2.5 CLE Credit Hours including 2.50 Professional Conduct
I. Watergate Impact on the Legal Profession
Review Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.6 (Confidentiality) and 1.13 (Organization as Client)
Background on the ABA Kutak Commission, the genesis of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the DOJ Policy on Communications with the White House.
II. Events Following June 17, 1972, Break-In (CIA tells FBI to stand down)
This segment provides an insider look into the death of J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon’s installation of a loyal Acting FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray, the Watergate break-ins, Deep Throat (Mark Felt’s) revolt, and Nixon’s order to have the CIA tell the FBI to stand down on the Watergate criminal investigation. John Dean’s role as White House Counsel and deck officer in the containment of the scandal before the election of 1972 are studied. This segment provides a look at obstruction of justice and the ethics rules for a lawyer who discovers he or she has crossed the line of legality.
III. Dean’s Break with the White House and the Firing of Archibald Cox
This segment focuses on Dean’s break with the White House in April 1973 and recorded backchannel discussions between Nixon and the DOJ Assistant Attorney General in Charge of the Criminal Division, Henry Petersen. Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox six months later triggers impeachment bills, eventually leading to the Supreme Court battle for the Nixon Tapes and Nixon’s resignation. The DOJ policy of independence from undue White House influence is one of the results of this series of events.
Program Overview
Former Nixon White House Counsel and current CNN contributor John W. Dean (read bio here) is partnering with James D. Robenalt (read bio here), lawyer, presidential historian and Vanity Fair contributor, to present a propulsive 2.5 hour ethics program, live, based on the reforms of Watergate as they relate to the ethics regime of the legal profession, and the policies of the FBI and the DOJ. As shown in earlier programs by this duo, the Watergate scandal directly led to the ABA’s Kutak Commission and the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (replacing the recently enacted 1969 Model Code). Watergate also gave birth to the Department of Justice’s policies and norms, set forth in the DOJ’s Justice Manual, establishing guidelines to govern all communications between the Justice Department and the White House personnel. The purpose of these guidelines was set forth in 1-8.600 (Communication with the White House) as follows:
Over the course of more than four decades, Attorneys General have issued policies governing communications between the Justice Department and the White House. The procedural safeguards that have long guided the Department’s approach to such communications are designed to protect our criminal and civil law enforcement decisions, and our legal judgments, from partisan or other inappropriate influences, whether real or perceived, direct or indirect.
The program begins with the death of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on May 2, 1972. Four weeks later, operatives from Nixon’s Re-Election campaign began a series of break-ins, twice at the National Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate. When the burglars were arrested on June 17, the White House sprang into action. Within a week, President Nixon ordered the CIA to tell the FBI’s new Acting Director, L. Patrick Gray, to stand down on the Watergate criminal investigation, claiming it would allegedly uncover CIA operations involving several of the burglars who had ties to the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
This began a time when the White House attempted to control, contain and otherwise interfere with the criminal investigations into Watergate, obstructing justice with things like payments of hush money to the jailed burglars in exchange for their silence. Things came to a head in April 1973 when John Dean broke with the White House and began cooperating with prosecutors and then Senate investigators. During one particularly eventful weekend, Henry Petersen, the United States Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the DOJ, began backchannel discussions with Nixon about Dean’s activities. These phone calls and meetings were captured on tape via the secret White House system.
President Nixon subsequently fired the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in October 1973, an act that led to the introduction of impeachment charges against the president and his eventual resignation in August 1974.
All of these improper acts led to the establishment of firm norms protecting the independence of the DOJ from improper influence from the White House in criminal investigations, especially those involving the president.
This seminar is dynamic and accompanied by White House tapes and transcripts. The presenters do not aspire to provide commentary on the current political landscape (either related to the Biden or Trump administrations), but instead the intention is to provide lawyers with critical historical information on the genesis of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and DOJ’s policies concerning communications with the White House. (The only exception: We will address Trump v US and the Supreme Court immunity decision of 2024). Audience members can draw their own conclusions as to how these lessons might apply to current events.
PRESENTERS:
James Robenalt, Esq.
James Robenalt is a presidential historian, lawyer, and author of four nonfiction books. He wrote one of the top five most read articles in Vanity Fair in 2023 on the JFK assassination and a Secret Service agent’s stunning revelations in a new book (Paul Landis, The Final Witness). He lectures nationally with John Dean, Nixon’s former White House Counsel, on legal ethics and Watergate. He writes for Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Politico, and numerous other publications.
In the summer of 2024, James appeared frequently on LiveNow on Fox as a presidential historian discussing the pivotal events of the presidential election. He is currently working as an executive producer with Moxie Pictures on a proposed documentary on Paul Landis and his book. James’s books include Linking Rings: William W. Durbin and the Magic and Mystery of America; The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War; January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever; and Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland.
James is also a contributing author to editor Ken Gormley’s masterpiece The Presidents and the Constitution, A Living History. Other contributors include Gary Hart, Paul Finkelman, Barbara Perry, Stanley Kutler, Kenneth Starr, Michael J. Gerhardt, and other presidential scholars.
James practices law in a national law firm, concentrating on trade secret and economic espionage cases. Since 2000, Jim has won major trials and arbitrations in complex litigation involving over $161 million. He has also defended major construction cases, tax cases and professional malpractice cases.
Jim earned his J.D. from The Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law in 1981 and his A.B. from Miami University in 1978.
He is a recognized leader in judicial election reform, as the founding chair of a website: Judge4Yourself.com He is the only person to interview Justice Lewis Powell’s law clerk, Larry Hammond, on Powell’s role behind the scenes in fashioning the viability standard found in Roe v. Wade. James has written frequently about reproductive rights, including an article in The Washington Post that went viral on the leak of the Dobbs’ opinion in 2022.
He plays guitar in an all-lawyer rock band, The No Name Band, a group formed to support charity events for organizations like Legal Aid, Music on a Mission, and bar associations. He grew up in Lima, Ohio, and has degrees from Miami University and The Ohio State University School of Law. He lived in Luxembourg during a junior year abroad program. His mother’s grandfather was a leader in the Democratic Party of Ohio and nationally known as a magician (the founding father of the International Brotherhood of Magicians). His great-grandfather helped FDR win the Democratic nomination in 1932 and was rewarded with the post of Register of the Treasury.
John W. Dean
John Dean is a CNN News contributor, analyst and author. He served as Counsel to the President of the United States from July 1970 to April 1973. Before becoming White House counsel at age thirty-one, he was the chief minority counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives, and an associate deputy attorney general at the US Department of Justice.
Dean recounted his days at the Nixon White House and Watergate in three books: Blind Ambition (Open Road reissued 2016), Lost Honor (1982) and The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (2014), which is currently being developed by Amazon Studios into a feature film entitled “Watergate.” Among his more recent best-sellers are Conservatives Without Conscience (2006), which explains the authoritarian direction of the conservative movement that resulted in Trump’s election a decade before it happened, and Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches (2008), which addresses the consequences of GOP control of government. Most recently, Dean published his twelfth book, a collaboration entitled, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020). He is currently working on three new books.
After retiring from a business career as a private investment banker doing middle-market mergers and acquisitions for two decades, Dean returned to full-time writing and lecturing, including as a columnist for FindLaw’s Writ (from 2000 to 2010) and Justia’s Verdict (since 2010). For the past two decades he has been a visiting scholar and lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. From 2015 to 2016, he held the Barry Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University. He also teaches continuing legal education (CLE) programs that examine the impact of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct on select historic events from Watergate (and the Trump presidency) with surprising results – see www.WatergateCLE.com.
Dean graduated with degrees in English Literature and Political Science from Colgate University and the College of Wooster. He accepted a graduate fellowship at American University to study government and the presidency before entering Georgetown University Law Center, where he received his JD with honors in 1965.