The Department of Justice—William Barr, consigliere—was in court Tuesday defending the president*'s right to keep a lid on the grand-jury evidence developed by the Mueller investigation. And the DOJ presented a defense that completed the vast circle of Republican corruption that extends wide enough through history to encompass some tape left on a basement door on a June night in 1972. Spencer Hsu of The Washington Post tweeted out the news.

Trump Justice Dept. asks U.S. judge to reject House Judiciary Committee request for Mueller grand jury materials, argues courts in 1974 wrongly gave Congress the Watergate grand jury 'roadmap' that led to President Nixon's impeachment.

In other words, the Attorney General of the United States is arguing that the Supreme Court of the United States in a unanimous vote screwed Richard Nixon. Just another Republican prisoner of conscience lost to history. If you had "Nixon Got a Raw Deal" on your Bullshit Legal Arguments Bingo card, please come to the front of the room and collect your prize money.

It is something that only a few aging initiates whisper to each other any more, but it has been an animating principle in Republican and conservative politics that what happened to Nixon will never happen to another Republican president. It is where they developed the techniques by which they rescued both Ronald Reagan and GHW Bush from their involvement in Iran-Contra. By 2000, those techniques were finely honed enough to keep all the scandals from ever reaching C-Plus Augustus. And it was sufficiently ingrained in conservative intellectual circles that an ambitious young judge named Brett Kavanaugh found it compelling, at least until it became inconvenient to do so during his confirmation hearings. But the final word should go to Tuesday's presiding judge, Beryl Howell, who, confronted by a legal argument she had not anticipated, reacted the same way any of us old enough to remember Watergate would.

"Oh, wow," the judge replied.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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