Aarongate? Feds invoke Tricky Dick in case vs Schock

WASHINGTON (WLS) -- Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to reinstate contempt of court charges against ex-congressman Aaron Schock, and the government is invoking the name of Richard Nixon in the case against him.

Watergate is 788 miles from Springfield and no one is nicknaming Schock "Tricky Dick," but the name of America's most corrupt president is being invoked in the government's legal stand-off with Illinois' latest defrocked congressman.

Federal prosecutors are reinstating their call for contempt of court charges to be filed against Schock for failing to turn over campaign and congressional records subpoenaed by a grand jury.

The former Peoria congressman has ignored two grand jury subpoenas for records and is fighting a third, according to federal prosecutors.

Authorities say that Schock is taking a page from former president Richard Nixon's playbook more than 40 years ago, when Nixon claimed executive privilege

The especially biting request for immediate contempt charges in court papers filed late Thursday and obtained by the I-Team accuse Schock of "obvious grandstanding and inartful rhetoric." The government claims that Schock is making arguments no different than when President Nixon unsuccessfully tried to claim "an absolute privilege of confidentiality for all Presidential communications" that the Supreme Court rejected four decades ago.

Prosecutors state that Schock's "representations to this Court to the contrary are simply a continuation of his deceptive defiance and callous disregard of this Court's and the Supreme Court's authority that he has displayed for months and from the outset of this litigation."

Read the government's full reply here

Despite proclaiming his innocence, Schock resigned from Congress five months ago in a lightning-fast fall from Republican stardom. The end of Richard Nixon took a couple of years. It was this month in 1974 that Nixon became the first president to resign office.

In the growing case against Schock, federal prosecutors are asking for immediate oral arguments on the question of whether he should be held in contempt of court.