Riley Moore, the Republican congressman for West Virginia's 2nd District, has a new take on the most famous political scandal in American history: Richard Nixon didn't do it.
Speaking on October 1 at the Nixon Foundation's annual Grand Strategy Summit in Washington, Moore said Nixon was "absolutely couped out of office" and that he was "framed" during Watergate, The Hill reported. The remarks were carried on C-SPAN.
"We now know more about the deep state and its power and ability to literally change things at the top," Moore said. He claimed Nixon "knew all of this" but "stayed quiet about it" to protect Americans' faith in their government. "The truth is now out there," he said, "so I think people feel a bit more liberated to talk about Richard Nixon and what an amazing president he was in this country."
The truth has been out there for more than 50 years. Nixon recorded it himself.
The tape that brought Nixon down
On June 17, 1972, burglars were caught inside the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate building.
Six days later, on June 23, Nixon sat in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. Nixon's secret taping system was running. On that recording, Nixon and Haldeman discuss telling the deputy director of the CIA to interfere with the FBI's investigation of the break-in.
That conversation became known as the "smoking gun." It was the President of the United States plotting to use one government agency to shut down another one's criminal investigation — into a break-in that investigators were close to tying to the White House.
Nixon fought to keep the tapes secret. In United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court ordered him to release the tape, and the decision was unanimous. Nixon released it on August 5, 1974. After that, the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment said they would change their votes. Nixon announced his resignation three days later, on August 8.
So the man who "framed" Nixon was Nixon. The evidence was his own voice, on his own recording system, in his own office.
Why he's saying it now
Moore wasn't speaking out of nowhere. According to The Hill, his remarks refer to a Wall Street Journal report that Trump's Justice Department has opened a review into whether the Watergate special prosecutor's office committed misconduct. A former Nixon aide, Geoff Shepard, who has argued for decades that Watergate was a plot, was reportedly invited by a senior Justice Department official to present at the department's headquarters.
That's the real story here. The Justice Department, under Trump, has opened a review of the people who investigated a president who broke the law — and members of Congress like Moore are cheering it on.
Moore made the connection himself. He compared Trump to Nixon, saying Trump "faced this in his first term with the fake Russia collusion hoax and all that."
That's not true either. In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that, as The Hill noted, found significant contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the 2016 election. The report said Russia and other countries took advantage of the Trump transition's inexperience and Trump's "desire to deepen ties with Russia," leaving the transition "open to influence and manipulation."
Rewriting history has a purpose
When a politician says a president who obstructed justice was "framed," he isn't just getting a history question wrong. He's telling voters that the next president caught breaking the law should be treated as a victim too.
The lesson of Watergate was that nobody is above the law — not even the president. Investigators followed the evidence, the courts made Nixon hand it over, and members of his own party said they would vote to impeach him. That's the system working. Moore calls it a coup.
West Virginians already have reasons to ask whose side Moore is on. He led the Republican push to turn DOGE's cuts into law, then held up a jar of brown tap water to ask for clean-water money, and his own committee voted him down. Now he's telling a Nixon Foundation audience that Watergate was a frame job.
What the record shows
On October 1, 2026, Rep. Riley Moore said Richard Nixon was "framed" and "absolutely couped out of office" during Watergate. Nixon's own June 23, 1972 Oval Office recording captured him and his chief of staff discussing having the CIA interfere with the FBI's investigation. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered the tape released, and Nixon resigned within days of handing it over. Moore also called the Russia investigation a "hoax," though the Senate Intelligence Committee found significant contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
