President Donald Trump's administration is moving forward with a plan that could rewrite the history of one of the Republican Party's biggest ever scandals, and a former Watergate prosecutor is warning that its intentions are "extremely dangerous."

According to a report published this past week by The Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is looking into "whether the special prosecutor's office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct." The Office of Professional Responsibility functions as the Justice Department's internal ethics unit, tasked with examining allegations of professional misconduct by department attorneys, and it remains unclear what this review will produce or how the department might act on its findings.

The Watergate scandal began in 1972, when then-President Richard Nixon was caught attempting to spy on the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex ahead of his reelection campaign. The ensuing scandal ultimately led to Nixon's resignation in 1974 and has been widely credited with permanently damaging public trust in government. The storm of scandal that engulfed Nixon has also been credited with spurring Republicans to craft their own alternative media ecosystem, in order to help insulate future GOP leaders from similar consequences. Now, the Trump administration appears to be taking that crusade to its logical extreme by attempting to find proof that the investigation which forced Nixon out of office was, in some way, corrupt.

Attorney Nick Akerman worked on the Watergate investigation from 1973 to 1976 as an Assistant Special Prosecutor with the Watergate Special Prosecution Force under Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski — Cox having been fired by Nixon during the October 1973 "Saturday Night Massacre," with Jaworski then taking charge of the investigation. In a new piece for MS NOW published Saturday, he sounded the alarm about the dangers the plan within the Trump Justice Department poses to the country.

Akerman focused particular attention on Geoff Shepard, whom he described as "something of an evangelist for this bonkers revisionist conspiracy theory" that Nixon got a raw deal on Watergate. Shepard, he noted, presented an extensive slide deck laying out his theory of the case to the DOJ, ultimately claiming that "the deep state took Nixon down."

"The opposite is true. Nixon took himself down and tried to use the deep state to cover up his crimes," Akerman wrote. He added: "In short, the well-documented evidence incriminating Nixon on the central issues surrounding the Watergate break-in was overwhelming, was based on Nixon's own words and involved Nixon trying to use deep-state actors to cover up his crimes."

He concluded: "I served under both Cox and Jaworski. We were constantly vigilant to adhere to all ethical rules governing lawyers and our obligation as prosecutors under Supreme Court law to turnover exculpatory evidence. When there was any close question, we always erred the side of the defendant — something that cannot be said about the current DOJ. For the DOJ to endorse Shepard's conspiracy theory will amount to another flagrant effort by the Trump administration to undermine our established rule of law."