GHWB has played dirty since the beginning of his political career.

From: https://deadline.com/2018/11/george-h-w-bush-dies-41st-president-of-the-united-states-former-cia-head-1202512193/

His political career began in 1963, when he was elected chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. Later that year, just hours after President Kennedy was assassinated, Bush told the FBI that he believed his political rival, James Parrott, might have been involved. That proved to be unfounded, but it wouldn’t be the last time his unfounded allegations would play out during a national crisis.

In 1967 he was elected to Congress.  He ran for the Senate in 1970 at the urging of President Richard Nixon, but lost. Nixon repaid him by appointing him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, an appointment that was confirmed by a unanimous vote of the Senate.

With the Watergate scandal heating up after Nixon’s re-election in 1972, the president asked Bush to return to Washington as chairman of the Republican National Committee to help him manage the ever-growing scandal, in which Bush would play a pivotal role.

On July 24, 1973, the day after the Senate Watergate Committee subpoenaed Nixon to turn over the now-famous White House tapes, Bush held a press conference and accused Carmine Bellino — the Senate Watergate Committee’s chief investigator — of wiretapping Nixon’s hotel suite the night before his second TV debate with JFK back in 1960.  Bellino had been JFK’s chief investigator during the 1960 campaign, but as the Watergate Committee’s chief sleuth, it was his job to track down evidence for all the various crimes of which Nixon and his White House cronies were accused or suspected.

During his press conference, Bush sheepishly acknowledged that the evidence supporting his allegations against Bellino was “incomplete,” but said, “I’d like to see somebody develop it further.”

Senate Republicans demanded that Bellino be taken off the Watergate investigation – which he was – and that he be investigated himself, which he was for the next 2 1/2 months. In the end, the investigation found no evidence to support Bush’s allegation and Bellino was cleared, but many believe that it impeded the Senate’s Watergate probe.

As President Reagan’s VP, Bush claimed to be “out of the loop” during the Iran-contra scandal, in which the U.S. was secretly supplying arms to Iran and using the proceeds secretly to fund right-wing opposition groups in Nicaragua. Despite his claim of having little operational knowledge of the arms deals, his diary entry from that time, as he was preparing to run for the presidency, said: “I’m one of the few people who know fully the details.”