Days after unequivocally claiming the CIA was behind the John F. Kennedy assassination, Tucker Carlson fingered the U.S. spy agency for ousting then-President Richard Nixon in 1974 by dispatching one of its most powerful assets: Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
Wait, what?
The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner? Half of the dynamic “All the President’s Men” duo? Mr. “follow the money” himself – a CIA asset?
“He wasn’t a journalist,” Carlson said about the most celebrated journalist of the modern age Thursday night on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“Who exactly was Bob Woodward? Well, he wasn’t a journalist,” Carlson continued. “Bob Woodward had no background whatsoever in the news business. Instead, Bob Woodward came directly from the classified areas of the federal government. Shortly before Watergate, Woodward was a naval officer at the Pentagon.”
It’s true that Woodward joined the Washington Post straight out of the Navy – in a two-week trial as a cub reporter. He failed that trial, and spent a year working at the D.C. suburbs weekly Montgomery Sentinel before he would get another shot over at the Post. (Woodward did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.)
Carlson made the claim on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” while arguing that Nixon was forced from the White House by a deep-state conspiracy. He inferred that Woodward was merely a cog in the machine that “forced” Nixon to resign in disgrace over the Watergate burglary cover-up scandal – despite Nixon’s resounding re-election just two years before – because he wasn’t playing nice with Washington establishment agencies and bureaucrats.
Carlson had already suggested last week that Woodward was working with the government to get Nixon out – and get “obedient servant” Gerald Ford – Nixon’s then-Vice President – into the White House.
“Richard Nixon believed that elements in the federal bureaucracy had been working to undermine the federal government,” Carlson said, and at one point the President told the sitting CIA director that he knew “who shot John [Kennedy].” At the time of that conversation, the first of Woodward and Bernstein’s series of Washington Post stories had just been published.
“Soon after leaving the Navy for reasons that have never been clear, Woodward was hired by the most powerful news outlet in Washington and assigned the biggest news story in the country,” Carlson added. “And just to make it crystal clear what was actually happening, Woodward’s main source for the Watergate series was Deputy Director of the FBI Mark Felt [believed to be the source known as ‘Deep Throat’].”
Carlson used that framing to suggesting that a similar bureaucratic coup is happening to President Joe Biden, who suddenly finds himself harangued by revelations that he had been improperly housing classified documents at his private residence, a now-familiar storyline.
Watch the segment in the video above, via Fox News.
Historical footnote: The only other person known to cast that much aspersion in Woodward’s direction (though he refused to name him) would be Nixon himself, who told British newscaster David Frost during the infamous Frost/Nixon interview that the greatest concentration of power in the U.S. is not the White House – it’s the media. The year was 1977.
“It’s too much power and it’s power that the Founding Fathers would have been very concerned about,” Nixon said, adding that “those who write history as fiction on third-hand knowledge, I have nothing but utter contempt. And I will never forgive them. Never!”
