Kaltura Video
An assessment of the Nixon pardon
A 50-year perspective on Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon
Speaker
Barbara McQuade, Jill Wine-Banks, John Dean, Kimberly WehleDate & time
Sep 13, 2024,
4:30 pm EDT
Location
Have a question for our panel? Submit your question at: https://myumi.ch/4rPZ4
After being vilified, and then lionized as a great act of patriotism, in this era of seeming impunity, what is the significance of that unique, historical pardon? University of Michigan law professor and former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks, Nixon White House Counsel John Dean and University of Baltimore Law School professor Kimberly Wehle, will discuss its significance.
Speaker bios:
Barbara L. McQuade, BA ’87, JD ’91, is a professor from practice at Michigan Law School. Her interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, data privacy, and civil rights. From 2010 to 2017, McQuade served as the US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Appointed by President Barack Obama, she was the first woman to serve in her position. Before becoming US attorney, McQuade was an assistant US attorney in Detroit for 12 years, serving as deputy chief of the National Security Unit, where she handled cases involving terrorism financing, export violations, threats, and foreign agents. She began her career practicing law at the firm of Butzel Long in Detroit. She previously taught at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.
Jill Wine-Banks began her law career as the first woman to serve as an organized crime prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. After just over four years in that position, she was hand-picked to be one of the three Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutors in the obstruction of justice trial against President Nixon's top aides, including his Attorney General, Chief of Staff, and Chief Domestic Adviser. President Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator in that case, and evidence from that case lead to Nixon’s resignation. Before that, Jill’s team delivered a briefcase of evidence to the House Judiciary Committee as a road map to impeachment. She was also a major player in the Watergate tapes hearing, famously cross examining Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, about the 18 ½ minute gap in a key White House recording. Once again, she was the only woman on the team.
John Dean served as Counsel to the President of the United States from July 1970 to April 1973. Before becoming White House counsel at age thirty-one, he was the chief minority counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives, an associate director of a law reform commission, and an associate deputy attorney general at the US Department of Justice. Dean held the Barry M. Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State
University (2015-16), and currently is a fellow at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications. John teaches a long-running continuing legal education (CLE) series (almost 200 programs) which examines the impact of the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct on select historic events, and the lasting impact of Watergate on the legal profession – “The Watergate CLE.”
Kimberly Wehle is an expert in constitutional law and the separation of powers, with particular emphasis on presidential power and administrative agencies. She is a tenured law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Administrative law, and Federal Courts. She was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Washington D.C. office and Associate Independent Counsel in the Whitewater Investigation. Her forthcoming book, Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works—and Why, is due out in September of 2.