May 31, 2005

"...Statement on Granting Pardons to W. Mark Felt

 and Edward S. Miller-  April 15, 1981:

 

 Pursuant to the grant of authority in article II, Section 2 of

 the Constitution of the United States, I have granted full

 and unconditional pardons to W. Mark Felt and Edward

 S. Miller.

 

 During their long careers, Mark Felt and Edward Miller served

 the Federal Bureau of Investigation and our nation with great

 distinction. To punish them further-- after 3 years of criminal

 prosecution proceedings-- would not serve the ends of justice.

 

Their convictions in the U.S. District Court, on appeal at the time

I signed the pardons, grew out of their good-faith belief that their

actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our

country. The record demonstrates that they acted not with

criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority

reaching to the highest levels of government.

 

America was at war in 1972, and Messrs. Felt and Miller followed procedures they believed essential to keep the Director of the

FBI, the Attorney General, and the President of the United States

advised of the activities of hostile foreign powers and their

collaborators in this country. They have never denied their

actions, but, in fact, came forward to acknowledge them publicly

in order to relieve their subordinate agents from criminal actions.

 

Four years ago, thousands of draft evaders and others who

violated the Selective Service laws were unconditionally pardoned

by my predecessor. America was generous to those who refused

to serve their country in the Vietnam war. We can be no less

generous to two men who acted on high principle to bring an

end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation..."

 

                -Comments to Congress by President Ronald

                 Reagan upon the pardoning of Messrs. Felt

                 and Miller, for their conviction on the violation of

                 Fourth Amendment rights of certain persons.

 

 

To All,

     Perhaps the Lamestream Media will finally come around to recognizing that they have no clothes on, given today's historically relevant announcement:

 

Payback Is A B*%ch:

     With today's confirmation by the Washington Post that W. Mark Felt is the notorious "Deep Throat" of Watergate fame, historians get to put a key piece of the puzzle into place so as to figure out what really happened during those tumultuous years.

 

     What does become clearer is that the Famous Lamestream Media did not "bring down a President" by it's own due diligence (aka the revelations of "ace" reporters Woodward and Bernstein). Rather, it is clear that Nixon ran afoul of what could euphemistically called "Hoover's Doomsday Device", designed to go off whenever a threat to the FBI's independence as a bureau was ever threatened. Without the spurned Felt (He was rejected by Nixon as Hoover's replacement in 1972) feeding Woodward and Bernstein confidential criminal investigative material, their now famous articles would have died for lack of source materials. And if Nixon had continued on with "the arrangement" that all his predecessors since Coolidge had accepted, then perhaps history would have been a tad bit different, to say the least.

 

     In other words, Woodward and Bernstein were simply pawns in a power struggle over the FBI's independence and the maintenance of Hoover's modus operandi after dying in place. Political opportunism, rather than any moral superiority of liberal ideology, is what really caused the Left's ascendancy pursuant to their prosecution of the Watergate scandal. And given that Woodward and Bernstein (as well as editors of the Washington Post) knew of Felt and his position in the FBI, the actuality of the situation borders on giving aid and comfort to a "political enemy" just so that a not-liberal enough Establishment Republican could be hosed out of office (The selling of newspapers probably had something to do with it as well).

 

    Back in the 1950's through the early 1970's, liberal forces were campaigning actively against those methods used by both the CIA and the FBI that were effective in fighting communism foreign and domestic. The FBI was actually engaged in (illegal) wiretapping of citizens of concern in the US, as part of that activity. As a career Bureau agent, Felt was part and parcel of that effort, which ultimately required his pardoning by Reagan in 1981 (Felt retired soon after Watergate broke as a scandal). Today's ultraliberals are thus confronted with the historical revelation that their premier (as well as last)  victory from the Age of the New Left was the result of one of the biggest "trades" since the Lakers of old first got Wilt Chamberlain. In addition,  the "trade" was made by private parties (FBI bureaucrats and select members of the Fourth Estate) not subject to the will of the people or even other Leftists. Those domestic Lefties-cum-terrorists caught by the FBI's efforts now get to ponder on whether their having be used as chips in the trade off to rid the world of Nixon, an event that weakened the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party enough that conservatives were able to move into the tactical vacuum in 1980, was worth the price. The rest of us just get to laugh at this latest revelation of Liberal "unintended consequences" gone bad.

 

 

Links may be found at:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nat-gen/
2005/may/31/053104758.html

 

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/
churchfinalreportIIce.htm

 

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/
1981/41581d.htm

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199205/mann

 

http://www.martykaiser.com/fbi1~1a.htm

 

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15511

 

http://law.cua.edu/alumni/news/almFD001002.cfm

 

Respectfully,