Mark Felt and the 'Collusion' Conspiracy

One strange element of the attempted coup against Donald Trump is that no one involved has brought up the name of W. Mark Felt. Or perhaps that’s not so strange.

Mark Felt is a unique figure in American history, an FBI official who actually did bring down a president. The president was Richard M. Nixon, the occasion the legendary Watergate scandal.

For the benefit of all you millennials out there, Watergate was the outcome of a burglary pulled at the D.C. hotel complex of that name targeting the Democratic National Committee offices during the 1972 presidential election campaign. The burglars were caught and swiftly traced back to rogue White House staffers. No involvement by Nixon was ever proven – and was unlikely in any case – but in an effort to protect his staff, a collection of sideshow habitués ranging from the simply goofy to the truly deranged, Nixon instigated a coverup.

A two-year uproar ensued, which the national media, led by the Washington Post, blew up into a full-scale, national-historical constitutional crisis. As legend has it, Nixon was about to tear the Constitution into shreds when a pair of WaPo reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, rode into town on white steeds and with the help of info from a shadowy gnome known only as “Deep Throat” (after a notorious porno flick of the day), blew the conspiracy wide open and sent Nixon packing. That’s the legend, anyway, handed down for decades since, a triumph of all right-thinking folk and a high point of postwar liberalism

For decades afterward, speculation was rife concerning the actual identity of Deep Throat, ranging from Nixon staffer John Dean to a phantom existing only in the caverns of Woodward and Bernstein’s brains. Nobody actually pinned down the real individual, who was W. Mark Felt.

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