A sledgehammer what i think are the judicial and prosecutorial abuses that categorized the watergate coverup trial. I understand people were convicted. But you need to understand lawyers lawyers dont play fair. , they argue two things. They can argue, look that the , person did not do the crime, the person was not guilty. But usually in a political scandal, the argument is, there was not enough proof to find them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Very high standard. It is not that they were blameless. Its not that they were innocent. We say, we would rather let 100 guilty go free than convict one innocent man. Properly, then it cant come in. If you did not share information properly with the defense, those procedural violations can equally invalidate a verdict. I am happy to argue both. So that is kind of what we are going to go through. One word from last week, last week was the allure of the white house tapes. I went through a bunch of them with you. Perhaps too fast. What i find fascinating about this, because i transcribed them. I worked word for word, for hours tracing what they were saying, the points they were trying to make. Trying to understand to get the transcript right. I give you that example of nixon telling John Mitchell to plead the fifth. If it will save the plan. I said that is not what he is saying. He is sending his best friend out to walk the plank. He is making him go in front of a grand jury without claim to executive privilege. He is trying in his own way to say, look, i dont care what you say when you go, but you have to go. Care if they dont he is talking about the others. He means John Mitchell. They can stonewall if it will save it for them. Probably it would have been understood if it had been a very noble speech. That is followed by the paragraph that says i would rather the truth come out worsee it is going to be by leak. It would be better if everybody tells the truth. It is totally misunderstood and mistranscribed to say the opposite. Same thing with his going away speech the morning of his resignation. Calls his staff together, the white house staff, all been on the long march and says goodbye. His family is up there. Timecourse, because at the was amongst those who misunderstood the smoking gun, i thought he made his family come stand there with him. I thought it was terribly cruel. It turns out they demanded to be there with him. They were there with him to the end. He tries to explain to the staff he says, you know, if you your enemies, they win. Everybody says what a crazy thing to say. But this is his quaker upbringing. This is what his mother has taught him. And he really means it. He really means, if you hate your enemies if youre consumed , by hatred, you lose. And you should be able to rise above that. And then thirdly, i dont think i hit this out of the park either, he keeps talking about alger hiss, at the beginning of his career. There are at least 18 references on the tapes to alger hiss. What he means people dont understand what he is saying. He is saying hiss perjured himself under oath. That is why he was in such trouble. The statue had run on being a commie. That wasnt where i nailed him. Where i nailed him was perjury. It shows up on the tapes. Should we go down trying to cover this up . He would say no. Then you have doubled your problems. You have got the problem of the defense and you have got the problem of perjury. Why on earth would you do that . But people arent willing to give dick the benefit of the doubt. They think of it as a mano a mano comeback combat between two gladiators. That is enough for the tape. Lets go and we will talk about special prosecutors. Will go back to our good friend, a very liberal journalist who was on the house impeachment staff, then she went to law school and she wrote a bunch of stuff area this is her comment on the special prosecutors. Prosecutor,ecial have always been a constitutional abomination. With, he straddled the three branches of government. If he had not been in such dire straits, he would never have permitted such an office in the person of archie cox. The press loves special prosecutors. They can generate stories for each other. That something did not happen is not a story. That something does not matter is not a story. That an antidote or an accusation is unfounded is not a story. There is this further commonality of interests. Leaks, anonymous sources, informers, rumormongers appear to offer stories. It produces threats and rewards. Journalists a strange Journalists Exchange a graphic portrayal for a story. There we are. The reporter and the special prosecutor. Not often the genuine prosecutor are in each others pockets. Hard tobeen trying very quote from liberal people. Love the bitter friends of geoff shepard. It is liberals at the time or shortly thereafter who are complaining about how this was handled. The next one gets better. There is this guy, the legal commentator named richard harris, who wrote for the new yorker. He is their legal commentator. In june of 1974, that is after the indictment, before nixons resignation and the coverup trial. This is starting to roll. That we know there is going to be a trial, but it has not occurred. He says the only way to punish corruption in the next and administration was by bringing water great in the next and administration was by bringing watergate criminals to justice. It was also essential that the prosecution the conducted fairly. That has not been done. In fact, many legal processes established by the prosecutors to establish the privacy of the law in this nation appear to have perilously subverted it. In the end history may conclude that those guilty of crimes in the watergate affair were bought brought to justice. Did more lasting damage to the highest purpose of american law than did the crimes themselves. There were two more on this. Harris i like. I am quoting them further. The use of generally discredited and unenforced laws, in order to get someone who was probably or even certainly has broken other laws, cannot be prosecuted for those crimes. The use of grandeur is to protect the innocent investigated into the prosecution rather than accusatory bodies. The use of plea bargaining in which a prosecutor offers a defendant a lesser charge in exchange for either a guilty plea or information about crimes committed by others. The use of partial or total immunity from prosecution in exchange for information. The use of selective prosecution in which one person is tried for a crime although others who are equally guilty of the same crime are ignored. The use of conspiracy charges when evidence of the crime that is believed to have been committed is flimsy. The use of perjury charges for the same purpose. The use of criminal sanctions that can be applied against ordinary citizens but not against government officials. And the unequal application of the law in general. And it goes on. Because we are going to go to the next slide. This is what they have been doing. This is talk about public perceptions. Once a large majority finally became convinced serious wrongdoings had indeed been committed by some of the nations highest officials. Including the president , public demand for cleaning up the wreckage and damage of those who caused it grew. The press demanded that there was an urgent need. To meet it swiftly. The prosecutors, with an astonishing disregard for fairness, fell back on all of the means that could reasonably be justified by the end including using some of the same Legal Practices that had been so employed by the nixon administration. And so roundly condemned by its critics. We are going to get to a slide that says how come we did not , know this before . How come we are hearing it from shepard the first time . This stuff was out and around. Being said but got no coverage. The new yorker is a liberal publication. This is a prestigious guide guy dumping all over the prosecution. But no coverage. No further coverage. I have complained to you for 11 weeks that this judge met privately, secretly with prosecutors and with people with interests adverse to Richard Nixons. I have him in the center of the bullseye. I have six guys around the side. I will talk about three of them so i have more time to go into the specific things. And we are going to start with a guy on the lower right corner. 4 00, clark muellerhoff. Whom you dont know. He was a reporter for the Des Moines Register, graduate of law school a licensed attorney in , the district the whole time. He was a confidant of the judge. He was also when nixon got elected, clark went to him and said, you know what you need a whistleblower on your staff, to warn you if your staff is not doing something the right way. I cant think of a perfect i can think of a perfect candidate. I dont like you but i can keep you out of trouble if you hire me. Viperon hires this guy, a to his breath. He wanted to report directly to nixon, but he ends up reporting to the councils office. He has the title of special counsel because he is a lawyer. And he stays for 10 months and discussed in gust because he did not have enough access to nixon. He says i want to discuss my issues directly with the president. The others would say we discussed it and this is the president s decision. Clark would say how would i know unless i hear it from the president . And maybe the president didnt hear my point of view. So maybe his decision as relayed by you is wrong . That went down really well. Months, he leaves, but he leaves with the credibility of having worked on the Nixon White House staff for the previous 10 months. He heads up the Washington Office of the Des Moines Register. And becomes the dean of the washingtonbased investigative reporters. This is before woodward and bernstein. They were a glint in someones eye. Ut clark was big stuff he has written a whole bunch of books but two of them had to do with watergate. One i have a picture here. Here is a picture of clark and nixon in the oval office. Nixon has got his feet on the desk. This is what blew the tapes. His feet clumped down on the desk. Supposedly he is listening to clark. Clark appears to be lefthanded. I always look for that. I am lefthanded. While was look for people who are lefthanded. These are two books i will quote from the later books. He wrote a book about investigative reporting because he was the expert. The expert rock maker expert muckraker or village scold. Nothing met clarks standard for propriety. The game plan was apparent. The addition of some minor figures with white house connections indicted to give the impression of an investigation. Even those indictments would be part of an obstruction of justice unless they included these three. He was the finance chairman for the reelection committee. He had this interview. As a result of the interview that occurs september 14, the day before the burglary indictments come down this is early on. Because of the interview i knew , Richard Nixon was involved in planning and directing a coverup that was being executed by john dean in the white house. So he is saying in his book the interview was embargoed. He could not print it. He could not tell anybody. But he knew from that interview there was a coverup, nixon is at the heart of it, john dean is running it. Ok . Who can he tell . One of his best friends is judge soroka. He just appointed himself to be trial judge for the breakin trial. He says in his later book that he invited the judge down to have lunch in the white house mess when he was special counsel to nixon. They were close and he had impressed the daylights out of the judge. Clark was an insider in the Nixon White House. He goes to meet with the judge. This is the second book. Ok . Comes out first. I hesitated to write or speak of my conviction that the judge would be trustworthy as a judge. This despite long conversations with him in the fall of 1972 in which we talked about the importance of honest government and i expressed a belief in the eventual triumph of right over wrong. We did not speak of the merits of the case, of course not, says clark. But i was sure that he was lonely and in need of assurance that if he did precisely what he believed to be right, at least one individual were to remember it and to record it in historic perspective. So he is sitting there lobbying the judge in secret. I tell you, i am making this up, but i know what he was doing. Judge you are the only person , that stands between this coverup being successful and the truth coming out. You have got to use the trial is in the pursuit of truth. That is the purpose here. You do that and i will write columns commenting you on what youre doing because i am so influential. Long conversations with him in the fall of 1972. You i dont care how good of a friend you are with a judge. You dont sit down with a judge and tell him how you think he should conduct a trial. You dont do that. This comes out. No one seems to care because sirica was meeting with everybody. So we go back. You saw the slide a moment ago. But you did not see number seven down there at the bottom. Turns out, fired from register for improper conduct, 1977. Remember when we were talking about triggering irs audits . And john dean had 17 people. He is going to go beg them. When that came out, it turned out another thing that was happening was the white house was asking to see irs returns on particular individuals. And it turns out, they were counselsested by the office. It turned out that the individual in the counsels office that wanted to see this tax returns, your tax returns, trumps tax returns was clark mollenhoff. And there was a story about it. It was three years later. Who cares . The president of the Des Moines Register said that is strange. And he did some checking and he found out which returns were requested. And he found out they were returns by people clark did not like. We had written articles about or the des moines Washington Bureau was writing articles about. So what you have is this village ofld, this great hero investigative reporting, when he was in power, immediate abuse. And they fired him for it. They did not make a big public think about it. I uncovered this because the guy , about book and said being head of the Des Moines Register and had this line that said i fired a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. And i only knew of one. I sent him and female. He says one back and said, are you writing a book . I said it is not really about clark but it is interesting. He said this is what i remember, i came and chatted with him. Without authority, to further personal grievance. Just illegal as hell. We go on. Bookis from siricas own and he describes his meeting with earl silver. Earl silver is the prosecutor. First earl has 10 years of prosecutor experience. Soica is approaching 70, earl is young, but he is hardly green behind the ears. He is the Principal Assistant u. S. Attorney. I like earl. I think he is a good lawyer. I wanted to be helpful to share one of my experiences and give him guidance or what was obviously a tough situation. A few days before the trial started this is the burglary , trial. He was in my chambers discussing Something Else. I said earl, you have a great opportunity in this case if you go right down the middle. Let the chips fall where they may. Dont let anybody put pressure on you. Before he left my office, i gave him a bound copy of the hearings conducted back in 1944 by a select committee of the house into the activities of the federal Communications Commission i wanted the young , prosecutor to know just how white washers were engineered. And i wanted him to know that i had direct experience with coverups while serving as chief counsel to that committee. This is the judge telling the prosecutor how to put on the case. It does not say it here. This is the judges version. It is earl, go after the truth. Dont let them confine it to the burglary. Use the trial to figure out who at the white house was involved. That is what i want you to do. That is going right down the middle. There are in the library of , congress under judge sirica, in his files, six earlier versions of the book. There wasnt a ghost writer. He really wrote the book himself. And you can trace the significance. It starts getting reduced as his editors say we dont need to , know that. But this was huge. Because sirica was counsel to this committee. They were going to go to go from public hearings to executive session. Coverup. D that is a if you do that, i will have to leave. He did that and he resigned. He was retained for the committee. He was in private practice. He felt this was one of the most significant things in his life that he wanted the truth to come out at the hearings. And he wants the truth to come out at the burglary trial. What makes the burglary trial so unique they were caught , redhanded. Nobody really cared why they were there. That wasnt the issue at the trial. I read this to you, earls memo to the head of the criminal division, the day they came down with the indictments, we have traced as far as we can trace. We can prove these people. When they are through with the trial, and they are looking at a long prison sentence, we will see if the story changes. For now, we have these guys cold. That is who we are taking to trial. You have sirica saying, no, i have a higher purpose. It corrupts the trial. Now we go to the next set of prosecutors. We start with the second guy. About three key meetings, december 14, february 11 and march 1. The reason we learn about these later is jaworski took his files with him when he left. And he dictated memos. We are going to see the memos. There is that tantalizing woodward interview. I have shown it to you two or three times, where he interviews jaworski after he resigns, and jaworski says there were lots of oneonone meetings with me and another guy and nobody knows about him. We were staffing the House Judiciary Committee and would let them follow up on either one. We did not learn about these secret meetings until they became available to me in 2013. We will start with the this is a first one. Letter. I know you cant read it, but that is ok. This is a letter to judge sirica. In the upper lefthand corner, not quite. Right below the handwriting it happened to be my handwriting phil. Says it is this means phil drafted a letter and his secretary typed it. It is not a jaworski letter. We are not even sure that he signed it. He is in texas. You read the first line. It is just bigger print. I met with you and the judge at your request on december 14. Friday,the four top prosecutors meeting with the judges who were going to do the watergate trials. What is going on . They can say anything they want. This is not a casua