I give this book 5 stars overall - just 3 stars for the writing, which is merely serviceable - but the author acknowledges this, just as he realizes he is the only one who could write this story. And the research is 5 stars all the way. My brief background on this: I am an author who graduated from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in 2017, where the official Washington Post "Watergate canon" was taught with a religious fervor that made me suspicious. I've wondered how the Washington Post went down the gutter since Watergate, but O'Connor argues that it's always been there.Postgate's claims are incendiary, but the author is no mere fringe conspiracy theorist. O'Connor is a former prosecutor colleague of Robert Mueller's and Mark Felt aka "Deep Throat's" lawyer, who has written on the subject in the past. To O'Connor's credit, he writes with lawyerly precision and the book is as concise as possible given Watergate's complexity. Also, importantly, although PostHill Press often publishes conservative authors, O'Connor makes a compelling case that this is not a partisan book. The book's also a Watergate historiography that relies on, and credits heavily, "Secret Agenda" and "Silent Coup" in this explosive revisionist history to the official Washington Post "Watergate canon." The implications have obvious and profoundly important implications for the dire state of the news media and intrigue around the Trump administration, although O'Connor only hints at this possibility, choosing to focus on the Watergate facts. Is 2019 - Russia-gate, Ukraine-gate. <insert scandal here-gate> new Watergate? Perhaps, but maybe not in the way the inane mainstream news media talking heads intend to frame it.What's new about this book, and most damning to Woodward and the Washington Post, to me at least, is how O'Connor wound up going down the rabbit hole of the DNC, CIA, call-girls, suspicious deaths, and the missing key. Two main things drew him in after becoming Mark Felt's lawyer. They were, O'Connor writes, (1) The reaction of Bob Woodward and the Washington Post when O'Connor told Woodward "Deep Throat" wanted to come out, which ranged from hostile to borderline hysterical; and (2) the behavior of the publisher of Felt's memoir, the Washington Post-linked PublicAffairs, which ranged from incompetent-at-best to deviously fraudulent. I'll leave it there. If you're intrigued... read the book!In the meantime, I'd like to hear what Woodward says about this, as a man I admired for a long time. Of course, I admired Charlie Rose too. And I admired the faculty at the Berkeley Journalism School to, before I got to know them and experienced duplicity eerily similar to what O'Connor describes - and wrote about it.