Wow, W. Mark Felt Really Was a Criminal!

This morning I was watching Fox and Friends and they were interviewing G. Gordon Liddy, the conservative talk show host and Watergate figure. I've always liked the guy for some reason - he's a straight shooter. When he got caught during Watergate he was a man - he fessed up and paid the price. Obviously he was on to comment on W. Mark Felt's admission that he was Deep Throat. Liddy was entertaining as always, but he kept on repeating the fact that Felt had been convicted of a crime. I hadn't heard that one before. Most of the other news reports that I saw were fawning over Felt - the savior of the democracy. So I decided to do a little fact-checking. Using Google, I pulled up the University of Pittsburgh School of Law's website JURIST. Apparently there were other people interested in the subject. And, sure enough, under the Presidential Pardons section of the website we find the following:

"W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller (Reagan, 1981; clemency for authorizing FBI agents to break into Vietnam protestors' offices without warrants)"

Wow. Convicted and pardoned. There's alot more to this story than one man doing what his conscience told him. Liddy said something else that I think is true - that a law enforcement officer (which Felt was) who finds evidence of a crime has an ethical and moral duty to prosecute that crime by presenting such evidence to a grand jury. Felt, instead, went to two Washington Post reporters.

Listen, to be the Number Two guy in the FBI under Hoover you had to be pretty tough. And the liberals during the 70s hated the FBI and everything it stood for. So I find it ironic that those same people would be calling Felt a hero today.