Geoff Shepard

Geoff Shepard came to Washington, DC in 1969 as a White House Fellow, after graduating from Whittier College and Harvard Law School. He then served for five years on the Domestic Council staff at the Nixon White House, becoming associate director in 1972. He also was deputy counsel on President Nixon’s Watergate defense team, where he helped transcribe the White House tapes, ran the Document Room holding seized files of H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Dean, and staffed the President’s counselors on Watergate issues. He transcribed and named the infamous “smoking gun” tape recording whose public release triggered Nixon’s resignation. He was subpoenaed to testify at both Watergate trials and is the only senior member of Nixon’s White House staff to obtain a “clearance letter,” confirming that he was never the subject of an investigated by the special prosecutors.

He has spent much of his adult life researching Watergate files, particularly the internal files of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, where he has uncovered documentation of a series of secret meetings between prosecutors and judges, secret agreements to select favorable trial judges, suppression of evidence helpful to Watergate defendants, and secret meetings between prosecutors and congressional staff in support of Nixon’s impeachment.

Today, Geoff is the foremost authority on behind-the-scenes developments in the unfolding of the Watergate scandal. He has written several books, given dozens of lectures, and authored dozens of essays on different aspects of the Watergate scandal. In 2019, he taught a semester’s adult education course, “Watergate Revisited, an Insider’s View,” at Temple University.