I ONCE WOULD HAVE FOUND THIS IMPLAUSIBLE, BUT NOW AFTER WHAT THEY DID TO TRUMP . . . Watergate revised: Prosecutor cover-up alleged.

It’s taken decades of work, but a former aide’s campaign to clear Richard Nixon’s name in the 1972 Watergate scandal has finally reached the Justice Department, with the aide seeking an investigation into allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and a “deep state” conspiracy to take Nixon down.” . . .

Shepard’s credibility is hard to challenge. He was an insider who turned on Nixon after hearing one of the most critical secret tape recordings in the Watergate case. In fact, he is credited with dubbing the tape the “smoking gun” because he believed it tied Nixon to the Watergate cover-up.

Only later did Shepard change his mind when he realized that Nixon was running through options in the scandal, not approving a hush payment in the case.

And more recently, he forced the release of the secret prosecutor’s “road map” used to convince a grand jury to indict key Watergate figures and egg on the impeachment inquiry that turned out to be a hoax, somewhat similar to the “dossier” used to spark the FBI investigation of former President Donald Trump.

“They knew it was a lie, and they made it up,” Shepard said. That road map, however, was never revealed to Nixon’s defense team and was sealed until 2019, when Shepard got it released. It is a central piece of his latest book, published by Bombardier Books.

He also found out that several members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, then headed by prosecutor Archibald Cox, improperly left the group with their documents. In some, they described how they worked with the anti-Nixon judge in the case, John Sirica, to get Nixon — a big legal no-no.

Like I say, knowing what we know now about how our institutions work, it’s a lot more plausible than I once would have believed.