WI: No Pardon

I have a few questions about Nixon's fate without the pardon.

1. What was the expected timeframe for an indictment? Would Nixon have been indicted at the same time as his coconspirators or would the prosecution have waited to develop a stronger case against Nixon in light of who Nixon was?
2. What counts can we expect the prosecution to bring against Nixon?
3. When would the trial of Richard Nixon have taken place?
4. Presuming the prosecution can convict Nixon what kind of sentence would Nixon have received?
5. I once read here that during the period where Nixon being convicted of a crime seemed possible there was a plan to have him serve out his sentence on a military base essentially under house arrest rather than sending him to a traditional prison. Would that kind of sentence cause public outcry? Would the public care that Nixon is serving his sentence at an air force base somewhere rather than in the same prison as the coconspirators?
6.Presumably Nixon would still try to rehabilitate his image here and attempt to reinvent himself as a trusted foreign policy expert. Would a trial and conviction keep him from doing so successfully?

1) The timeframe is hard to predict. "Watergate" itself took so long for two reasons. One was because the early stretch of hearings took quite a while to play out -- Nixon's people were beginning to think they might survive it all Iran-Contra style because while the Watergate Committee hearings were tremendously popular early on they wore on for a while without producing many new revelations past the first couple of months. But then came the Saturday Night Massacre which was indeed a minor constitutional crisis, and the revelation of the White House tapes, which breathed a whole new life into it all. The second reason it took time was (1) because it took months to work through the appeals process until the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes, and (2) the fact that most of the grunt work had passed from the "Watergate Committee" of TV fame and to the House Judiciary Committee that would actually assess and vote on impeachment charges, and Peter Rodino wanted that work to be meticulous. That's when they brought in a team of outside legal experts led by the legendary civil-rights enforcer John Doar (with a certain former First Lady and presidential candidate among his water carriers) to look at the historical impeachment process and how to implement it in this case. All that dragged the initial process, investigation to impeachment charges, for a year and a half. It wouldn't be that long to charges because they had all the Judiciary Committee's work to draw on, but it wouldn't be super fast. This was part of why he was pardoned -- Ford's inner circle of advisors said this was going to take time, and it would make it impossible for Ford to govern if the news every day was each little scrap of the criminal process wrt Nixon.

2) Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice first and foremost. The "smoking gun" tape, while it is actually vague, does seem to suggest that Nixon was conspiring in that way. It's not a huge charge penalty-wise but it's the safe play, the best chance for a conviction. Really the best chance for conviction was three other things but they each had their issues. One was that Nixon had broken the law by bombing Cambodia and Laos as part of Operation FREEDOM DEAL because that contravened the Cooper-Church Amendment to one of the major appropriations bills. The prosecution could argue that, trying to retrospectively apply War Powers Act exemptions or not, Cooper-Church was a clear example of Congress exercising its war-making (or rather war-stopping) powers with legislation attached to their constitutional "power of the purse." But strangely, maybe because it wasn't tied to Watergate, there were a couple of Congressmen who wanted an impeachment charge on that but no one else took it anywhere. The other one is the "X File," LBJ's detailed wiretapping and investigative details on how Nixon conspired to torpedo the Paris Talks in October 1968 in contravention of the Logan Act. If Johnson or his political heirs (esp. Walt Rostow who held the file before giving it to the LBJ Library) had made that public, it would have provided some real meat for charges. The problem there is the Logan Act itself: only one person has been charged under it in a couple of centuries (it was very early Federal-era legislation) and that the language of the Act is sufficiently vague that it may be trying to forbid permissible forms of behavior. It's not at all clear Nixon's behavior was permissible -- when Johnson called it "treason" on the phone to Everett Dirksen in the fall of '68, Dirksen just verbally nodded his head -- but there would be an extensive challenge, up to SCOTUS, to the validity of the Logan Act. The real smoking gun wasn't actually found for years because the tapes were so damned extensive -- it was a conversation from spring of '71 where Nixon clearly and definitely says the Brookings Institution "ought to" be burglarized in order to find more dirty laundry like the Pentagon Papers. But that took a long time to find and it was buried for years too because, until Timothy Naftali took over the institution in the late Nineties/early Aughts, the Nixon Library was as much a place to bury the bodies of Nixon's record as an open archive. They will go for conspiracy charges because really that's the best they can get in a court of law. There was plenty of "abuse of power" that could have removed him from the presidency, but impeachment charges don't always hold up as felony charges.

3) As soon as possible and in the Federal District Court of DC, which would then appeal up to the First Circuit of the Court of Appeals and then SCOTUS.

4) Whatever, likely, the going rate on conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is at federal level. Sentence likely to be probationary and suspended.

5) In the sentencing phase the defense would take a lot of time discussing the unique security issues of sentencing a former President, so his sentence would probably be probationary and involve essentially house arrest at San Clemente (no ankle lo-jacks in those days but same idea.) Given his phlebitis attack in the autumn of '74 the defense will argue the health and welfare angle too. Simply convicting him on the charge and marking him as "a crook" will have to do. A particularly galling penalty that could be exacted would be using the felony count to deny Nixon a passport, so the man in love with foreign policy could never leave the States again. That would hurt.

6) He would, and he would have people like Reagan backing him all the way. Like the Iran-Contra folk who either managed to dodge charges because there were vague chains of evidence and/or good attorneys and/or tainted jury pools (ex. Ollie North, who went from fall guy for the "new Watergate" to Virginia senatorial candidate in a few short years) or were simply pardoned in return for keeping shtum about how involved Poppy Bush was in the process (particularly in the arms-money-laundering-to-the-contras phase of operations, which was in keeping with his helping set up the "Safari Club" -- France, the Shah, the Saudis, and a few others, all funding covert ops through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International because the Church Committee had clipped Langley's wings -- when Bush was at CIA under Ford.) Nixon was very good at making a martyr of himself and I'm sure he would again here, particularly since there are really only one or two charges for which there was sufficient evidence to take a swing at him in federal court.
 
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