While I was in college, news reports broke regularly about seven men arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. They were caught trying to fix bugs installed during an earlier break-in.

At first, news reports linked them to the committee to re-elect President Richard Nixon, then to junior people who worked in the White House, and we know where the Watergate affair ended up.

At each stage, administration officials assured us that the president and his top aides were busy taking care of the nation's vital business and so weren't aware of the sordid matters that a few overzealous underlings had carried out. Many of us believed them. I voted for Nixon; I wanted to believe.

Then fired White House Counsel John Dean testified before a Senate committee that the president had endorsed paying blackmail money to the burglars, and Dean revealed other remarkable crimes originating from the White House. Dean had to be exaggerating or lying. No one else close to the White House was saying anything like that, and the president used the full prestige of his office to isolate Dean as a self-serving liar.

But then we learned that the president had tape-recorded his meetings and phone calls. A special prosecutor subpoenaed the tapes, and the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a defiant White House to produce them. The tapes confirmed what Dean had said and more.

Some highlights of what we know now:

• Federal agencies can punish enemies. "I want the most, I want the most comprehensive notes on all of those that have tried to do us in," the president told Dean, then the loyal White House counsel. "We have not used the power in this first four years, as you know. . . . We haven't used the Bureau and we haven't used the Justice Department, but things are going to change, and they're going to get it . . . ."

• The "enemies" list and the IRS. Dean presented the Internal Revenue Service commissioner with a list of "enemies" and asked the IRS to audit them. The commissioner refused.

• The Plumbers. The president's top adviser for domestic affairs approved forming a group of operatives called the Plumbers to "repair" leaks to the press.

A big leak came from the Pentagon, where Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press. The president's top domestic adviser approved breaking into the office of Ellsberg's former psychiatrist to get the doctor's notes from treating Ellsberg. The idea was to use the notes to "destroy his public image and credibility." The Plumbers broke in but didn't find anything useful.

• Wiretapping journalists. For two years, from 1969 through 1971, the FBI's Intelligence Division, at the direction of the White House, conducted warrantless wiretaps of the phones of four journalists, and the FBI delivered the records of the wiretaps to the White House.

And we now know that the president approved instructing the CIA to lie to the FBI -- to tell the FBI to confine its investigation of the Watergate affair to just the seven men arrested for the break-in because a broader investigation would uncover a national security CIA operation, which it wouldn't have.

The facts that we know so far about the current storms surrounding the Obama administration reveal nothing that sinks into the Watergate sewer. We don't have the FBI illegally tapping reporters' phones; we have lawful seizures of phone company records of reporters' phone calls. The attorney general's approval of those warrants grossly contradicts President Barack Obama's mantra that America should protect national security without sacrificing our civil rights ideals, and genuinely threatens some press independence. Overkill but legal.

We have the Cincinnati office of the IRS singling out for close scrutiny applications from groups using the name "Tea Party"; those groups sought tax-exempt status under a law covering groups that benefit "social welfare." Civil servants trying to sift through a deluge of electronic applications seem to have been tone deaf to the abuse-of-power appearance of what they did. Nothing revealed so far resembles the White House Counsel giving the IRS a list of "enemies" and asking the agency to audit them.

But without a special prosecutor, we would have learned nothing more convincing about Watergate than we have learned about the reach of the current controversies.

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. I am a liberal Democrat partly because of Watergate. I don't think that Obama or his advisers are lying. But I want a special prosecutor here. I don't want to be fooled again.

David Marburger is a Cleveland lawyer whose practice centers on First Amendment law in representing the press, including The Plain Dealer.