leader in the Senate during the 1980s and ’90s. Altogether, he was the Republicans’ leader in the Senate for nearly 11½ years, a record until Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell broke it in 2018.

After Republicans won Senate control, Dole became chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee and won acclaim from deficit hawks and others for his handling of a 1982 tax bill, in which he persuaded Ronald Reagan’s White House to go along with increasing revenues by $100 billion to ease the federal budget deficit.

Relegated to private life, Dole became an elder statesman who helped Clinton get a chemical-weapons treaty passed.

He also tended his wife’s political ambitions. Elizabeth Dole ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, then served a term as senator from North Carolina.

As with most on-the-record discussions with an elected official, I was recording our conversation to ensure accuracy.And after Mr. Corker got off the phone, his two aides made sure I had recorded the call. Like the senator, they wanted to ensure his extraordinary charges were precisely captured.As Mr. Corker noted in our interview, his comments were only the latest, and sharpest, critique he had made of Mr. Trump this year.

The problem, he suggested, is Trump’s tweets and other statements implying that there is no deal to be made with North Korea and that Tillerson “is wasting his time,” as one tweet put it. Such comments are causing the Chinese to back away from what has been an incipient willingness to bring serious pressure to bear on Pyongyang.

“When you jack the legs out from under your chief diplomat, you cause all that to fall apart,” Corker said. “Us working with [Beijing] effectively is the key to not getting to a binary choice. When you publicly castrate your secretary of state, you take that off the table.”

In context, Corker’s assertion that “we could be heading towards World War III” was a more pungent way of conveying Trump’s undermining of diplomacy. Trump “isn’t necessarily a warmonger,” he told the New York Times. The point was that the combination of exaggerated statements and the undercutting of Tillerson could corner the White House.

“At that point,” he said, “we pulled him out the house and said, ‘You can’t be here.’”

“He’s a child preying on a child,” Jim Bob Duggar said.

Kelly said that officer has since been convicted of child pornography charges and is incarcerated.“We had no idea” that the officer was involved in anything wrong, Jim Bob Duggar replied.

The scandal ignited on social media, where many expressed anger and disappointment toward the Arkansas family using the hashtags #CancelTheDuggars, #DitchTheDuggars and #BoycottTLC.

“I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true,” he said. “You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.”

One spring day in 1994, Dole, then the Senate’s Republican minority leader, passed a note to his longtime Democratic friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who as the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee had jurisdiction, asking, “Pat, Are we ready for the Moynihan-Dole Bill?” But the Clinton White House said no compromise, the Republican House leader Newt Gingrich said no dice, and Dole, who wanted nothing so much as to win the Republican nomination for president in 1996, realized he had to give up

Long-shot efforts at compromise by John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island and veteran of Guadalcanal who had been John F. Kennedy’s Navy secretary, and John Breaux, a laissez les bon temps rouler Democrat from Louisiana, also came to naught. Months later, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress and, arguably, nothing in Washington has ever been quite the same.

The House Intelligence Committee chair received an unsought assist from Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who said in an interview yesterday that the Senate would forever be known as a body that “shirks its responsibilities” if the trial concludes without calling witnesses.

GOP members of Congress who consider Trump an ignorant, narcissistic, lying, authoritarian bully (and according to Bob Corker, many do) face a choice between their principles and their jobs.

In May 2016, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake of The Washington Post enumerated “The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most.” Graham came in number one.

Graham has become, as Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in The New York Times, the “Senate’s Trump whisperer.

Graham admitted in another interview, “I do better in South Carolina when I’m seen as helping him, ‘cause he’s popular.”

“if I don’t stand up for” the religious freedoms of Muslims, “you won’t stand up for mine.”

In September 2015, when Ben Carson said he could never support a Muslim for president, Graham told him “to apologize to American Muslims” for failing to recognize that “America is an idea, not owned by a particular religion.”

That December, when Trump responded to the attacks in San Bernardino by proposing a moratorium on Muslim immigration, Graham responded ferociously. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham told CNN. “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. ... He’s the ISIL man of the year.”

as he and Trump have grown chummier, Graham’s tone has changed. In his Fox interview, Graham twice applauded Trump for recognizing “that we’re in a religious war.” In other words, he applauded Trump for doing exactly the thing Graham has in the past denounced him for doing: defining the war against ISIS as a war against Islam

Graham later explained that, in his mind, this “religious war” is against not Islam per se but merely “a sect in Islam.” But there’s plenty of evidence that Trump doesn’t make such subtle distinctions. Trump said during the campaign, after all, that, “Islam hates us.” He called for a moratorium on all Muslim immigration

Graham is less public about a lot of the issues on which he once opposed Trump. And, as a result, American Muslims seem to have lost one of the few Republicans willing to defend their rights just when they need him most.

Answers that normally draw wild cheers at Trump's packed campaign events fell flat when he was confronted by voters who appeared to want to cut through bluster and propaganda.

On a day when America recorded more than 1,400 new deaths from Covid-19, Trump effectively told the country to ignore his own words to Bob Woodward downplaying the threat early this year even though he knew how bad it was.

He said he did a "tremendous" job on the virus, insisted "it's going to disappear" and that "a lot of people think masks are not good." Asked who said masks aren't good, Trump replied, "Waiters."

On Tuesday night, audience members granted him the respect due to his office but none of the adulation he craves.

The President became most exercised when denying reports that he referred to US war dead as "losers" and "suckers," calling them "fake."

The President also falsely claimed that Democrats wanted to remove protections for patients with pre-existing conditions introduced under Obamacare. His own administration is currently arguing a Supreme Court case trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act, while Democrats seek to preserve the law.

Nine percent of voters in a CNN/SSRS poll this month said they might still change their mind about who they will vote for. Trump's task in the election appears to be to add less fervent voters to his coalition after spending four years incessantly playing to his base. But while his strongest moments Tuesday came on ending foreign wars and on the economy, and he likely pleased supporters with his unequivocal pro-police statements, the President offered few new policies or approaches at the event that differed from positions in three years when his approval rating has rarely climbed above the low 40s.

"To him a lie is not a lie. It's just what he thinks. He doesn't know the difference between the truth and a lie," Coats is quoted as saying to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

"I don't know, to be honest, whether he's got it straight in his head what is real and what is unreal."

“The FBI’s decision to reopen its investigation into Secretary Clinton reinforces what the House Judiciary Committee has been saying for months: the more we learn about Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the clearer it becomes that she and her associates committed wrongdoing and jeopardized national security," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said in a statement. 

The development comes 11 days before the general election, and is the latest shockwave to hit the race. Clinton had been gaining in the polls over Trump in the wake of the release of footage showing Trump talking about groping women and subsequent allegations of sexual assault and harassment against him. 

He uses data going back to 1912 that primarily has to do with two central tenets.

He’s a professor with an “excellent,” “phenomenal,” and “remarkable” prediction record, according to an amalgam of conservative media websites

First, the setting has to be ripe for a “change” election—where the party in power for an extended period of time appears ready to lose it. And second, the model substantially weights primary popularity for each candidate.

The model still shows a pretty narrow victory—52.5 percent to 47.5 percent for Trump.

“You saw this, for example, with Carter in ’76. He had no money, no endorsements. People said he didn’t have a chance. Nobody had a clue who he was going in,” Norpoth said.

“If he ultimately loses, it’s because he was unwilling to make the transition from the primary to the general election. He had a big message for change, but he couldn’t lay off of anyone who’s ever slighted him,” Norpoth said. “He’s had so many self-inflicted wounds.”

Richard Nixon, who once told Bob Dole to “run as far as you can to the right because that’s where 40 percent of the people who decide the nomination are. And to get elected you have to run as fast as you can back to the middle, because only about 4 percent of the nation’s voters are on the extreme right wing.”

Trump pulled into a virtual tie with Clinton in some poll averages.

After the Scopes Trial of 1925, though, evangelicals turned inward

Many white evangelicals tilted toward the right in the 1950s and 1960s – nascent Cold War fears of godless communism and Billy Graham’s public friendship with Richard Nixon doubtlessly contributed

but a counter-movement of progressive evangelicals arose in the late 1960s in opposition to the Vietnam War and in favor of racial reconciliation and women’s equality. Their signature document, the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, was drafted in November 1973, and many evangelicals relished the opportunity to vote for one of their own, Jimmy Carter, in 1976.

The real catalyst for the formation of the religious right was the attempt to defend against Internal Revenue Service attempts to rescind the tax exemption of racially segregated institutions, especially Bob Jones University and Jerry Falwell’s segregated Liberty Christian Academy in the 1970s. Their anger at the federal government for challenging their tax status drove them into the waiting arms of activists like Weyrich,

In the ensuing decades, evangelicals became the most reliable constituency of the Republican Party, much the way that labor unions once sustained the Democratic Party

But the price of evangelicals’ betrayal of their biblical commitments was fearsome. When Reagan rejigged the tax codes to favor the wealthy, most evangelicals fell silent, despite the biblical warnings against the corruptions of wealth and injunctions to care for the indigent.

hen George W. Bush launched two vanity wars that would not meet even the barest criteria for just warfare, criteria honed by Christian thinkers over centuries, evangelicals, with rare exceptions, registered no objections and even cheered the invasions.

When I was writing “Thy Kingdom Come” during the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency, I searched in vain for a single religious-right organization willing to condemn the use of torture.

In a word, they secularized, trading their fidelity to the Bible and their own heritage of social activism for what amounted to a mess of pottage, the illusion of political influence

Rather than echoing the biblical cries for justice and peace and equality, they settled for the claptrap of hard-right political orthodoxy and thereby became just another interest group, a political entity susceptible to the panderings of politicians.

The proposal comes at a time in which the polarizing presidential election has fueled intense debates surrounding first amendment rights and academic freedom in American universities. In recent months, conservative groups on campuses across the US have launched coordinated attacks against professors and courses that promote liberal ideologies or challenge traditional views on race and gender.

Thorpe’s bill is particularly far-reaching in its targeting of social justice organizing and ethnic studies, said Martín Quezada, a Democratic state senator, and has prompted an outcry on Arizona campuses. “Our students are terrified that their freedom of speech, their freedom of thought and their ability to learn about issues and think at a higher level is in jeopardy now,” he said. “The scariest part of this bill is that the impacts are so broad.”

“By attempting to legislate against certain types of activities that focus on people of color, women or social justice issues,” he added, “it really undermines the ability of the university to function as a space of intellectual engagement and debate.”