For fifty years, the official history of Richard Nixon has been written in permanent ink. Crook. Criminal. The president who got caught and resigned in disgrace. Watergate was a straightforward morality tale — a corrupt president brought down by brave journalists and honest institutions.

Except seven pages of sealed grand jury testimony just blew a hole in that story big enough to drive a presidential motorcade through. And what’s on those pages doesn’t just change how we understand Nixon. It changes how we understand everything that’s happening right now.

The Pages They Hid

In June 1975, Nixon testified before the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. The full transcript ran 297 pages. Most of it was released by the National Archives in 2011. But seven pages were held back — sealed, deemed too incendiary to share even with the rest of the grand jury.

Last week, New York Times reporter James Rosen published the contents of those seven pages for the first time. And what Nixon described under oath half a century ago reads like a script for the modern deep state playbook.

Nixon testified that in December 1971, he discovered that a Navy Yeoman named Charles Radford had secretly copied roughly 5,000 classified National Security Council documents — including papers stolen directly from Henry Kissinger’s briefcase. Radford then handed those documents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

Five thousand classified documents. Stolen from the National Security Adviser. Delivered to military leadership that opposed the president’s foreign policy.

That’s not a leak. That’s an intelligence operation run against a sitting president by his own military establishment.

Why Nixon Stayed Quiet

Nixon wanted to prosecute. He said so under oath. But he couldn’t — because Radford had been Kissinger’s top notetaker. The man had accompanied Kissinger on secret diplomatic trips to Paris during Vietnam War negotiations. He knew what was said, who said it, and what both sides offered. Prosecuting Radford would have blown open the most sensitive diplomatic channels the administration had.

Nixon called it a “can of worms” and chose to protect the operations rather than expose the betrayal. He urged prosecutors not to dig deeper. They agreed. And the whole thing was buried — for fifty years.

Meanwhile, the people who spied on Nixon faced no consequences. The military officers who received stolen classified intelligence kept their careers. The deep state operatives who undermined a democratically elected president went home every night and slept fine.

The Pattern

Read Nixon’s testimony and then read the headlines from the last decade. The parallels aren’t subtle. They’re screaming.

The Joint Chiefs spied on Nixon because they opposed his foreign policy — particularly his efforts to end the Vietnam War and open relations with China. The permanent bureaucracy didn’t agree with the elected president’s direction, so they ran covert operations against him.

Sound familiar? The FBI opened an investigation into Donald Trump based on opposition research dressed up as intelligence. The FISA court was used to surveil Trump’s associates. Career officials leaked classified information to damage the administration. An entire apparatus of permanent government worked to undermine, constrain, and ultimately remove a president they disagreed with.

Nixon. Then Trump. Different decades. Same machine.

Tucker Carlson has been making this argument for years. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2024, he laid it out plainly: Nixon was “the most popular president, by votes, in his re-election campaign. And two years later, he’s gone, undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI, and a bunch of CIA employees.”

Roger Stone wrote two books about it — “Nixon’s Secrets” and “Tricky Dick” — arguing that Watergate was less a scandal than a vehicle for removing a president the establishment couldn’t control.

For years, that was dismissed as conspiracy thinking. Now Nixon’s own sealed testimony confirms the core of their argument. The deep state was real. It spied on the president. And it got away with it.

The Significance for Today

Rosen, the reporter who obtained the pages, wrote that Nixon’s testimony “bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the ‘deep state.'”

That’s the New York Times — not exactly a right-wing outlet — publishing the words that validate what Trump supporters have been saying since 2016. There is a permanent class of bureaucrats, intelligence officers, and military officials who believe they have the right to override democratic elections when the results don’t suit them.

They did it to Nixon. They tried it with Trump. The methods evolve — wiretaps become FISA warrants, stolen briefcases become leaked phone calls — but the principle is the same. Unelected officials deciding that they know better than the voters, and acting on that belief with the full power of the state.

Stone connected the dots on his podcast: “You have here the deep state, which Nixon’s testimony now proves exists, spying on Richard Nixon for the same reasons that they spied on Donald Trump. For the same reasons they invented the Russian collusion hoax.”

He called Nixon’s removal a “government-engineered coup d’état.” After reading seven pages of sealed testimony, that description is harder to dismiss than it used to be.

The History That Writes Itself

The official Watergate narrative served the establishment perfectly for half a century. It taught a generation of Americans that the system works — that institutions catch bad presidents and accountability prevails. It became the founding myth of modern political journalism.

But myths have a way of crumbling when sealed documents get unsealed. Nixon wasn’t just a president who broke the law. He was a president who was spied on by his own military, undermined by his own intelligence community, and ultimately removed by the same permanent bureaucracy that would later target Trump.

That doesn’t make Nixon innocent. He made choices that gave his enemies the ammunition they needed. But it does make the story far more complicated — and far more relevant — than the version they taught you in school.

The deep state didn’t start with Trump. It didn’t start with Obama. It’s been running the same playbook for at least fifty years. And seven pages of buried testimony just proved it.