On August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon deviated from his usual health-conscious breakfast of wheat germ, cottage cheese and fruit and instead ordered up an unctuous spread of corned beef hash with a poached egg. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep — he had spent the night calling old friends and fine-tuning his farewell speech — he decided to indulge one final time. Then he traded his fork for a pen and signed his last document as president, a one-line note that read, “I hereby resign the office of President of the United States.”

They were practically kids back then – most of them at least – when the Senate Watergate committee was announced, and they wanted in. One, a young Senate elevator operator, closed the door on a senator’s arm and wouldn’t open it until he agreed to pass along her résumé. Another got a job by promising to help a senator clear out a backlog of 10,000 letters. Others landed positions when their former Georgetown law professor Sam Dash was named chief counsel. Few had robust experience.

Ellen L. Weintraub is a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.

The burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex 50 years ago sparked coverups, investigations, constitutional crises, a presidential resignation, deep damage to Americans’ faith in government and a raft of bipartisan legislation aimed at restoring that faith. One of those laws created a small federal agency to “follow the money,” the Federal Election Commission, where I serve.

The break-in at the Watergate complex 50 years ago today led to a sweeping government ethics overhaul that included a push to insulate the Department of Justice (DOJ) from politics.  

In a historical twist, this nearly half-century-old corrective may help frame the DOJ’s fraught decision over whether to criminally charge former President Trump for his effort to overturn the 2020 election results. 

Now that Democrats have failed in their attempt to remove the president from power, it's worth asking why they haven't seriously considered the reverse: removing power from the president.

Jan Ehrlichman remembers the summer of 1973 as if it were yesterday.

Her dad, John Ehrlichman, was knee-deep in the Watergate scandal. He had recently been fired as a top adviser to President Richard Nixon, and was now testifying before the Senate’s special Watergate committee.

Ms. Ehrlichman, then a college student, and her mom would drive her dad to Capitol Hill, drop him off, and go watch the Senate hearings on TV at a friend’s house to avoid the press. Afterward, they’d go pick him up and talk about how it went.

Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the nation’s highest office, making that decision in the face of almost certain impeachment by the House and plummeting public support, as a majority of Americans called for his removal from office. But it happened in stages.

To Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton's new email review by the FBI was "bigger than Watergate."
"No way" says journalist Carl Bernstein, who was part of the team that uncovered the Watergate scandal that ultimately brought down the Nixon presidency.

Carl Bernstein, an investigative journalist who rose to national prominence for his coverage of the Watergate scandal, said Friday that the FBI would not be considering reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton unless newly-discovered evidence contained “a real bombshell.”