This week, an encore presentation of an interview we first brought you earlier this year. John Dean was the star witness of the Watergate investigation — the counsel to President Richard Nixon who famously flipped and became the prosecution’s star witness in the process that helped take down the president. The Russia scandal is far from over, said Dean, but Trump has advantages that Nixon didn’t.

“There’s social media, there’s the internet; the news cycles are faster. I think Watergate would have occurred at a much more accelerated speed than the 928 days it took to go from the arrest at the Watergate to the conviction of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and [John] Mitchell, et al.,” Dean told Off Message host Isaac Dovere in our first episode of 2018. “There’s more likelihood [Nixon] might have survived if there’d been a Fox News.”

POLITICO's Off Message podcast is hosted by Isaac Dovere and is part of the Panoply network. Zack Stanton is its producer. Theme music by Podington Bear.

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