By Andrew Cohen
Amid growing attacks on the rule of law and studies that show declining public faith in government institutions, a recent Berkeley Law event confronted the perils of public corruption and the need to confront them.
Presented by the school’s Edley Center on Law & Democracy and moderated by Executive Director Catherine E. Lhamon, the event brought together three former federal prosecutors — one from the Watergate era and two from the last several presidencies — along with the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
Public corruption — the abuse of entrusted power by government officials for personal, financial, or political gain — encompasses breaches of trust including bribery, extortion, embezzlement, and nepotism. On a broader level, the panelists discussed how it weakens democracy’s guardrails. You can watch a video of the event.
Henry Hecht was on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, created by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1973. The group conducted an independent investigation after five people enlisted by the White House under President Richard Nixon (self-named The Plumbers, formed in 1971 after Daniel Ellsburg leaked the Pentagon papers to The New York Times) were arrested for breaking into the Watergate Office Building to wiretap phones and photograph confidential documents at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
A Berkeley Law Senior Continuing Lecturer Emeritus, Hecht described how bipartisan support and the strength of governmental institutions fueled the group’s work, which included many examples of public corruption beyond the break-in and revealed various illegal acts — such as a secret taping system in the Oval Office and subsequent cover-up by Nixon’s administration.
Led by Special Prosecutors Archibald Cox and later Leon Jaworski, the group’s findings led to numerous indictments and three Republican senators telling Nixon he would be impeached and removed from office, promoting his decision to resign.
“Our office was independent and didn’t need to go to the Attorney General for permission to investigate anything,” Hecht said, contrasting that with today’s political and media climate. “There wasn’t a 24/7 news cycle then, there was no social media, and CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite was known as the most trusted man in America.”
Hecht cited five reasons for his group’s success: effective checks and balances between the three government branches, the Senate and House forming non-partisan committees to help investigate what happened, courts ruling impartially (including the Supreme Court ordering the release of Nixon’s secret recordings, which revealed his participation in the cover-up), persistent efforts by the news media to learn what happened, and the public response — which included over 400,000 communications to the White House protesting Cox’s firing.
Then and now
Molly Gaston and J.P. Cooney, Edley Center senior fellows and co-founders of the law firm Gaston & Cooney, described their experiences investigating public corruption and Washington’s fast-changing landscape.
Cooney, a top deputy to former Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith in two criminal prosecutions of President Donald Trump, said during the Watergate scandal Congress worked in a bi-partisanship spirit to investigate Nixon and make sure the facts came to light.
“Contrast that today with how the allegations against Donald Trump have divided Republicans and Democrats,” said Cooney, now running for Congress in Virginia. “Also, where the courts moved with alacrity to rule on the subpoena of the White House secret tape recordings, contrast that with the Trump immunity decision. It was months before the Supreme Court ever got to that case.”
Gaston was also a top deputy to Jack Smith and was co-lead trial attorney in United States v. Donald J. Trump, in which a federal grand jury charged Trump with four felonies related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A career federal prosecutor until February 2025, she said the number of federal attorneys focused on public corruption has shrunk from over 30 to two.
“Public corruption impacts local communities as well,” said Gaston, who described working on a case where a fire department official taking kickbacks resulted in area firehouses lacking needed firefighting supplies. “These are the kinds of things that affect people in daily life. They’re no longer going to be handled by federal prosecutors, so it’s up to state and local prosecutors to figure out how to do this.”
At the federal level, she added, “If there’s no public outcry, the political leadership of the DOJ will continue making decisions on a political basis rather than in the interest of justice. Part of the erosion I think we’ve seen since the Watergate era is the public’s awareness of public corruption on a large scale and its ability and will to protest when the government is not doing what it should.”
Taking ownership
CREW President Donald K. Sherman, also an Edley Center senior fellow, called the gutting of federal agencies a sobering threat to American democracy — and extolled the many law students in attendance to do their part.
“‘This is illegal, why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?’ is a question I get often,” Sherman said. “The thing you need to tell them and need to continue to tell yourself as you move throughout your career is that the law does not enforce itself. Someone has to do it.”
CREW sued Trump on his first day in office in 2017, alleging that he accepted payments and benefits from foreign and state governments through his hotels and businesses in violation of the Constitution’s Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses that serve as anti-corruption safeguards. The Supreme Court eventually dismissed the cases in 2021 when Trump left office after his first term, without a final legal ruling on the definition of emoluments.
“A question we continue to ask ourselves on a daily basis, particularly when Congress has abdicated its authority and civil servants are forced out of office, is how do we use the tools available to defend the law and the Constitution?” Sherman said. “If the pillars we’ve known, like Congress or the Justice Department, aren’t going to use them, it’s incumbent upon us to. The law is not going to do it on its own. The law is words on paper. You’ve got to make it real.”
Cooney shared the satisfaction of working as a prosecutor in both Republican and Democratic administrations with federal attorneys and office leaders who saw their role as insulating their team’s work from undue influence of the powerful and wealthy.
“They always saw their job as separating the political from the enforcement of the law,” he said. “We all have a right to have our public officials be free of someone paying them to influence their decision making.”
Urging the audience to be more engaged with society and the news, Sherman said “the benefit of being in the public is that there are a lot of us.” Too often, he lamented, “we’ve gotten to a place where we assume everyone’s corrupt and we’re willing to tolerate a certain level of corruption. That doesn’t mean we like it, but we don’t dislike it enough to do something about it.”
Gaston asked the students to consider fighting corruption head-on and pursue government work: “We hope those of you studying to become lawyers will consider going into civil service. We need the very best to go back and rebuild it.”