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Sept. 26, 2025, 6:33 PM EDTBy Tim Stelloh and Brenda BreslauerEarlier this year, Daniel Krug was convicted of killing his wife in an insidious murder plot: He stalked her for months, sending increasingly terrifying messages and posing as someone she hadn’t seen in decades — an ex-boyfriend who’d struggled to get over their breakup.A cousin of Kristil Krug’s now believes she might still be alive if communications companies had responded faster to search warrants that eventually provided key evidence to authorities investigating the case. That evidence, which helped identify Krug’s husband as the stalker, didn’t come for weeks, until after Kristil, 43, was fatally struck in the head and stabbed on Dec. 14, 2023, in their suburban Colorado home.In an interview with “Dateline,” the cousin, Rebecca Ivanoff, called on state and federal lawmakers to require companies to respond to stalking-related search warrants within 48 hours.For more on the case, tune in to “The Phantom” on “Dateline” at 9 ET/8 CT tonight.DATELINE FRIDAY SNEAK PEEK: The Phantom01:58“I’m looking at a system here that has a fundamental flaw that we can fix easily,” said Ivanoff, a former prosecutor who specialized in domestic violence cases.Ivanoff pointed to the link between stalking and homicide — researchers have found that victims are significantly more likely to die at the hands of an intimate partner if they’ve been stalked — and called her proposal “homicide prevention.” She described the numerous steps her cousin took to protect herself, including installing security cameras, maintaining a detailed “stalker log” that she provided to law enforcement, and eventually carrying a handgun.Kristil Krug. Courtesy Dateline “Kristil did everything right,” she said. “The system operated as it’s currently designed, and she still got killed.”Emily Tofte Nestaval, executive director of a Colorado-based legal service nonprofit that assisted Kristil’s family, called Ivanoff’s 48-hour response window “more than reasonable.” She said her organization has encountered far too many cases “where a more timely and diligent response from communication providers could have — or would have — been lifesaving, as we believe was true in Ms. Krug’s situation.”The district attorney whose office prosecuted Daniel said it’s critical for companies to respond quickly because “criminals can turn from stalking a victim to killing that victim at any time.”Brian Mason, district attorney for Colorado’s 17th Judicial District, noted that many stalkers leave a digital trail of evidence that can be used to identify suspects and save lives — evidence that can be uncovered through forensic searches of phones and online accounts.“When law enforcement sends subpoenas to tech companies for this evidence, it is imperative that these companies respond in a timely and thorough manner,” he said. “Lives are literally on the line.”In response to questions about how search warrants were processed in Kristil’s case, officials with two of the companies — Verizon and Google — pointed to the many requests they said they receive from law enforcement annually. For Verizon, that number is 325,000, with 75,000 emergency requests, a spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the company typically responds to those requests in the order received and that it generally doesn’t know the nature of the investigations. They prioritize requests that law enforcement considers “emergent,” the spokesperson said.Data from Google shows the company received tens of thousands of warrants just in the second half of 2023. In a statement, Google said it prioritizes its responses based on a variety of factors, including whether law enforcement tells them if the matter is an ongoing emergency.“At Google, we recognize the critical importance of maintaining flexibility in our processes to effectively triage matters based on the individual circumstances, particularly when assessing the presence of an ongoing emergency,” the company said.A third company, TextNow, did not respond to requests for comment.The unnerving messages begin In Kristil’s case, the stalking began 10 weeks before her death. A police report shows the first message arrived Oct. 2 via text: “Hope its OK I looked u up. I go to boulder every few weeks and thought we could hook up. U game?” The author of the note identified himself as “Anthony” — an apparent reference to Jack Anthony Holland, a man Kristil began dating the summer before college. They were together for just over a year, according to a timeline Kristil provided to authorities, and he periodically reached out and expressed what Kristil believed was an interest in getting back together.She married Daniel, a financial analyst with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, in 2007. They had three children.Kristil and Daniel Krug. Courtesy DatelineKristil didn’t respond to the text, or to a series of increasingly hostile messages the next day, according to the police report. But a few weeks later, the messages continued — and escalated dramatically, the police report shows.One — from an “a.holland” email address — included a vulgar note and a photo of her husband. Others contained sexually explicit photos and appeared to come from people responding to an ad posted on a classified site with Kristil’s phone number. Another message informed her that her license plate was expired. On Nov. 9, a message said: “saw u at dentist.”A few days later, Kristil got a lengthy message that appeared to threaten her husband’s life.“Ill get rid of him and then we can be together,” the text said. “So easy.”In the police report, the detective noted the toll the messages were taking.“Kristil is very fearful for her safety and the safety of her family,” Andrew Martinez wrote. “There is evidence and admission of repeated following and surveillance of her and her immediate family. The recent communication has caused her anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and paranoia.”At the time, authorities still thought of her husband, Daniel, as a possible victim. In a sometimes tearful interview with the detective, Daniel described how the stalking had caused his paranoia and anxiety to surge.“I’m panicking and I’m doing a s— job of protecting my wife,” said Daniel, 44, according to a video of the interview.Kristil — an engineer who had what her cousin described as a “super-analytical mind” — did everything she could to face the situation head-on, her family said.She began documenting the messages in a “stalker log.” She hired a private investigator to track down Holland’s last known address, according to her family. She armed herself and went to the Broomfield Police Department, which dispatched undercover officers to keep an eye out for the stalker. (The effort came up empty.)Although the private investigator had found addresses for Holland in Utah and Idaho, Martinez, the police detective, said he wanted digital evidence proving that Holland was actually behind the messages. If the detective confronted him without that proof, he could “just close the door in our face and that is the end of our case,” Martinez told “Dateline.”So on Nov. 12, Martinez applied for the warrants for Google, TextNow and Verizon that sought information for the phone numbers and email addresses associated with the messages, police records show. They were submitted to the companies five days later. There was a typo in the warrant to Google, so Martinez resubmitted a corrected version on Dec. 6. But as the weeks passed, neither of the other companies responded. And in the days after the corrected warrant was filed, Google did not respond either.That lag wasn’t unusual, Martinez said. “When we serve a search warrant to any major company, unfortunately, it takes time,” he said. “And a lot of times it takes weeks, if not months for some companies.”Following the wrong lead all along On Dec. 6, an email arrived in Kristil’s inbox.“Hey gorgeous i cant visit u no more,” it said, according to a police report. “No more colorado time. My girlfriend dosnt want us talking witout her. She says u will let cops get me aftr u off him but she dont kno u likei do.”Eight days later, Daniel Krug summoned police to the family’s house for a welfare check after he said he’d been unable to reach his wife. An officer found her body in the garage, body camera video shows.An April 1 image of the home in which Kristi Krug was found stabbed and beaten to death in Broomfield, Colo. David Zalubowski / APShe had a substantial head wound and appeared to have been stabbed in the chest.Authorities raced to track Holland down and — with a warrant for his arrest for stalking — they found him at home in Utah on Dec. 14. With help from a Utah sheriff’s office, they quickly concluded that it would have been “physically impossible” for Holland to have been in Colorado at the time of the killing, according to a prosecutor in the case, Kate Armstrong.Holland told “Dateline” that he didn’t think he’d get charged after authorities came to his door because he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong.”I was like, ‘I didn’t do it,'” he recalled telling the officers. “I knew I was OK once the police officers left my house.”At roughly the same time, investigators reached back out to Google, Verizon and TextNow, which still hadn’t responded to the warrants. This time, with the “exigent” circumstances of a homicide linked to the request, they responded within an hour, according to police records.That data revealed the stalker used an IP address “similar” to the government building where Daniel worked, according to police documents. Investigators then confirmed it was linked to a public wi-fi network at Daniel’s office building, the documents state.To Martinez, the revelation was “earth-shattering,” he said. It showed that he’d been on the wrong path the whole time.To Justin Marshall, the lead homicide detective, that evidence could have allowed them to act sooner.“If the information that we learned pursuant to exigency had been made available in mid-November, we would have known that every communication had originated at the same location — Dan’s work address,” he said. “We wouldn’t have been as far behind.” When investigators confronted Daniel with the evidence, he said their new “theory” was wrong and suggested the stalker may have accessed his workplace’s wi-fi, a video of the interview shows. Daniel and Kristil Krug. Courtesy Dateline Authorities came to believe that Daniel had been stalking Kristil — who’d wanted to end their marriage — in an effort to scare her and push her closer to him. He killed her out of fear of being found out, Armstrong, the prosecutor, said.Daniel was arrested two days after his wife’s killing and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, stalking and criminal impersonation. Earlier this year, after a roughly two-week trial where his lawyers pointed to the lack of physical evidence and what they described as sloppy police work that failed to keep Kristil safe, he was convicted of all charges and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Pushing for change In the months after the conviction, as Ivanoff processed the evidence presented at her cousin’s murder trial, she said one thing became clear: “We have a system failure that needs to be addressed.” She pointed to how quickly the emergency requests for data associated with the stalker’s devices and email addresses were returned and said it’s clear that the companies can move fast when they want to. Had they moved as quickly as they did after Kristil was killed, she said, perhaps the outcome would have been different.“They could’ve arrested him weeks before she’s killed, and she could’ve safety planned in a way that could’ve saved her life,” she said.Asked about Ivanoff’s claim that Kristil might be alive if the companies had acted faster, Google and TextNow did not respond, while Verizon said in a statement that it was “highly unlikely” that any of its data would have identified the source of the stalking messages.The statement added that the stalking warrant had not been designated as an emergency by law enforcement.Ivanoff said she is in the beginning stages of reaching out to lawmakers, victims’ rights groups and others in her push for swifter response times to search warrants. But she hopes federal lawmakers enact model legislation that states can adopt. The benefit is clear for law enforcement and victims, Ivanoff said, but defense attorneys should also support the change. She recalled that there was an arrest warrant for Holland, who she said could’ve been jailed while authorities awaited the digital evidence.“Think about the innocent person that’s accused having to wait and incur all of the attendant impacts of the full weight of the state’s system being brought to bear on them, losing their liberty, losing their job, losing connections with family, friends,” she said.Ivanoff’s proposal, which she’s calling Kristil’s Law, “is a fight worth taking on,” she said. “If Kristil could, I think, say anything right now, it would be: ‘Get that done.’”If you or someone you know is facing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence hotline for help at (800) 799-SAFE (7233), or go to www.thehotline.org for more. States often have domestic violence hotlines as well.Tim StellohTim Stelloh is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.Brenda BreslauerBrenda Breslauer is a producer with the NBC News Investigative Unit.
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October 26, 2025
Oct. 26, 2025, 6:00 AM EDTBy Andrew GreifTrailing the Cincinnati Bengals in the final seconds of Week 7 and still nearly 70 yards from the end zone and a potential go-ahead touchdown, the Pittsburgh Steelers were in an unenviable position.That wasn’t to say they were out of options, however.Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers bought time, jogged forward to add momentum and heaved his final pass of the night.It was knocked down incomplete, just out of arm’s reach of a Steelers receiver, but it didn’t diminish the feat of the throw itself, which traveled 69.8 yards, the longest pass attempt since at least 2017, according to NFL tracking data.The danger of such a Rodgers heave should be familiar to Pittsburgh’s next opponent, Green Bay. While playing 18 seasons with the Packers and winning four MVP honors and one Super Bowl title, Rodgers became known for possessing perhaps the league’s strongest arm, one that helped him complete three Hail Mary attempts with the franchise. When he completed another with the New York Jets in 2024, their coach said they were “fortunate that we have the best Hail Mary thrower in the history of this game.”When Rodgers plays Green Bay on Sunday for the first time since forcing his way out of the franchise three seasons ago, the Packers will see a quarterback who is diminished from his former MVP form — yet, from his arm to his ability to spray the ball around the field, remains a viable starting quarterback and has found life after Green Bay.“They’re asking me this week, ‘Is it a revenge game?’” Rodgers told reporters this week. “What have I got to be avenging here? They paid me a ton of money, I grew up there, and spent some of the best years of my life there and have nothing but love for the organization.”Last spring, as Rodgers was cut loose by the Jets and entertained only a few suitors in free agency as he mulled whether to return for an 18th season as a starter, and 21st overall, such a development didn’t appear to be a foregone conclusion.Yet as Rodgers nears his 42nd birthday in December, the oldest active player in the league has helped Pittsburgh to a 4-2 start, and first place in the AFC North.Packers coach Matt LaFleur dismissed the reunion storyline, saying that “we’re playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, who happen to have Aaron Rodgers.” But days later, LaFleur was back discussing Rodgers again.“For such an old man, he’s still moving around pretty good,” LaFleur told reporters.But it will be partly about how well the Packers defend a quarterback who has revived his career amid a season that he has said could be his last. Of the 33 quarterbacks this season with at least 100 attempts, Rodgers leads the league in the percentage of his passes that become touchdowns. In an acknowledgement of Rodgers’ decreasing mobility, Pittsburgh designed its offense around exceptionally quick and short passes, and Rodgers has responded with the highest passer rating on throws in 2.5 seconds or less.He also ranks seventh in completion percentage, ninth in passer rating and has engineered two game-winning drives. Rodgers remains the only quarterback with multiple games of four-plus passing touchdowns.It has not entirely been a Rodgers revival tour. His interception rate is the league’s fourth highest.Wins are not a quarterback statistic, yet a team’s success is still deeply intertwined with a quarterback’s success. When Rodgers started, the Packers had a winning percentage of .647; since leaving Green Bay, his winning percentage stands at .416.Jordan Love of the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay, Wis., on Oct. 12.Michael Reaves / Getty ImagesThe Packers (4-1-1) have had little reason to look back with regret at their decision to acquiesce to Rodgers’ desire to play in New York in 2023. His successor, Jordan Love, led the Packers to playoff berths in each of his first two seasons, while producing none of the off-field headlines that marked the end of Rodgers’ time in Green Bay. And this season, Love has curbed one of his major weaknesses by throwing just two interceptions in six games; at the same point last season, Love had thrown nine.“Obviously would’ve loved to ride off in the sunset after a Super Bowl win [with Green Bay], but that’s not the way the league goes sometimes,” Rodgers told reporters. “I knew the writing was on the wall when Jordan was picked.”“I knew at some point there would be a change, and if I wanted to play, it’d probably have to be elsewhere. So I understand the situation.”What else we’re watching in Week 8Dolphins (1-6) at Falcons (3-3): Tua Tagovailoa is still the starting quarterback in Miami despite a league-high 10 interceptions. The Dolphins have yet to win on the road this season.Jets (0-7) at Bengals (3-4): Aaron Glenn is trying to avoid becoming just the fifth coach in the last 20 seasons to lose their first eight games. Cincinnati has scored at least 27 points in six straight games.Browns (2-5) at Patriots (5-2): Cleveland has lost its last 11 games on the road, the longest active losing streak. With one sack, Myles Garrett will pass Reggie White for the most sacks before turning 30 since sacks started being tracked in 1982.Giants (2-5) at Eagles (5-2): New York is 0-4 on the road this season and hasn’t won in Philadelphia since 2014. Philadelphia’s offense ranks only 14th in average scoring, but thanks to the “tush-push,” it scores a touchdown on an NFL-high 82% of red-zone trips.Bills (4-2) at Panthers (4-3): Buffalo averages a league-best 151 rushing yards, while Carolina ranks third, with a 140.1-yard average.Bears (4-2) at Ravens (1-5): Lamar Jackson, who has participated in practice this week, was ruled out again with a hamstring injury. With a loss, Baltimore would tie for the worst seven-game start in franchise history. If D’Andre Swift gains 100 yards on the ground for a third straight game, it will be the longest streak by a Bears back since Matt Forte in 2013.49ers (5-2) at Texans (2-4): The Texans are the first team in NFL history to lead the league in fewest points allowed per game through Week 7 but still have a losing record. Every Texans loss has come by one score.Buccaneers (5-2) at Saints (1-6): The last time New Orleans started 1-7 was 1999. One bright spot: If Alvin Kamara gets two catches, he’ll join LaDainian Tomlinson and Marshall Faulk as the only players with at least 6,000 career rushing yards plus at least 600 catches.Cowboys (3-3-1) at Broncos (5-2): Dallas has protected quarterback Dak Prescott marvelously, allowing only 1.1 sacks per game, but Denver is the best in the league at getting sacks. More than 13% of Broncos opponents’ plays result in sacks, by far the highest rate in the league.Titans (1-6) at Colts (6-1): Opposites meet. Indianapolis has outscored opponents by 92 points, 28 more than the next best team. The Titans have been outscored by a league-worst 96 points, meanwhile.Packers (4-1-1) at Steelers (4-2): Micah Parsons broke through in Week 7, with three sacks. He is averaging the second-most quarterback pressures in the league, per Pro Football Focus.Commanders (3-4) at Chiefs (4-3): Quarterback Jayden Daniels has already been ruled out with an injury. Patrick Mahomes leads the NFL with 18 touchdowns and has transformed Kansas City into the betting favorite to win the Super Bowl.Andrew GreifAndrew Greif is a sports reporter for NBC News Digital. 
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Nov. 29, 2025, 7:00 AM ESTBy Tyler Kingkade and Ben KamisarDuring a segment on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in August, activist Christopher Rufo astonished the studio audience when he said the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon “was a setup from start to finish.” The crowd hooted. Maher retorted that there were plenty of “smoking guns” showing the late president’s guilt. But Rufo insisted that there were federal agencies that had had illegal backdoor meetings and that there was a judge who was “out to get Nixon.”Maher muttered, “Oh, geez,” to which Rufo replied with a grin and a prediction: “Nixon vindication by 2035.”The Watergate scandal has long been viewed as a defining moment in presidential corruption and accountability, prompting a series of government transparency reforms and influencing generations of journalists. It became a shorthand comparison for political scandal and lent the omnipresent “-gate” suffix to many that followed.But those lessons are now being flipped by some of the most influential right-wing figures, including people known to have President Donald Trump’s ear, who insist that Watergate was actually an underhanded scheme by the “deep state” and the press to take down a popular Republican president.Watergate has often been invoked in comparison to Trump’s scandals, in both his first and current term. Many people — from historians to former Nixon officials — argue that were Watergate to happen in today’s media landscape, with the influence of conservative outlets and in particular Fox News, Nixon most likely would have survived it.“In some ways, the reframing of Watergate seems like an attempt to try and rehabilitate the current president’s image,” said Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning initiatives at the American Historical Association, a nonprofit professional organization. “In a lot of ways, it’s about what’s happened the last few years.”Michael Koncewicz, a historian who has been sounding the alarm on Watergate revisionism and who formerly worked at the Nixon presidential library, said the scandal has always been remembered as one in which “the system worked.” But if these pundits “can make Americans believe that that story is bulls—,” he said, “then they can ensure that another Watergate will never happen again.”Beyond Rufo, the conservative media personalities Tucker Carlson, Michael Knowles and Steve Bannon have pushed this revisionist Watergate narrative in the past year. Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan, promoted and endorsed a Carlson podcast episode that described Watergate as a “scam.” Even actor Bill Murray suggested this year on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Nixon might have been “framed.”Republican-controlled states like Idaho and Louisiana have approved a video for use in public school social studies classes that was produced by the conservative media organization PragerU, in which the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quotes a historian who argues that Watergate was the media’s attempt to reverse an election.Hewitt, who serves on the board of the Nixon Foundation, contends that the media and the “East Coast liberal elite” had it out for Nixon in part because of his “staunch anti-communist” views. PragerU worked over the past two years with many Republican-led states to get its content into public schools, and it recently partnered with the Trump administration on a civics education initiative. After Rufo’s proclamation on HBO, Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, said he is “right about Nixon!” and directed people to watch Hewitt’s video on X.Through a spokesperson, Streit declined an interview request. In response to specific questions, PragerU said people should watch its Watergate content.Rufo also declined an interview request, but said in an email that the Nixon era is crucial to understanding why he believes politics has been in a loop since 1968. “To understand our moment — and to move beyond it — we must understand Nixon and learn from his experience, his successes, and his failures. BLM, Russiagate, gender ideology, left-wing terrorism: all of our current challenges can be understood through the prism,” Rufo said, of Nixon, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest presidents.”Hillsdale College, Hewitt and Idaho and Louisiana’s education agencies did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson and Bannon’s shows.Kenneth Hughes Jr., a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who is considered one of the foremost experts on the audiotapes from Nixon’s White House, said the recordings clearly demonstrate that Nixon was “the ring leader of the abuses of power that we group under the heading of Watergate.” “They do show Nixon deliberately, consciously and illegally weaponizing the government against those he considered political threats,” Hughes said.Nixon has always been a conflicted character in American consciousness. His congressional career defined him as a strident anti-communist, but as president he opened diplomacy with China. Liberals have praised him for signing Title IX and the Environmental Protection Agency into law but criticized his administration for launching a “war on drugs.”After losing the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Nixon famously told reporters that they “won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” only to then become president in 1968 and subsequently win every state except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in his 1972 re-election.The scandal that brought down Nixon, in oversimplified terms, centered around his complicity in attempts to cover up the involvement of members in his administration in a botched break-in to bug the Democratic Party’s headquarters. The fallout from the episode then exposed other illegal activity he authorized to go after political enemies.While the twists and turns were widely covered by multiple national media at the time, the scandal was immortalized by the book and film “All the President’s Men,” based on the work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — relying in part on an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat” — to expose the plot.Nixon resigned in August 1974, once it became clear he’d lost the support of many Republicans in Congress and would likely face impeachment.“If Donald Trump and his advisors and his supporters, in the media and within his administration, can alter the history of Watergate, then they can pretty much change anything, and that’s why the history of Watergate matters so much,” said Koncewicz, associate director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.The revisionism arguments generally concede that the president’s aides and campaign staff were involved in boneheaded and nefarious activities. But they contend Nixon was oblivious to much of it until after it happened. And they say the true scandal was that Nixon’s due process rights were violated by prosecutors who secretly met with judges and by the release of confidential grand jury testimony to Congress.“It sends chills down your spine about how close this is to what they’re trying to do to President Trump right now with this radical judiciary,” Bannon said on his podcast in August.Monica Crowley, a Trump administration official and former Fox News host, said on a New York Post podcast in July that “the full vindication, I think, of President Nixon is coming to pass.” She said Trump passes Nixon’s portrait every day, and she sees the two men as similarly “forging their own path, which inevitably put them in a collision course with the deep state.”Many of these conservative commentators rely on or feature Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon administration lawyer, who’s written for decades about ways he believes the president was wronged in the Watergate investigation.Bannon, who helped run Trump’s first campaign and remains a loyal booster, provided his streaming subscribers with free access this past summer to a new documentary based on Shepard’s work. In September, a historian spotted one of Shepard’s Watergate books displayed prominently at the gift shop of the National Archives, which is currently managed by the former head of the Nixon Foundation.A key piece of Shepard’s argument is that the “smoking gun” tape is misunderstood. The tape is typically interpreted as showing that Nixon approved White House interference in the FBI probe into the DNC break-in, but according to Shepard, it was actually a narrow question as to whether investigators could look into donations the Department of Justice had deemed outside of the Watergate case. In other words, he writes on his website, it “did not remotely prove that Nixon was in on, much less directing, the cover-up from its outset.”Shepard, who is also on the Nixon Foundation’s board, declined an interview request, but said in an email that his focus has always been on ways he believes the Watergate Special Prosecution Force violated the due process rights of the president and his aides.“In short, lawfare (the misuse of criminal law to undercut political opponents) didn’t begin with President Trump; it began with President Nixon,” Shepard said.Jill Wine-Banks, an assistant Watergate special prosecutor, said these arguments are nonsense. Nixon’s team distributed cash as hush money payments, the president is on tape approving it, the grand jury testimony was provided to Congress through a judicial process and there were no secret meetings with a federal judge, she said. And the smoking gun tape includes Nixon giving instructions on how to tell the FBI to avoid questioning certain people that would expose where hush money payments came from.“That’s him directing an action,” she said in an interview. “How much more do you need than that for him to be guilty of the cover-up?”The Nixon Foundation, which gave Trump an Architect of Peace Award last month, has welcomed the newfound interest in dismantling the mainstream narrative around Watergate. On social media, the organization has amplified examples of popular pundits defending Nixon. It recently published a video featuring podcast host Michael Knowles describing him as “the first president taken down by the deep state.”Speaking at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, this month, Knowles said the investigations into Trump during his first term started the process of exonerating Nixon by demonstrating “the lengths to which ‘deep state’ would go to undermine the will of the electorate.” “Was it so crazy that the man whom they dubbed ‘Tricky Dick’ might be the target of their shenanigans?” Knowles said in his speech, later adding, “The forces that sought to destroy him are the forces that threaten us again.”Knowles was unavailable for an interview. Historians, however, argue that the only person who set up Nixon was Nixon himself.Hughes, from the University of Virginia, said Nixon pursued a cover-up to protect himself because he had committed crimes to target political enemies, and it’s what makes his actions most relevant today.“What Nixon hid, Trump is doing much more blatantly,” Hughes said. “He’s weaponizing the government against people who he deems political threats, and that’s just something that America has not allowed, and something that America came together against during Watergate.”Tyler KingkadeTyler Kingkade is a national reporter for NBC News, based in Los Angeles.Ben KamisarBen Kamisar is a national political reporter for NBC News
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