painful. okay. we ll see, we ll see. i want to talk about why you did this. you have written this piece. it has received a lot of attention, not only for the historical analogy that people are drawing to our current situation, but also because you wrote it. can you just tell me what it is about this part of history that interests you so much. sure. a couple of things. when i first i didn t really know about the road map very much before. and when it was recently released by the district court in washington, d.c., i d looked at it. i heard about it. i took a look at it and started reading it. and i saw all these references to henry petersen. i had worked in the criminal department of justice for many years and knew who henry petersen was, and he is a revered figure there. that sort of leapt off the page at me. what s all this about? the road map itself is very sparse in terms of the information it provides, but it cites two additional underlying documents that i started digging in
supervising the whole watergate case against nixon, from very beginning, from the first break-in, from the discovery of the break-in at dnc headquarters, right. well, what jim baker, the former general counsel of the fbi has put together at lawfare is a sort of long granular history of how nixon used that particular justice department official, how nixon used henry petersen, the head of the criminal division at the justice department to obstruct justice. how nixon saw henry petersen essentially as his man inside the justice department and his guy who had access to everything going on in the watergate investigation, and nixon used petersen to get inside information about what was going on in that investigation in a way that benefitted nixon s defense. jim baker goes through the contemporaneous evidence produced by the watergate
history since watergate, since these things came to light of the department and the white house being very cautious about what the nature and scope of the interactions between the two organizations is and how that s regulated. especially when you ve got an investigation going on that touches the white house. as a regulated matter, and i m not asking you to comment on the trump administration specifically, i know you re constrained from being able to do that here. but as a matter that you say is regulated now in terms of contacts between the white house and the justice department, if there were violations on that, if there were somebody at a high level in the justice department who was having secret communications with the white house about an investigation that involved the white house, that would be against justice department rules. that s the sort of thing that you would expect the inspector general to look into if there were credible allegations of that. just speaking hypothetic
the government have access to this information, and then obviously more broadly the american people. i think it s we, as many people have said, if we don t learn from history, we re condemned to repeat it. so this was piece of history that i personally didn t know about. i thought it was intriguing and interesting. and as you mentioned, sarah grant and i wrote this up and put it out there. on in terms of looking back at this and sort of seeing how people have dealt with this before, what might be the relevant precedent or the lessons of history here, obviously, there is a lesson of history here in terms of nixon. nixon gets caught for doing this. as you spell out in your piece, one of the articles of impeachment is based in part on him having improper contact with the justice department about this ongoing investigation. right. i wonder, though, if it was also improper from the perspective of the justice department for henry petersen, for this senior justice department officia
headquarters, right. well, what jim baker, the former general counsel of the fbi has put together at lawfare is a sort of long granular history of how nixon used that particular justice department official, how nixon used henry peterson, the head of the criminal division at the justice department to obstruct justice. how nixon saw henry peterson essentially as his man inside the justice department and his guy who had access to everything going on in the watergate investigation, and nixon used peterson to get inside information about what was going on in that investigation in a way that benefitted nixon s defense. jim baker goes through the contemporaneous evidence produced by the watergate investigation at the time, and in this new article for lawfare, he highlights all the communications between the president nixon and the senior justice department official, where nixon was pumping this justice department official for information.