The movement toward prosecuting people (i.e., politicians) and not crimes did not start with the current onslaught against former President Donald Trump. In the modern era, it stretches back to Robert Kennedy’s all-out effort to destroy Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. Many of the same personnel and procedures were later utilized by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in the 1970s to “Get Nixon.”
Today, the all-out effort to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot approaches the same ferocity, as is detailed in professor Alan Dershowitz’s recent book Get Trump: . The three situations are eerily similar.
As majority counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee under John McClellan back in 1957, the young Robert Kennedy took an intense dislike to Jimmy Hoffa, the tough, no-nonsense president of the Teamsters Union. Kennedy called him “the most dangerous man in America,” even as Hoffa dismissed Kennedy as “a spoiled rich kid.”
Kennedy grew more and more frustrated at his inability to nail Hoffa, but this all changed when he was named attorney general in Jack Kennedy’s administration. RFK launched a personal vendetta and recruited some 20 prosecutors to form a special unit within the Organized Crime Section of the Criminal Division of his Department of Justice. It became known as the “Get Hoffa” Squad, led by FBI agent Walter Sheridan, because its sole mission was to convict Hoffa of something, anything, to remove him as the Teamsters president.
After a couple of misfires, they convicted Hoffa in 1964 in two separate cases: one in Tennessee for jury tampering and one in Illinois for wire fraud. They were so eager to convict Hoffa in the Tennessee case that they planted a spy in Hoffa’s entourage, whose reports included the legal advice Hoffa was getting from his defense lawyers. Hoffa also claimed that he was a victim of illegal surveillance and paid government perjurers. Hoffa called the lead prosecutor in Tennessee, James Neal, “the meanest SOB he’d ever met.” Hoffa was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Kennedy later sent the other Tennessee prosecutor, Charles Shaffer, to spy on the Warren Commission’s investigations of his brother’s assassination — with instructions to report back directly to the attorney general should any evidence come to light of organized crime being involved in the planning or execution of his brother’s murder.
Kennedy went on to become a senator from New York and was assassinated in 1968 while running for president. Hoffa was released from prison in 1971 when his sentence was commuted by President Richard Nixon. The young White House lawyer doing the staff work on Hoffa’s commutation was Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, who two years later became Nixon’s principal accuser in the Watergate Scandal. Hoffa disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1975 and is presumed dead.
The Watergate Scandal ended Nixon’s presidency in 1974, primarily as a result of the investigations and prosecutions of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, created as a result of demands of Edward Kennedy of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The unit was staffed by 60 lawyers, specially recruited by two Harvard Law professors: Archibald Cox and James Vorenberg. Cox’s first request upon being named special prosecutor was the contact information for Walter Sheridan, who had run Robert Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa” squad a dozen years before. The unit’s top 17 lawyers had all worked in the Kennedy/Johnson Department of Justice — and painted targets on Nixon and his top staff. They announced at their first press conference that they would investigate every allegation of wrongdoing from the time Nixon first took office. (READ MORE: Jack Smith’s Corruption of the Justice System)
The personnel overlaps are instructive. Heading the Watergate Task Force was James Neal, who — with his co-counsel, Charles Shaffer — had secured Hoffa’s conviction in the Tennessee jury tampering case. Shaffer, for his part, became John Dean’s criminal defense lawyer — and was able to negotiate a “sweetheart deal” for Dean with his former co-counsel. While apparently sentenced to a one-to-four-year prison term, Dean was confined to a witness protection program for only the four-month duration of the cover-up trial and never spent a single night in jail. William Bittman, who had secured Hoffa’s conviction in the Chicago wire fraud case, became the defense lawyer for Watergate burglar Howard Hunt. While Bittman was heavenly involved in the Watergate cover-up, he was never indicted due to his “prior record” with the Department of Justice in the “Get Hoffa” prosecutions.
The “Get Nixon” squad was highly successful, driving Nixon from office and voiding his landslide reelection, as well as convicting two dozen members of his administration. But they were so eager to succeed that they denied Nixon’s people any semblance of the due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. Internal prosecutorial documents surfacing in the past decade detail a series of secret meetings with Watergate judges, suppression of evidence favorable to the defense, and misrepresentations of facts to grand jurors and congressional staff alike. One of the documents is a memo from the second special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, to his deputy complaining about his staff’s “subjective conviction that the president must be reached at all cost” and saying he could not rely on them for advice since they were so biased.
Democrats’ non-stop efforts to prevent Trump from again running for office are both legion and well-known. They are detailed in a recent book entitled Get Trump by my former criminal law professor at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz has been a Democrat all his life and does not like Trump — or Nixon, for that matter — but he does fervently believe in the Fifth Amendment’s due-process guarantees.
Prosecutors’ eagerness to get Trump mirror that of their predecessors’ eagerness to get Nixon some 50 years prior. To come full circle, the leadoff witness in the House Judiciary Committee’s initial impeachment hearings against Trump was none other than Nixon’s former counsel, John Dean, who conveniently testified that Trump’s actions were worse than Nixon’s. (READ MORE: Trump’s Third Indictment Is Ludicrous)
The all-out effort to convict Trump of something, anything, to knock him out of the 2024 race stands in stark contrast to the near-total lack of prosecutorial zeal to try Hunter Biden, who is accused of a whole series of crimes, including tax evasion and selling access to this father as both vice president and president.
Whether the multitude of federal and state prosecutions leads to convictions of Trump (and mere slaps on the wrist for Hunter Biden) remains to be seen. But, someday, all of the internal prosecutorial documents will be made public — even if decades from now — and one can only wonder just what they will show.
Geoff Shepard came to Washington in 1969 as a White House fellow, after graduating from Harvard Law School. He served on President Richard Nixon’s White House staff for five years, including a year as deputy counsel on the president’s Watergate defense team. He has written three books about the internal prosecutorial documents he’s uncovered, many of which are posted on his website, www.shepardonwatergate.com
