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President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has entertained the idea of reframing former President Richard Nixon as a victim of “deep state” persecution in the Watergate scandal, with allies likening Nixon to Trump as an unfairly maligned figure.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility — an internal watchdog that was created in response to Watergate — recently heard a presentation from a revisionist Watergate historian, Geoff Shepard, on his theory that the nation’s most infamous presidential corruption scandal was actually a result of “deep state” actors conspiring to take Nixon down.

Shepard conducted a two-hour talk, accompanied by a 78-page slide deck entitled “Watergate As Lawfare.” Shepard, a former Nixon aide, has been trying to promote this theory for decades with little buy-in by mainstream historians. He thinks that Watergate was a ploy to install Edward “Teddy” Kennedy as president, and has likened the wide-ranging Nixon plot — which was uncovered by a mixture of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and investigative journalism — to a “legal pogrom.”

Among other things, Shepard argues that the special prosecutor who investigated the 1972 Watergate break-in committed misconduct in relation to the case. One of his primary complaints is that Nixon is “loathed” and that his........

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