In late December 2017, I began to watch old Watergate movies. I was enjoying the holiday break with my family and finally had a modicum of free time to settle into my favorite blue chair in my basement, looking straight at my seventy-inch television. My back pressed against the small pillow that my oldest daughter, Jordyn, had made for me, in 2012, when she was eleven years old.

I picked up the remote and scanned the movies I could stream to my television and settled on All the President's Men.1 I'd seen the film before, but watching it in December was different, since I'd spent a year and a half witnessing remarkable things while working on the Russian espionage story for CBS News. By the end of 2017, there were eerie parallels between Watergate and the Russia investigation.

All the President's Men tells the story of Washington Post investigative reporters Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) who were instrumental in exposing the Watergate scandal that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon on August 9, 1974. It is a film that might be viewed as a journalism cult classic.

I watched, mesmerized, as the team sat in the gritty newsroom bullpen, sweating in their suits as they pecked away at onion skin and carbon paper on antiquated typewriters. They ran around DC discovering colorful forms of “ratf—ing,” a slang term for political sabotage that began when five men who were CREEPs (working for the Committee to Re-elect the President) broke into the Watergate Hotel, the headquarters of the Democratic Party, and were found trying to bug the place and rifling through files. Gradually, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered the Nixon reelection committee's “dirty tricks” campaign against Democrats, which included wiretapping phones of people who had been critical of Nixon (like journalists), enlisting spies, stuffing ballot boxes, and creating propaganda-like fake campaign literature. The Post reporters were digging deeper into the scandal when Nixon turned over tapes of phone calls he recorded that alluded to his involvement in these tactics.2

It was interesting to view the team's mysterious source “Deep Throat” and the way they protected both him and his identity.

The film was anchored in the reporters’ collective integrity in uncovering and sharing the truth—that there were members of the Nixon administration who were dirty, including Nixon himself. Woodward and Bernstein had an unflinching belief that the administration committed a moral wrong by deceiving the American people for its own selfish reasons and essentially seeking to undermine democracy.

The world would later learn in 2005 that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, the FBI's number two in the early 1970s.³ In 2017, Felt would be the subject of another eponymously named Watergate movie, which I also watched that late December. Part of the movie's plot covered Felt's effort to push back against an administration that he believed was breaking laws and trying to short-circuit the FBI investigation. I had an appetite for the issue. Watergate was a domestic crisis. The Russia investigation is a domestic crisis involving a foreign adversary—a Russia controlled by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.

Many Americans (including government officials) were distracted when Russian-backed hackers weaseled into federal and state databases. Cyberattacks are a new kind of warfare—the type average Americans don't notice until it's too late. After the attack is over you're still left wondering what happened, who invaded the local voter database, or who planted propaganda on Facebook or Twitter for you to follow and to sway you toward a candidate or political camp. In that way, it was personal. The information manipulated you through your personal computer or phone. Perhaps worse, you may sense that foreign entities could have contributed toward stirring up dormant feelings in you to become prejudiced toward blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, or to have hatred for Democrats or Republicans.

The power of the Russian intelligence operation was its covert nature. More than three years after it began, we—as Americans—still don't know the extent of what really hit us. It was a multipronged attack, the most potent aspect of which was its influence campaign. The Russian propaganda machine seeped into the fabric of our democracy by poisoning our free speech. Over and over, US investigators and government officials insisted that the Russian intelligence operation did not alter votes. But the Russian plan may not have been to change actual votes, which would have been harder to do because the election system is dispersed and—to borrow a word from former FBI director James Comey—“clunky.”4 Their bar was likely lower and an easier target to hit. What if you pervert the information American voters hear and read? Doesn't that ultimately change how they vote? Furthermore, what would happen if it was determined that votes were changed? Then what? How would the country solve that?