Heading up the Plumbers was Egil âBudâ Krogh Jr., a deputy assistant to the president. Among his recruits were G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who organized the Watergate break-in while working for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, aka CREEP.
Since Nixon and many senior officials involved in Watergate were lawyers, the scandal severely tarnished the public image of the legal profession. The Watergate scandal resulted in 69 government officials being charged and 48 being found guilty, including:
The New York Times reports that McCord told the Senate Watergate Committee that a Republican group, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) had made cash payoffs to the Watergate burglars. Acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray resigns after admitting that he destroyed documents given to him by John Dean days after the Watergate break-in.
The Watergate scandal intensifies as Nixon announces that White House aides John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman have resigned. White House counsel John Dean is fired.
The White House Plumbers, sometimes simply called the Plumbers, were a secret White House group led by G. Gordon Liddy. They were established July 24, 1971, during the presidency of Richard Nixon.
James Walter McCord Jr. (January 26, 1924 â June 15, 2017) was an American CIA officer, later head of security for President Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. He was involved as an electronics expert in the burglaries which precipitated the Watergate scandal.
On February 7, 1973, the United States Senate voted 77-to-0 to approve 93 S.Res. 60 and establish a select committee to investigate Watergate, with Sam Ervin named chairman the next day.
Proclamation 4311 was a presidential proclamation issued by president of the United States Gerald Ford on September 8, 1974, granting a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon, his predecessor, for any crimes that he might have committed against the United States as president.
On February 21, 1975, Mitchell was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury, and sentenced to 2½ to 8 years in prison, which was later reduced to 1 to 4 years; he actually served 19 months.
Dean pled guilty to obstruction of justice before Watergate trial judge John Sirica on October 19, 1973. He admitted supervising payments of "hush money" to the Watergate burglars, notably E. Howard Hunt, and revealed the existence of Nixon's enemies list.
What bargain did many Americans suspect had been made between presidents Nixon and Ford? c. that Nixon had resigned with the understanding that Ford would pardon him.
April 27, 1994Richard Nixon / Date of burial
Why did President Ford issue the pardon for Nixon? Ford felt he was having to spend to much time dealing with the aftermath of Watergate and he did not have the time to do his job as President. He issued the pardon to end the issue.
On April 6, Dean hired an attorney and began his cooperation with Senate Watergate investigators, while continuing to work as Nixon's Chief White House Counsel and participating in cover-up efforts, not disclosing this obvious conflict to Nixon until some time later.
Magruder was the only direct participant of the scandal to claim that President Nixon had specific prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary, and that Nixon directed Mitchell to proceed with the burglary.
These articles charged Nixon with: 1) obstruction of justice in attempting to impede the investigation of the Watergate break-in, protect those responsible, and conceal the existence of other illegal activities; 2) abuse of power by using the office of the presidency on multiple occasions, dating back to the first year ...
January 30, 1973. Former Nixon aide and FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord, an ex-CIA agent and former security director of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), are convicted for their roles in the break-in at the Watergate complex.
In total, 41 people will receive criminal convictions related to the Watergate scandal.
March 21, 1973. In a White House meeting, White House Counsel John Dean tells Nixon, âWe have a cancerâwithinâclose to the Presidency, thatâs growing.â. He and Nixon discuss how to pay the Watergate bribers as much as $1 million in cash to continue the cover-up.
The Washington Post reports that Dean told Watergate prosecutors that he discussed the cover-up with Nixon at least 35 times. On June 25, Dean testifies before the Senate Select Committee about Nixonâs involvement.
An article in The Washington Post reports that a check for $25,000 earmarked for Nixonâs 1972 re-election campaign was deposited into the bank account of one of the men arrested for the Watergate break-in.
The Watergate Complex is an office-apartment-hotel building in the neighborhood of Foggy Bottom, Washington, DC., overlooking the Potomac River. Hoberman Collection/Corbis.
May 28, 1972. Liddyâs team breaks into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. for the first time, bugging the telephones of staffers. pinterest-pin-it.
James McCord. HIS ROLE: A former CIA officer and FBI agent, McCord was one of the five burglars arrested at the Watergate complex, and the â chief wiretapper â of the operation. During the burglary, McCord, then security director of the Committee to Reelect the President (or CREEP), left a piece of tape on the latch of a stairwell door, ...
H.R. Haldeman. HIS ROLE: The Nixon administration White House chief of staffâ known as the gatekeeperâ to the Oval Office who once called himself "the president's son-of-a-bitch"âbecame a key figure in the Watergate probe as investigators zeroed in on tape-recorded conversations of White House meetings.
HIS ROLE: Serving as White House counsel from 1970 to 1973, Dean helped cover up the Nixon administrationâs involvement in the Watergate break-in and illegal intelligence-gathering. But as the investigation was closing in, he had warned fellow staffers, âThe jig is up. Itâs over,â and reportedly said to Nixon, âWe have a cancer within, close to, the presidency, that is growing.â Nixon fired him shortly thereafter.
In 1974, he published a book about his involvement in Watergate, titled A Piece of TapeâThe Watergate Story: Fact and Fiction.
HIS ROLE: A former CIA operative, Hunt was a member of the so-called âPlumbers,â an informal White House team tasked with preventing and repairing information âleaksâ such as the 1971 release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers. After investigators found his phone number in address books belonging to the Watergate burglars, they connected the dots between the burglary, President Nixon and his re-election campaign.
president. Author: Alice Popovici. On June 17, 1972, five burglars were arrested during a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. According to news reports of the time, the men ...
area and rebranded himself as a conservative talk-show host and military and weapons expert. He also worked as an actor, appearing on shows such as âMiami Vice.â In his 1980 memoir, Will, he talks about conquering his fears by subjecting himself to gruesome experiments in which he eats rat meat and burns his own flesh. He retired from the airwaves in 2012, saying he wanted to spend more time with his grandchildren. He died on March 30, 2021, at age 90.
Watergate clearlyâand perhaps permanentlyâundermined public trust and confidence in government and its leaders. But the scandal also spurred a significant decline in public opinion of lawyers from which the profession has never fully recovered.
After Watergate, schools began to make legal ethics a required class. Bar examinations added an extra section on ethics. And nearly all states started requiring lawyers to attend annual continuing legal education programs focused on ethics and professional conduct.
The Kutak commission recommended that lawyers representing an organization be allowed to disclose confidential information concerning officers or employees who are violating the law.
Dean tried to persuade Ehrlichman and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst that they needed to hire a criminal defense attorney to help them navigate their decision-making.
THE EARLIEST BREAK-IN. Watergate actually was the culmination of a chain of events that began months before the failed break-in at the Democratic Party offices. In March 1971, presidential assistant Charles Colson helped create a $250,000 fund for âintelligence gatheringâ of Democratic Party leaders.
The FBI called Dean the âmaster manipulator of the Watergate cover-up.â. When it came to names and dates, meetings and roles, Dean was the man in the middle. He knew it all. Ehrlichman put Krogh in charge of the Plumbers in 1971.
In a 1998 law review article tracing attitudes toward lawyers, Marc Galanter, now a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that public regard for lawyers was at an all-time high in the 1960s, when lawyers were viewed as fighting for justice and civil rights in real life and in the movies.
The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's continuous attempts to cover up its involvement in the June 17, 1972 break-in of the Democratic National ...
Address book of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, discovered in a room at the Watergate Hotel, June 18, 1972. Within hours of the burglars' arrests, the FBI discovered E. Howard Hunt 's name in Barker and MartĂnez's address books.
Rather than ending with the conviction and sentencing to prison of the five Watergate burglars on January 30, 1973, the investigation into the break-in and the Nixon Administration's involvement grew broader. "Nixon's conversations in late March and all of April 1973 revealed that not only did he know he needed to remove Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean to gain distance from them, but he had to do so in a way that was least likely to incriminate him and his presidency. Nixon created a new conspiracyâto effect a cover-up of the cover-upâwhich began in late March 1973 and became fully formed in May and June 1973, operating until his presidency ended on August 9, 1974." On March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica read the court a letter from Watergate burglar James McCord, who alleged that perjury had been committed in the Watergate trial, and defendants had been pressured to remain silent. In an attempt to make them talk, Sirica gave Hunt and two burglars provisional sentences of up to 40 years.
The resulting Senate Watergate hearings were broadcast "gavel-to-gavel" nationwide by PBS and aroused public interest. Witnesses testified that the president had approved plans to cover up administration involvement in the break-in, and that there was a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office.
On February 7, 1973, the United States Senate voted 77-to-0 to approve 93 S.Res. 60 and establish a select committee to investigate Watergate, with Sam Ervin named chairman the next day. The hearings held by the Senate committee, in which Dean and other former administration officials testified, were broadcast from May 17 to August 7. The three major networks of the time agreed to take turns covering the hearings live, each network thus maintaining coverage of the hearings every third day, starting with ABC on May 17 and ending with NBC on August 7. An estimated 85% of Americans with television sets tuned into at least one portion of the hearings.
Watergate Trial Conversations â Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. The Watergate Files, at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, National Archives. Official and unofficial documents on the Watergate scandal from the Presidential collection of President Nixon's successor, Vice President Gerald R. Ford.
On August 1, a $25,000 (approximately $155,000 in 2019 dollars) cashier's check was found to have been deposited in the US and Mexican bank accounts of one of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker.