Douglas Caddy

Bush: Worse Than Nixon The writer was on Richard Nixon's "enemies list," but Bush's power grab has him really worried. By Morton H. Halperin MORTON H. HALPERIN served in the administrations of presidents Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. He is a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress and the director of U.S. Advocacy for the Open Society Los Angeles Times July 16, 2006 THE BUSH administration's warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it provoked a case of deja vu. The Nixon administration bugged my home phone — without a warrant — beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council, and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie's presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the White House. Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was, after all, No. 8 on Nixon's "enemies list" — a curious compilation of 20 people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in some way with the administration. The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was part of a plan to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies," as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971 memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words, "a scandal would be helpful here"). As I watch the Bush administration these days, it's hard not to notice the clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon's day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what they learn about those activities. But there also are important differences, and at first blush, it is hard to say which administration's policies are worse. Much of what the Nixon administration did was clearly illegal and in violation of the Constitution. Nixon and his colleagues seemed to understand that and worked hard to keep their activities secret. On the occasions when their actions became public, administration officials tried to blame others for them. These actions were not limited to its warrantless wiretap program and the investigation of political opponents by the IRS and other agencies. They also included, among other things, the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist (to find evidence discrediting Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times) and the effort to have the CIA persuade the FBI to call off the investigation of the Watergate burglary (by asserting that it threatened national security). Although the Nixon administration did argue (like the Bush administration) that virtually anything the president did to promote national security was lawful, it never presented an argument to justify these particular transgressions. By contrast, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not engaged in any such inherently illegal activities. Nor has it, to our knowledge, specifically targeted its political opponents (aside from the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame). But even though Nixon's specific actions might have been more obviously illegal and more "corrupt" (in the sense that they were designed to advance his own career over his rivals), President Bush's claim of nearly limitless power — including the ability to engage in a range of activities that pose a fundamental threat to the constitutional order and to our civil liberties — overshadows all comparisons. Among the many such activities are the seizure of U.S. citizens and their indefinite detention without charge or access to lawyers; warrantless wiretaps of citizens in violation of procedures mandated by Congress; and the seizing of individuals in foreign countries and their movement to third countries, where they have been subjected to torture in violation of U.S. laws and treaty obligations. When these activities have leaked out, the president has not sought to deny them but has publicly defended them (and attacked the press for printing the information). The administration has vigorously opposed all efforts to have the courts review its actions, and when the Supreme Court has overruled the president, as it has several times now, the administration has given the court holdings the narrowest possible interpretation. Congress has been treated with equal disdain. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to prohibit torture and cruel and degrading treatment by all agencies, including the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney warned lawmakers that they were overstepping their bounds and threatening national security. When Congress persisted and attached the language to a defense appropriations bill, the president signed the law with an accompanying statement declaring his right to disobey the anti-torture provisions. The administration has repeatedly failed to inform Congress or its committees of what it was doing, or has told only a few selected members in a truncated way, preventing real oversight. Even leading Republicans, such as Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have voiced strong concerns. During the Nixon years, the laws governing what the president could do and under what circumstances he needed to inform Congress were murky. There were no intelligence committees in Congress, and there was no Intelligence Oversight Act. There was no legislated prohibition on national security surveillance. In response to Watergate and the related scandals of the Nixon years, however, Congress constructed a careful set of prohibitions, guidelines and requirements for congressional reporting. Bush's systematic and defiant violation of these rules, as well as of the mandates of the Constitution and international law, pose a challenge to our constitutional order and civil liberties that, in the end, constitutes a far greater threat than the lawlessness of Richard Nixon.

Do you make John Dean's decisions for him about where to participate or not? (Now that's 64 questions. Ka-ching!) Regardless of whether you answer or not, it's good to know that you and ol' John Wesley are in touch with each other. If you do talk to him, please pass on my regards, and let him know I'm doing a small series in the Watergate forum, growing his legend. Significantly. By all means, I'd love for there to be two Watergate-related attornies here running from me. Do you think you could get Liddy and Hunt to join the game? Hell, I'll type with only one hand if I could get all four of you here, and especially if Alfred Baldwin would come back out from under the porch. Come on, Doug. If you could drag Colson away from the pulpit long enough, bring him along, too! Let's all play Question-and-Evade! I'm ready. Six against one. You can't beat those odds! Oh! While we're on the subject of Hunt and Baldwin, and since Baldwin has lost his voice, and since you apparently are close to him, too: I don't think Hunt came to your apartment at all on the morning of June 17, 1972, but instead followed Baldwin, who was driving the van to McCord's house, then took Baldwin where he needed to be taken after Baldwin had planted the "evidence" there. And I think you know, too. I think you were and are Hunt's alibi for being in knowing collusion with Baldwin on planting the "evidence" at McCord's house, after Hunt had planted his "evidence" in the White House, which is precisely why you're avoiding all my questions about that. Did I ring the bell, Doug? Do I win a kewpie doll? Please see if you can round up all your Watergate pals. Bring 'em on. Ashton Gray UNITED STATES v. GEORGE GORDON LIDDY United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 509 F.2d 428 Before: BAZELON, Chief Judge, WRIGHT, McGOWAN, LEVENTHAL, ROBINSON, MacKINNON, and WILKEY, Circuit Judges, sitting en banc. LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge. Appellant Liddy seeks reversal of his conviction on charges relating to the burglary and wiretapping of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment-office building complex in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Appellant was named in six counts of an eight count indictment returned against seven defendants1 on September 15, 1972. On January 8, 1973, jury selection began before then Chief Judge John J. Sirica of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Shortly after the trial commenced, five defendants changed their pleas to guilty. On January 30, 1973, the remaining defendants, appellant Liddy and James W. McCord, Jr., were found guilty by the jury. Appellant was convicted of conspiracy in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371 (count 1), burglary in violation of 22 D.C. Code § 1801( (counts 2 and 3), and unlawful endeavor to intercept oral and wire communications and interception of communications in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a) (counts 4, 5, and 8). * * * * * * IV. INSTRUCTION REGARDING RETAINING OF COUNSEL On direct examination, attorney Michael Douglas Caddy testified as follows: At approximately 3:40 a.m. Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, Howard Hunt arrived at his apartment and arranged with him to secure counsel for the five men arrested in the Democratic National Committee’s offices an hour and a half earlier. At about 4:45 a.m. Hunt called Liddy and both Hunt and Caddy explained to Liddy the steps that had been taken to retain an attorney for those men. During this conversation, Liddy indicated that he desired to have Caddy represent him in this matter. Appellant assigns as error the trial judge’s instruction that the jury could draw no adverse inferences from the fact that Liddy retained counsel but could consider the time and other surrounding circumstances at which Mr. Liddy retained Mr. Caddy with respect to the state of mind of Mr. Liddy only. Appellant claims that allowing the jury to draw inferences of guilty knowledge from his efforts to obtain counsel imposes a penalty on the exercise of his Sixth Amendment rights.40 Liddy cites the Government’s emphasis in closing argument on the unusual hour at which he retained counsel as evidence of the prejudicial nature of the alleged error. Appellant bases his Sixth Amendment claim on Griffin v. California, 380 U.S. 609 (1965). In that case the Court held that comment on the defendant’s failure to testify was forbidden by the Fifth Amendment, because it was tantamount to a penalty for exercising a constitutional right. Id. at 614-15. A number of courts, including this court, have extended the principle announced in Griffin to prohibit comment on the defendant’s failure to make an exculpatory statement upon arrest. There is disagreement as to whether a defendant’s silence at the time of arrest can be used to impeach his testimony at trial. Compare United States v. Hale, 498 F.2d 1038 (D.C. Cir. 1974); Johnson v. Patterson, 475 F.2d 1066 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 878 (1973) with United States v. Ramirez, 441 F.2d 950 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 869 (1971). This disagreement appears to be grounded primarily on diverse conclusions reached in attempts to harmonize the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v. New York, 401 U.S. 222 (1971), and Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966). There is only scant law on the applicability of the penalty analysis employed in Griffin to the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Some courts have found reversible error in circumstances in which the prosecutor has commented on the defendant’s silence and request for counsel upon arrest. Those cases, though containing language referring generally to the right to counsel, appear to be bottomed on considerations involving the rights of an accused facing police interrogation - a context in which the right to counsel is intimately bound up with the privilege against self-incrimination. They are thus of marginal value in ascertaining the applicability of Griffin to the Sixth Amendment claim raised in the present case. In the present case, the trial judge instructed the jury that no adverse inferences could be drawn from the fact that appellant Liddy exercised his constitutional right to counsel. The trial judge, however, drew a distinction between the fact of hiring counsel and the time and circumstances under which an attorney was retained by the defendant. Although it is the latter action of the trial judge that is contested on this appeal, we may usefully begin our discussion by approval of his instruction prohibiting the drawing of an adverse inference from the mere fact of hiring an attorney, at least when the circumstances are such that admission of evidence of such a request provokes the possibility that it will be taken as self-incriminatory. This prohibition of adverse inference from the fact of hiring an attorney seems to us to be a fair corollary to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Griffin. We should, perhaps, refer to our opinion in Jones v. United States, 111 U.S.App.D.C. 276, 296 F.2d 398 (en banc 1961), cert. denied, 370 U.S. 913 (1962), although it was not cited by parties. Insofar as Jones, which rejects a Sixth Amendment claim, uses the broad principle that the expression of a desire to have a lawyer never impinges on the right to have one, we think it is superseded by the reasoning of Griffin. * * * In view of the peculiarities of the fact situation in Jones, we see no point in speculating on the result that would and should have ensued if it had been decided after Griffin. Certainly, the broadside rejection of the Sixth Amendment contention was not sound. The trial judge erred, however, in limiting the application of the principle of Griffin with a ruling that apparently considered that it is generally proper to take into account the time and circumstances of retaining an attorney, and to draw whatever inferences as seem appropriate. Such a distinction generally raises problems that hobble the right to seek counsel. To the extent that an inference of criminality is operative, it invites probing of the very process of selection of counsel - who, why, when and where - and pressing the defendant to come forward with evidence concerning this process. The mischief of the approach is underlined by its semantic subtleties, which opens the door to maneuver and misunderstanding. It would be a rare case indeed where the prosecutor could not point out that the incriminating feature of the employment of counsel - in the absence of explanation - rests not in the employment as such but in the time and circumstances surrounding that event, and inferences therefrom that reflect adversely on the defendant.45 The Third Circuit recently examined the application of Griffin to a Sixth Amendment contention in United States ex rel Macon v. Yeager, 476 F.2d 613 (3rd Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 855 (1973). In that case the prosecutor in his summation to the jury commented upon the fact that the defendant called an attorney the morning after the alleged crime and argued that this action cast doubt on the defendant’s claim that the shooting was an accident. Id. at 614. Although the defendant neither objected to the comment nor requested an instruction, the court held that there was plain error that required a reversal of the conviction. The court read Griffin as an absolute prohibition against the imposition of any penalty for the exercise of a constitutional right in a criminal law context. Id. at 615-16. We agree with the Third Circuit’s analysis that the admission of a request for counsel raises Sixth Amendment problems under Griffin. We are not called upon in this case to determine whether the Third Circuit was correct in treating Griffin as a bar that is absolute - whether, for example, it would apply where the request for or retainer of counsel was part of the actions constituting the offense, sometimes called the res gestae, so that omission of the request or retainer would distort the underlying account of the witnesses or undercut the likelihood that it would be considered reasonable or natural. In the present case, even if it be assumed that there was error in the admission of evidence, the prosecutor’s summation, or the instruction, or all of these, the error would be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. In Macon, where the Third Circuit found reversible error, the prosecutor’s comment was directed at the credibility of the accused’s story which was a central issue in the case. 476 F.2d at 616. Here, the time at which Liddy retained counsel was but one of a number of factors that linked him to Hunt and the five defendants apprehended a couple of hours earlier. Moreover, the effect of the error was mitigated by the fact that evidence of part of Liddy’s 5:00 a.m. conversation with Caddy was clearly admissible to show Liddy’s involvement in his action of retaining counsel for those arrested during the break-in. His assertion of a right to Sixth Amendment protection against any use of his statements to obtain counsel for himself certainly does not prohibit inquiry into portions of his conversation with Caddy relating to his action in obtaining counsel for others. This evidence of Liddy’s efforts on behalf of the five defendants only a few hours after their arrest was probative of his involvement in their venture. The evidence against the appellant, summarized at the outset of the opinion, was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge there is no reasonable possibility that it contributed to the conviction. * * * Affirmed. -------------------------------------------- This 1998 article by me from the Wall Street Journal puts in perspective the 1974 U.S. Court of Appeals Decision in U.S. v. Liddy: The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page March 24, 1998 WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY? By Douglas Caddy (Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer) The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures. The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years. Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail. On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room. From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights. Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.” In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?” Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with [Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.” Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?” The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney. However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.” Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice. I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham. Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.” Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

UNITED STATES v. GEORGE GORDON LIDDY United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 509 F.2d 428 Before: BAZELON, Chief Judge, WRIGHT, McGOWAN, LEVENTHAL, ROBINSON, MacKINNON, and WILKEY, Circuit Judges, sitting en banc. LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge. Appellant Liddy seeks reversal of his conviction on charges relating to the burglary and wiretapping of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment-office building complex in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Appellant was named in six counts of an eight count indictment returned against seven defendants1 on September 15, 1972. On January 8, 1973, jury selection began before then Chief Judge John J. Sirica of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Shortly after the trial commenced, five defendants changed their pleas to guilty. On January 30, 1973, the remaining defendants, appellant Liddy and James W. McCord, Jr., were found guilty by the jury. Appellant was convicted of conspiracy in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371 (count 1), burglary in violation of 22 D.C. Code § 1801( (counts 2 and 3), and unlawful endeavor to intercept oral and wire communications and interception of communications in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a) (counts 4, 5, and 8). * * * * * * IV. INSTRUCTION REGARDING RETAINING OF COUNSEL On direct examination, attorney Michael Douglas Caddy testified as follows: At approximately 3:40 a.m. Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, Howard Hunt arrived at his apartment and arranged with him to secure counsel for the five men arrested in the Democratic National Committee’s offices an hour and a half earlier. At about 4:45 a.m. Hunt called Liddy and both Hunt and Caddy explained to Liddy the steps that had been taken to retain an attorney for those men. During this conversation, Liddy indicated that he desired to have Caddy represent him in this matter. Appellant assigns as error the trial judge’s instruction that the jury could draw no adverse inferences from the fact that Liddy retained counsel but could consider the time and other surrounding circumstances at which Mr. Liddy retained Mr. Caddy with respect to the state of mind of Mr. Liddy only. Appellant claims that allowing the jury to draw inferences of guilty knowledge from his efforts to obtain counsel imposes a penalty on the exercise of his Sixth Amendment rights.40 Liddy cites the Government’s emphasis in closing argument on the unusual hour at which he retained counsel as evidence of the prejudicial nature of the alleged error. Appellant bases his Sixth Amendment claim on Griffin v. California, 380 U.S. 609 (1965). In that case the Court held that comment on the defendant’s failure to testify was forbidden by the Fifth Amendment, because it was tantamount to a penalty for exercising a constitutional right. Id. at 614-15. A number of courts, including this court, have extended the principle announced in Griffin to prohibit comment on the defendant’s failure to make an exculpatory statement upon arrest. There is disagreement as to whether a defendant’s silence at the time of arrest can be used to impeach his testimony at trial. Compare United States v. Hale, 498 F.2d 1038 (D.C. Cir. 1974); Johnson v. Patterson, 475 F.2d 1066 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 878 (1973) with United States v. Ramirez, 441 F.2d 950 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 869 (1971). This disagreement appears to be grounded primarily on diverse conclusions reached in attempts to harmonize the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v. New York, 401 U.S. 222 (1971), and Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966). There is only scant law on the applicability of the penalty analysis employed in Griffin to the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Some courts have found reversible error in circumstances in which the prosecutor has commented on the defendant’s silence and request for counsel upon arrest. Those cases, though containing language referring generally to the right to counsel, appear to be bottomed on considerations involving the rights of an accused facing police interrogation - a context in which the right to counsel is intimately bound up with the privilege against self-incrimination. They are thus of marginal value in ascertaining the applicability of Griffin to the Sixth Amendment claim raised in the present case. In the present case, the trial judge instructed the jury that no adverse inferences could be drawn from the fact that appellant Liddy exercised his constitutional right to counsel. The trial judge, however, drew a distinction between the fact of hiring counsel and the time and circumstances under which an attorney was retained by the defendant. Although it is the latter action of the trial judge that is contested on this appeal, we may usefully begin our discussion by approval of his instruction prohibiting the drawing of an adverse inference from the mere fact of hiring an attorney, at least when the circumstances are such that admission of evidence of such a request provokes the possibility that it will be taken as self-incriminatory. This prohibition of adverse inference from the fact of hiring an attorney seems to us to be a fair corollary to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Griffin. We should, perhaps, refer to our opinion in Jones v. United States, 111 U.S.App.D.C. 276, 296 F.2d 398 (en banc 1961), cert. denied, 370 U.S. 913 (1962), although it was not cited by parties. Insofar as Jones, which rejects a Sixth Amendment claim, uses the broad principle that the expression of a desire to have a lawyer never impinges on the right to have one, we think it is superseded by the reasoning of Griffin. * * * In view of the peculiarities of the fact situation in Jones, we see no point in speculating on the result that would and should have ensued if it had been decided after Griffin. Certainly, the broadside rejection of the Sixth Amendment contention was not sound. The trial judge erred, however, in limiting the application of the principle of Griffin with a ruling that apparently considered that it is generally proper to take into account the time and circumstances of retaining an attorney, and to draw whatever inferences as seem appropriate. Such a distinction generally raises problems that hobble the right to seek counsel. To the extent that an inference of criminality is operative, it invites probing of the very process of selection of counsel - who, why, when and where - and pressing the defendant to come forward with evidence concerning this process. The mischief of the approach is underlined by its semantic subtleties, which opens the door to maneuver and misunderstanding. It would be a rare case indeed where the prosecutor could not point out that the incriminating feature of the employment of counsel - in the absence of explanation - rests not in the employment as such but in the time and circumstances surrounding that event, and inferences therefrom that reflect adversely on the defendant.45 The Third Circuit recently examined the application of Griffin to a Sixth Amendment contention in United States ex rel Macon v. Yeager, 476 F.2d 613 (3rd Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 855 (1973). In that case the prosecutor in his summation to the jury commented upon the fact that the defendant called an attorney the morning after the alleged crime and argued that this action cast doubt on the defendant’s claim that the shooting was an accident. Id. at 614. Although the defendant neither objected to the comment nor requested an instruction, the court held that there was plain error that required a reversal of the conviction. The court read Griffin as an absolute prohibition against the imposition of any penalty for the exercise of a constitutional right in a criminal law context. Id. at 615-16. We agree with the Third Circuit’s analysis that the admission of a request for counsel raises Sixth Amendment problems under Griffin. We are not called upon in this case to determine whether the Third Circuit was correct in treating Griffin as a bar that is absolute - whether, for example, it would apply where the request for or retainer of counsel was part of the actions constituting the offense, sometimes called the res gestae, so that omission of the request or retainer would distort the underlying account of the witnesses or undercut the likelihood that it would be considered reasonable or natural. In the present case, even if it be assumed that there was error in the admission of evidence, the prosecutor’s summation, or the instruction, or all of these, the error would be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. In Macon, where the Third Circuit found reversible error, the prosecutor’s comment was directed at the credibility of the accused’s story which was a central issue in the case. 476 F.2d at 616. Here, the time at which Liddy retained counsel was but one of a number of factors that linked him to Hunt and the five defendants apprehended a couple of hours earlier. Moreover, the effect of the error was mitigated by the fact that evidence of part of Liddy’s 5:00 a.m. conversation with Caddy was clearly admissible to show Liddy’s involvement in his action of retaining counsel for those arrested during the break-in. His assertion of a right to Sixth Amendment protection against any use of his statements to obtain counsel for himself certainly does not prohibit inquiry into portions of his conversation with Caddy relating to his action in obtaining counsel for others. This evidence of Liddy’s efforts on behalf of the five defendants only a few hours after their arrest was probative of his involvement in their venture. The evidence against the appellant, summarized at the outset of the opinion, was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge there is no reasonable possibility that it contributed to the conviction. * * * Affirmed. ---------------------------------------- This 1998 article by me from The Wall Street Journal puts in perspective the 1974 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals decision in U.S. v. Liddy. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page March 24, 1998 WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY? By Douglas Caddy (Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer) The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures. The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years. Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail. On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room. From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights. Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.” In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?” Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with [Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.” Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?” The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney. However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.” Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice. I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham. Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.” Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

The second I read of his death, my first thought was "how convenient." My second thought was "did he fake his death? I wonder if they'll show his body on TV like Zarqawi's?" My third thought was "maybe he was murdered." The next couple days should be interesting. Detroit News July 13, 2006 by Marney Rich Keenan Conspiracy theories surround Ken Lay's untimely death I 'll be the first to admit, I'm a sucker for conspiracy theories, my mistrust dating as far back as the discrepancy between John F. Kennedy's head flying backward when Lee Harvey Oswald's fatal shot was fired from behind the president. So, it was entirely in character for me, upon hearing of Kenneth Lay's death, to immediately surmise that his sudden exit was an arranged Kevorkian-like suicide, a simple injection that triggered a "massive heart attack." After all, his convenient timing (Lay's sentencing for his role in the corporate fraud was scheduled for Sept. 11.), coupled with his disregard for all those retirees' lost life savings and broken dreams, makes it difficult, as Tom Zeller Jr. wrote in the New York Times, "to expect that ordinary Americans would trust much of anything involving Mr. Lay unless they could poke it with a stick." Think about it: A coroner could be bought. It was reported that Lay had requested cremation. The site -- a small, rented house in the idyllic mountain resort town of Aspen where friends remained loyal -- was aptly chosen over the family home in Houston where he'd become quite a spectacle of derision. And, too, Lay was no dummy. He had a Ph.D. in economics and orchestrated the rise of the seventh largest company in the nation. After such a steep fall from grace and likely facing the rest of his life behind bars, why wouldn't he consider his life already over? And so it has been with some delight (albeit morbid) that I took a spin in the blog-o-sphere. Not surprisingly, the perverse shenanigans are up and running full steam ahead, like www.kenlaylives.com, a domain where "reports of Ken Lay sightings worldwide continue to roll in." You can also order Ken Lay Lives T-shirts for $14.95 each. (Or not.) I also found other conspiracy theorists, some who seriously questioned whether Lay even died at all. Posted on the blog Metafilter are the comments: "Death schmeath, he's sippin' martinis on a private jet to his off-shore tax shelter/vacation home on a remote island shaped like an E." "I want to see a (expletive) body. I want an autopsy. I wasn't involved at all in Enron and still I want to see these things -- I can't imagine what they would want." "I'm sure the investors he defrauded and the workers whose lives he ruined would love to die in a vacation home." Just when I thought I'd seen it all, I came across the Houston Chronicle's report of the memorial service last Sunday in which Lay's hometown pastor, the Rev. Bill Lawson, eulogized the former Enron CEO. Lawson compared Lay to Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus Christ, saying that often those who are vilified in life become heroes in death. (I'm not making this up.) I don't know about you, but the conspiracy theories seem a little closer to the truth. Marney Rich Keenan's column runs in The Detroit News Features section on Thursdays and in Homestyle on Saturdays.

Ashton Gray, a/k/a the Great Fake/the Great Flake, seems to be avoiding meeting you. One can only wonder why. If such a meeting does take place, which is very unlikely as it would blow Ashton Gray's false cover, you might ask him why he poses unprofessional questions in the Forum that are based on false premises and are designed to mislead the reader. You might also ask him if he is actually Huntley Troth. See below: Forum members and readers of this thread are invited to contrast what Ashton Gray has written about the first break-in at Watergate and the document below from Wikipedia. The dates of Huntley Troth writing on this topic in Wikipedia and those of Ashton Gray in our Watergate Forum appear to be suspiciously aligned. Huntley Troth even makes note in Wikipedia of the virus that appeared in the Spartacus Forum on virtually the same day of its appearance. In Wikipedia an alert observer who apparently can spot a phony writes about Huntley Troth: “What I forgot to mention: The already dubiously looking name given by the original author is nothing but an unimaginative anagram of "Only the Truth". I leave it to others to check out how reliable Wikipedia contributions are whose authors claim that they possess the truth.” In the Watergate forum reference has been made that Ashton Gray is the name of Canadian porn star. I leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions of whether Ashton Gray may actually be Huntley Troth or whether both of these are made-up names for someone who actually may be an undisclosed third party. Or whatever or however the bizarre case may be. In any event the credibility of Ashton Gray and Huntley Troth is being questioned in the Watergate Forum and in Wikipedia. From Wikipedia:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...s/Huntley_Troth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Watergate_first_break-in

Pat -- It looks as though Ashton Gray is going to be a no show. So it turns out that not only is he a Great Fake but also a Great Flake.

Dawn: Thank you for asking these questions that are framed in a professional manner. I am pleased to answer them to the best of my ability. (1) Taken as a whole, I think that much of the truth about Watergate was aired during the Watergate Committee hearings. However, two subjects that should have been covered but were omitted were (i) the alterations of my grand jury testimony and the sworn testimony of Alfred Baldwin by the original prosecutors; and (ii) Robert "Butch" Merritt's allegations about how the FBI and the Washington, D.C. police department recruited him as an informant on the activities of the New Left and the gay community and of me as an attorney in Watergate. The lengthy article about Merritt published in the Advocate in 1977 reproduced a photograph of a signed receipt of money given to Merritt by the Washington, D.C. police to cover costs of his role as an informant. So the story he told was not something that he made up out of thin air. (2) All I can say about the death of Dorothy Hunt in the plane crash in 1972 is that the circumstances of the crash remain highly suspicious. (3) I do not believe that we have a free press in the U.S. today. Operation Mockingbird may not be in place at the present time but instead the mass media is controlled by a small number of corporations. These corporations bend when the government asks them to do in curtailing the dissemination of news. The most encouraging develop in the last year has been the rise of the bloggers, who are like bloodhounds on the scent of government corruption and controlled news. The biggest challenge facing the successors of Operation Mockingbird is how to control the Internet (which they are now trying to do through proposed legislation) and rein in the bloggers. (4) Bob Woodward is known to have had close ties to the Pentagon even before Watergate. His role in trying to downplay the Plame investigation has led to allegations that he engaged in some sort of coverup. Woodward today gives the appearance of someone heavily influenced by government authorities. Contrast him with Seymour Hersh and the difference between a controlled newsman and a free one becomes quite evident. Thank you very much Mr. Caddy. I think I have another question or two for you, and some thoughts on what you posted, but have to get out the door for a trial. (Fortunately for me it will be short: a parole revocation hearing with a mentally ill inmate. ) Sometime perhaps we can discuss the legal bus...off this forum... I know that you and Barr are close as are Barr and I. (email daily, of late, re Nathan Darby's death, and the work he is doing now, about which I will PM you, later.) Dawn Thank you again Doug. As you know from my prior questions to you my interest is in the JFk assassination. Not to say I am not deply interested in Watergate, but I want to go back to 11/22/63. I believe I may have already asked you this, so forgive me if I did, but 1. How did Billie sol Estes come to pick you to rep. him? (Or at least to write to AG Trott). 2. (If you know) how did Trott become the person to whom you wrote? I ask this because as soon as HSCA ended and it got turned over to the Justice Dept. I began calling and called every year on 11/22 . The name of the AG in charge - or so I was told- was Cubbage. I spoke with him several years in a row. Not that I ever thought under Reagan there was a prayer that Justice WOULD follow-up, I called none the less. Got nowhere. 3.Do you have an opinion on who killed JFk? 4. Do you have an opinion as to why he was killed? 5. I am curious as to what lead you here. The why of it? (I got here by goglging a name of one of my favorite researchers (also probably the nicest): -Atty Vince Salandria in 10/04- and life has not ever been the same:)) Again, with much appreciation. I also have some comment re your answers above but want to just check in here, then have a ton of legal work to get done....Do you ever miss practicing law? I doubt I will ever retire as I love it still, after now 21 years. Dawn ps Your answer re the Mac Wallace press conference is the same as Barr's. It's J who had it wrong then. J -God rest his soul- thought/told me- there was to be a joint press conf in DC with you and Barr. Guess Barr did not get around to asking you til later. Sounds like Barr! I am mailing him a picture packet today, of different times we were all here in Austin. The town where Mac Wallace's first murder was fixed. JFK's next stop if Dallas did not "work out". Dawn: In answer to your questions:: (1) As I have recounted previously, Billie Sol was in federal prison in Big Spring, Texas. He telephoned Shearn Moody, Jr., one of the three trustees of the billion-dollar Moody Foundation of Galveston, Texas, upon the advice of one of the inmates, a former Austin, Texas lobbyist for Moody who had committed a federal crime after he moved to Washington that was unrelated to any work that he had done for Moody. Billie Sol asked Moody for a Moody Foundation grant in order to tell what he knew about LBJ. Moody, who was a history buff, was enthusiastic and asked me to go the prison where Billie Sol was incarcerated and talk to him. I advised Billie Sol that the best way to get his story out was by writing a book. Billie Sol upon his release from prison in December 1983 again contacted Moody and said that he wanted to write the book and needed a Moody Foundation grant to do it. I visited Billie Sol in Abilene, Texas and we went together to see the president of Abilene Christian University, a Church of Christ institution. Billie Sol was a life-long member of that church. The university president was receptive to the idea of a Moody Foundation grant to assist Billie Sol to tell his story as the university had previously received grants from the Foundation. It was both Shearn Moody’s and Billie Sol’s decision that I represent him in getting his proposed book published. Billie Sol’s first needed to get both federal and state immunity before he could tell his story. (2) Edward Miller, a former Assistant Director of the FBI, was already working with me on another Moody Foundation grant. Miller and Mark Felt had both convicted and then pardoned by President Reagan for engaging in “black bag” jobs against the New Left in the early 1970's. Miller knew Stephen Trott, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, in the U.S. Dept. Of Justice, who had arranged for the presidential pardon. This led to my writing Trott and visiting him several times in the U.S. Dept. of Justice, accompanied by Miller in order to obtain immunity for Billie Sol so that he could tell his story. (3) My personal opinion as to who killed JFK counts for nothing. If one is to believe Billie Sol, Mac Wallace was instrumental in doing it upon the orders of LBJ. (4) Who stood the most to gain by JFK’s murder? LBJ. The historical record shows that LBJ was facing a potential criminal investigation and indictment for his involvement with Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker in their respective scandals in the months leading up to the assassination. Had JFK not been killed, LBJ’s political career at the minimum would have come to an abrupt halt. (5) As to why I joined the Forum, I would state that occasionally I google my name to see what new has been posted about me. Earlier this year I saw that John Simkin had started a thread about me, apparently as a result of the article about me that was published in the Advocate in August 2005. He noted that my name surfaced in both Watergate and the JFK assassination. I was hesitant to join at first because John’s biography of me and comments were somewhat negative. But after I saw that Alfred Baldwin had joined the forum, I decided to do so also. Until recently I thought that I might attempt to contact John Dean to see if he were interested in joining the Forum. However, in light of the destructive postings of Ashton Gray, I have decided that encouraging Dean or anyone else who has a direct knowledge to join the Forum is not a viable option. You are correct in the general assertion that grand jury testimony is secret. However, there is a recognized exception to this legal rule that permits any witness who has appeared before the grand jury to disclose publicly what transpired during that witness's appearance, including testimony and queries posed by the prosecutor and jury members. This is applicable even if the witness is a defendant, although in most cases a defendant decides not to speak out. I talked to Billie Sol within a few days following his grand jury appearance in March 1984 in Robertson County, Texas. He had received transactional immunity from the prosecutor before testifying. The grand jury appearance had been arranged with Billie Sol's consent by U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples. It was my impression in talking to Billie Sol afterwards that he wanted his testimony before the grand jury to be made public and had so authorized public discussion by the prosecutor, U.S. Marshal Peoples, and his own attorney. There were a number of press reports at the time, so it would be impossible now to state which exact source of information about Billie Sol's testimony was used by the writer of a particular press report. Billie Sol desired to set the record straight publicly about murders commissioned by LBJ and wisely employed the grand jury system to accomplish this end. Doug: Thanx for the reminder here. We discussed the highly suspicious death of the great US Marshall- (and former TX Ranger)- Clint Peoples privately, some time ago, for which I remain most appreciative. 1. What do you think of the print evidence? (Mac Wallace known prints from murder conviction of Kinsner, to latent print on 6th floor, matched by Nathan Darby and others (one wishing to remain private, and one by an expert in France). 2. Do you have a personal opinion as to why Billie sol was not killed? (Especially given that the brave men who investigated Billie sol's evidence/testimony to Grand Jury : Henry Marshall, and Clint Peoples were, in my opinion, murdered. Again I appreciate your reply. Dawn In response to your questions, (1) I have full faith in Nathan Darby’s expert analysis of Mac Wallace’s fingerprint that was left on a box on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. (2) In light of the murders of so many persons directly involved in the Billie Sol Estes –LBJ relationship, I am surprised that Billie Sol’s name has not been added to the list of those who are no longer with us. I have no personal opinion why this is the way it has turned out.

Authors on Discovery Channel, July 17th at 1pm... on a documentary about the book called "Conspiracy Files: JFK Assassination," produced by NBC. Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann are featured, along with the first televised interview with ex-Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden. http://ultimatesacrificethebook.com/node/16 Many new files cited in the book are online at maryferrell.org, on a page devoted to "Ultimate Sacrifice," http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/...imate_Sacrifice The web page also contains exclusive video clips of Lamar Waldron talking about the new revelations in the book. Mary Ferrell was one of the leading researchers in the field and the Foundation continuing her legacy contains a wealth of information, including a huge number of declassified files you can view online.

Some members have complained that they see this as a threat to Ashton. As I have met you I know that this is not the case. However, I can understand why they have interpreted it in that way. I think it would be a good idea to delete this comment. I would hate people to think that this is part of a strategy to drive Ashton from the Forum. After all, he has given you and Ray an intellectual beating. When Pat posted his invitation I began wondering how Ashton Gray could escape from having his fake cover blown. Now we know: John, our moderator, rushes to the rescue. It is amazing the lengths that Gray and John will go to make sure that Gray is not exposed for what he is. Why doesn’t Gray accept Pat’s invitation? Could it be that he would be shown for what he is? I guess that I shall have to take Maj. Ed Dames’ course on remote viewing to ascertain Gray’s real identity. I always listen to Dames when he is interviewed on the radio show www.coasttocoastam.com. Of course, in the age of the Internet there are other ways to trace and find a person’s true identity merely through the posting that the person has made. Law enforcement and private detectives do this all the time. So sooner or later forum members will learn the truth about Mr. X, a/k/a Ashton Gray, and exactly who is pulling his strings, John’s coverup for Gray notwithstanding. In the interim maybe the forum should sponsor a contest on who Gray really is. Could he be operating at the behest of the CIA in a disinformation program? Is he someone who is bitter for having been kicked out of the Church of Scientology for having heretical views? The possibilities are endless, based on the ravings that Gray has made in the Forum.

I have been contacted by several members of the forum who are working on manuscripts on specialized topics covered in the forum that they would like to have published in book form. I personally have been impressed, or should I say overwhelmed, by the depth of research and knowledge displayed by forum members in their postings. For this reason, as the author of five published books, I thought it might be helpful if I were to describe for all forum members on how you can get your manuscript published by a recognized publishing house. Actually, there already exists a book that provides you with everything you need to know. I cannot praise it highly enough. Its title is the “2006 Guide to Literary Agents.” It tells you everything you need to know – from A to Z - in getting your manuscript published. Selling your writing and getting a good contract often require help beyond your persistence and diligent work – you need an agent. But know how to find an appropriate person that you can trust to represent your work is the key. The 2006 Guide to Literary Agents is your essential roadmap to finding that agent – without fear of being scammed – and making a lucrative deal for your work. Each listing has been verified and updated, putting the most current information at your fingertips. Inside the 2006 Guide to Literary Agents you’ll find: 1) Comprehensive contact information for more than 600 literary and script agents – more than any other source – who adhere to the ethical guidelines established by the Association of Authors’ Representatives and the Writers Guild of America. 2) Detailed contact information for publicists, production companies, script contests and writers’ conferences. 3) Over 60 pages of exclusive articles and interviews with top agents. Nowhere else is this completely updated and reliable information available in one place. The 2006 Guide to Literary Agents will advise you on how to write a query letter and make the perfect pitch. It even covers the subject of what your contract with your publisher should contain to protect your rights. The 2006 Guide to Literary Agents is published by Writers Digest Books, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Its price is US $24.99, UK 15.99 pounds, Canada $34.99. Below are three links. The first takes you to the Writers Digest Book Club. The second takes you to the page in the Book Club’s web site that contains information on ordering the 2006 Guide to Literary Agents. The third takes you to writersmarket.com that provides you information updated almost daily on developments in the publishing field, including new agents and editors. I cannot stress enough that the 2006 Guide to Literary Agents, with its 362 pages, is indispensable in advising you how to get your book published. http://www.writersdigest.com/ http://www.writersdigest.com/store/booksea...#39;s+Reference http://writersmarket.com/index_ns.asp

Dawn: Thank you for asking these questions that are framed in a professional manner. I am pleased to answer them to the best of my ability. (1) Taken as a whole, I think that much of the truth about Watergate was aired during the Watergate Committee hearings. However, two subjects that should have been covered but were omitted were (i) the alterations of my grand jury testimony and the sworn testimony of Alfred Baldwin by the original prosecutors; and (ii) Robert "Butch" Merritt's allegations about how the FBI and the Washington, D.C. police department recruited him as an informant on the activities of the New Left and the gay community and of me as an attorney in Watergate. The lengthy article about Merritt published in the Advocate in 1977 reproduced a photograph of a signed receipt of money given to Merritt by the Washington, D.C. police to cover costs of his role as an informant. So the story he told was not something that he made up out of thin air. (2) All I can say about the death of Dorothy Hunt in the plane crash in 1972 is that the circumstances of the crash remain highly suspicious. (3) I do not believe that we have a free press in the U.S. today. Operation Mockingbird may not be in place at the present time but instead the mass media is controlled by a small number of corporations. These corporations bend when the government asks them to do in curtailing the dissemination of news. The most encouraging develop in the last year has been the rise of the bloggers, who are like bloodhounds on the scent of government corruption and controlled news. The biggest challenge facing the successors of Operation Mockingbird is how to control the Internet (which they are now trying to do through proposed legislation) and rein in the bloggers. (4) Bob Woodward is known to have had close ties to the Pentagon even before Watergate. His role in trying to downplay the Plame investigation has led to allegations that he engaged in some sort of coverup. Woodward today gives the appearance of someone heavily influenced by government authorities. Contrast him with Seymour Hersh and the difference between a controlled newsman and a free one becomes quite evident.

I appreciate your above comments. Until the arrival of Ashton Gray and the ensuing chaos in the Forum, I had attempted to answer all questions posed to me about Watergate and the Kennedy assassination to the best of my ability. Apparently Mr. Gray, with the tacit encouragement of our moderator, has seen fit the change the character of the questions posed so that they are initially framed on false premises. I have neither the time nor energy nor inclination to answer such questions, which any objective observer would readily see are unprofessional and designed to mislead the reader. I shall continue to answer questions posed by other Forum members to the best of my ability when such questions reflect an honest intention to elicit any information that I may possess about these two historical events. In case you missed the recent posting I made in the Watergate topic under the thread dealing with Ashton Gray's violations of the Board's Guidelines, I am reproducing this below. My posting reflects another reason why the questions posed by Mr. Gray are not deserved of my answers: Forum members and readers of this thread are invited to contrast what Ashton Gray has written about the first break-in at Watergate and the documents below from Wikipedia. The dates of Huntley Troth writing on this topic in Wikipedia and those of Ashton Gray in our Watergate Forum appear to be suspiciously aligned. Huntley Troth even makes note in Wikipedia of the virus that appeared in the Spartacus Forum on virtually the same day of its appearance. In Wikipedia an alert observer who apparently can spot a phony writes about Huntley Troth: “What I forgot to mention: The already dubiously looking name given by the original author is nothing but an unimaginative anagram of "Only the Truth". I leave it to others to check out how reliable Wikipedia contributions are whose authors claim that they possess the truth.” In the Watergate forum reference has been made that Ashton Gray is the name of Canadian porn star. I leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions of whether Ashton Gray may actually be Huntley Troth or whether both of these are made-up names for someone who actually may be an undisclosed third party. Or whatever or however the bizarre case may be. In any event the credibility of Ashton Gray and Huntley Troth is being questioned in the Watergate Forum and in Wikipedia. From Wikipedia:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...s/Huntley_Troth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Watergate_first_break-in

Forum members and readers of this thread are invited to contrast what Ashton Gray has written about the first break-in at Watergate and the document below from Wikipedia. The dates of Huntley Troth writing on this topic in Wikipedia and those of Ashton Gray in our Watergate Forum appear to be suspiciously aligned. Huntley Troth even makes note in Wikipedia of the virus that appeared in the Spartacus Forum on virtually the same day of its appearance. In Wikipedia an alert observer who apparently can spot a phony writes about Huntley Troth: “What I forgot to mention: The already dubiously looking name given by the original author is nothing but an unimaginative anagram of "Only the Truth". I leave it to others to check out how reliable Wikipedia contributions are whose authors claim that they possess the truth.” In the Watergate forum reference has been made that Ashton Gray is the name of Canadian porn star. I leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions of whether Ashton Gray may actually be Huntley Troth or whether both of these are made-up names for someone who actually may be an undisclosed third party. Or whatever or however the bizarre case may be. In any event the credibility of Ashton Gray and Huntley Troth is being questioned in the Watergate Forum and in Wikipedia. From Wikipedia:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...s/Huntley_Troth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Watergate_first_break-in

I have obviously upset you by not deleting Ashton Gray’s membership. As I have explained many times on this Forum, I am fully committed to the idea of free speech. One of the most important aspects of this is the freedom to ask questions. Ashton is not always as polite as he should be. He has apologised for this and hopefully he will adjust his style in future. However, he is clearly very knowledgeable about Watergate and has raised some very important questions. Hopefully, in time, Ashton will also be able to answer them. Just because I have not deleted his membership does not mean that I always agree with him. (I am not sure what you are implying by the comment the “John Simkin-Ashton Gray tag team”) In fact, as the threads on “What was Watergate all about?” and “John Paisley” will eventually show, we probably disagree fundamentally about several issues. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7253 http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3017 You originally contacted me because you wanted me to make changes to my web page on you. It is the main reason why most of the people involved in the assassination of JFK and Watergate stories make contact with me, including Alfred Baldwin, is that anyone who does a web search for the names of these people they quickly find themselves on my website. (For example, if you do a search at Google for “Douglas Caddy” my page on you comes up 1st out of 301,000 pages.) People are understandable concerned that in future my interpretation of their life could be quite significant. In your case, you wanted me to add that you had abandoned your previous right-wing views on politics. I was quite willing to do this as it was clearly true. You also agreed to answer questions on the Forum (as did Alfred Baldwin). As people like Gerry Hemming have discovered, this is a risky strategy as members cannot control the questions they are being asked. Gerry left leaving the questions unanswered. That in itself tells members a great deal. That is why I confidently predicted on the forum, in response to Ray Carroll assertion that Alfred and you would leave the forum if I allowed Ashton to remain as a member, that you would indeed stay and answer questions. I am sure that you are right that the published documents show that you have never been an employee of the CIA. I doubt very much if you ever fell into this category. What I do believe is that William Buckley recruited you as a CIA asset in 1960 when you began to play a key role in the Young Americans for Freedom organization. Buckley had been a member of the CIA where he worked under E. Howard Hunt in Mexico. I suspect the CIA also asked you to carry out tasks for the organization. I don’t think it is a coincidence that E. Howard Hunt contacted you to help out the Watergate burglars. He did this because he knew that investigators would eventually find the links between you and the CIA via Robert Mullen. In other words, you were part of the set-up. As you rightly say, the Watergate burglars were caught because of James McCord’s tape. However, the reason that journalists connected up the burglary with the CIA was McCord’s statement in court on the morning after his arrest. McCord voluntarily told the court that he had been a former employee of the CIA. He did not need to do that. That triggered off a series of events that eventually brought down Richard Nixon. I know this is pure speculation and that we will never discovery documentary evidence that this is the case. However, unless we assume that McCord was a complete idiot (and his previous record shows this was not the case), his main role was to implicate Nixon in the break-in. The same goes for E. Howard Hunt. I think you were an innocent victim of these events. I also understand why you are unwilling to admit to being a CIA asset. John, you are right. What you have written is pure speculation. The truth is that I have never been recruited by the CIA to carry out any tasks for that organization. I was never an employee of the Mullen Company. I was a General Foods employee. As I have disclosed previously Robert Mullen did at one time approach Howard Hunt and myself about purchasing his company as he wanted to retire. But out of the blue Mullen suddenly announced that he was selling the company to Robert Bennett. One must remember that it was the CIA that incorporated the Mullen Company. While Robert Mullen had run the company for a number of years and was entitled to sell it, the CIA still had to approve the purchaser. That is why Robert Bennett chosen. He was then and is now, as the Republican U.S. Senator from Utah, a CIA asset. When he purchased the Mullen Company his father was the U.S. Senator from Utah. It was the CIA’s decision, for whatever reason, to have the Mullen Company sold to Bennett and not to Hunt and myself. As to James McCord, I was surprised at the arraignment hearing later in the day after the arrests on June 17, 1972 when he disclosed he was formerly a CIA employee. All I knew at the time was that he was the Security Director for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. My best guess is that he chose to reveal his CIA background because he realized that it would soon become public knowledge once his name was published in the newspapers. In the succeeding days I received calls from a number of persons at the National Security Agency who knew McCord personally and wanted to help him in his time of difficulty. In short, his CIA background would have become public knowledge probably sooner than later and he may have decided to make a pre-emptive strike by announcing it at the arraignment hearing. Your statement that I am unwilling “to admit being a CIA asset” is pure McCarthyism. I have never been a CIA asset and never will be. I wholeheartedly concur with Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and in recent years a syndicated columnist, who wrote in his July 3, 2006 newspaper column: “It is proof of the collapse of American morals and the fallen character of the American people that the American public and its elected representatives in Congress refuse to rein in the Bush regime and to hold it responsible for its monstrous crimes. “America has become a land of evil. The rest of the world hates and despises us. And we are going to pay a terrible price for it. “Bush’s belief that our superpower status makes us immune to the opinion of others goes beyond hubris into insanity.” In short, because I hold the same opinion as Paul Craig Roberts, I would make a terrible CIA asset.

It is true that I sometimes cite my sources in my postings. On other occasions I do not do this. This is no conspiracy. It all depends on if the posting is part of a book I am writing. The story about Shofler, Chung and Merritt does appear in Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. In my opinion it is the best book written so far on Watergate. However, Hougan did make mistakes in the book and like other investigators was unable to fully explain what Watergate was really about. For example, on page 321 he writes that he does not believe the Merritt story because: "If we are to believe the disaffected informant, Shoffler told him to establish a homosexual relationship with Douglas Caddy, stating falsely that Caddy was gay and a supporter of Communist causes. In fact, Caddy was about as conservative as they come, and there was no reason to suspect that he was anything but heterosexual.” Hougan was wrong about your homosexuality. Those on the right would no doubt say that you are now a “supporter of Communist causes”. Maybe it is time to reassess the information supplied by Merritt. I also find Captain Edmund Chung’s testimony very interesting. Why did Sam Ervin and his committee believe Shofler over Chung? Why did they not ask any questions about Operation Sandwedge? Is it possible that like the Warren Report, Ervin was part of the cover-up? Countless books have been written about Watergate and yet, to the best of my recollection, not a single author ever contacted me to get my views on the scandal – including Jim Hougan. I was also surprised that I was never interviewed by the Senate Watergate Committee. It may have been that the Committee, as well as the Watergate Special Prosecutor, wanted to steer clear of gathering information and testimony that might have destroyed the U.S. Department of Justice and the judiciary branch of government in the eyes of the public. I refer to the alteration of my grand jury testimony, given under penalty of perjury, by the court reporter at the instigation of the original Watergate prosecutors (Silbert, et. al) and by the alteration of Alfred Baldwin’s sworn testimony. These are both discussed in my article published by the Advocate. I believe that even today in cases of paramount significance the practice of alteration of grand jury testimony still takes place. One hypothetical example that has occurred to me is the Enron case. Ken Lay was very, very close to Texas Governor George Bush and later to President George Bush. It was Lay who used Enron’s resources to help secure the victory for Bush in Florida after the voting controversy erupted there in 2000. If any grand jury testimony were taken that linked Bush to Lay in the events that led up to the collapse of Enron, I believe that such grand jury testimony would likely have been altered or even deleted to protect Bush. You write that “Maybe it is time to reassess the information supplied by Merritt.” I could not agree more. That is why I approached the Advocate to publish my Watergate article. In 1977 the Advocate published a two-part interview with Robert “Butch” Merritt that detailed the Nixon Administration’s covert war against the New Left and the gay community, which included his recounting of the role of the FBI and of Washington, D.C. police officer Carl Shoffler in targeting me because I was gay. The present editor of the Advocate, an extremely talented individual who is under 30 years of age, was unfamiliar with the 1977 article. It was only after he assigned a staff person to search the magazine’s archives, which led to the discovery of the article, that the Advocate placed great emphasis on publishing my piece. http://www.advocate.com/special_feature.asp?id=19186 I have obviously upset you by not deleting Ashton Gray’s membership. As I have explained many times on this Forum, I am fully committed to the idea of free speech. One of the most important aspects of this is the freedom to ask questions. Ashton is not always as polite as he should be. He has apologised for this and hopefully he will adjust his style in future. However, he is clearly very knowledgeable about Watergate and has raised some very important questions. Hopefully, in time, Ashton will also be able to answer them. Just because I have not deleted his membership does not mean that I always agree with him. (I am not sure what you are implying by the comment the “John Simkin-Ashton Gray tag team”) In fact, as the threads on “What was Watergate all about?” and “John Paisley” will eventually show, we probably disagree fundamentally about several issues. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7253 http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3017 You originally contacted me because you wanted me to make changes to my web page on you. It is the main reason why most of the people involved in the assassination of JFK and Watergate stories make contact with me, including Alfred Baldwin, is that anyone who does a web search for the names of these people they quickly find themselves on my website. (For example, if you do a search at Google for “Douglas Caddy” my page on you comes up 1st out of 301,000 pages.) People are understandable concerned that in future my interpretation of their life could be quite significant. In your case, you wanted me to add that you had abandoned your previous right-wing views on politics. I was quite willing to do this as it was clearly true. You also agreed to answer questions on the Forum (as did Alfred Baldwin). As people like Gerry Hemming have discovered, this is a risky strategy as members cannot control the questions they are being asked. Gerry left leaving the questions unanswered. That in itself tells members a great deal. That is why I confidently predicted on the forum, in response to Ray Carroll assertion that Alfred and you would leave the forum if I allowed Ashton to remain as a member, that you would indeed stay and answer questions. I am sure that you are right that the published documents show that you have never been an employee of the CIA. I doubt very much if you ever fell into this category. What I do believe is that William Buckley recruited you as a CIA asset in 1960 when you began to play a key role in the Young Americans for Freedom organization. Buckley had been a member of the CIA where he worked under E. Howard Hunt in Mexico. I suspect the CIA also asked you to carry out tasks for the organization. I don’t think it is a coincidence that E. Howard Hunt contacted you to help out the Watergate burglars. He did this because he knew that investigators would eventually find the links between you and the CIA via Robert Mullen. In other words, you were part of the set-up. As you rightly say, the Watergate burglars were caught because of James McCord’s tape. However, the reason that journalists connected up the burglary with the CIA was McCord’s statement in court on the morning after his arrest. McCord voluntarily told the court that he had been a former employee of the CIA. He did not need to do that. That triggered off a series of events that eventually brought down Richard Nixon. I know this is pure speculation and that we will never discovery documentary evidence that this is the case. However, unless we assume that McCord was a complete idiot (and his previous record shows this was not the case), his main role was to implicate Nixon in the break-in. The same goes for E. Howard Hunt. I think you were an innocent victim of these events. I also understand why you are unwilling to admit to being a CIA asset. John, you are right. What you have written is pure speculation. The truth is that I have never been recruited by the CIA to carry out any tasks for that organization. I was never an employee of the Mullen Company. I was a General Foods employee. As I have disclosed previously Robert Mullen did at one time approach Howard Hunt and myself about purchasing his company as he wanted to retire. But out of the blue Mullen suddenly announced that he was selling the company to Robert Bennett. One must remember that it was the CIA that incorporated the Mullen Company. While Robert Mullen had run the company for a number of years and was entitled to sell it, the CIA still had to approve the purchaser. That is why Robert Bennett chosen. He was then and is now, as the Republican U.S. Senator from Utah, a CIA asset. When he purchased the Mullen Company his father was the U.S. Senator from Utah. It was the CIA’s decision, for whatever reason, to have the Mullen Company sold to Bennett and not to Hunt and myself. As to James McCord, I was surprised at the arraignment hearing later in the day after the arrests on June 17, 1972 when he disclosed he was formerly a CIA employee. All I knew at the time was his role as the Security Director for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. My best guess is that he chose to reveal his CIA background because he realized that it would soon become public knowledge once his name was published in the newspapers. In the succeeding days I received calls from a number of persons at the National Security Agency who knew McCord personally and wanted to help him in his time of difficulty. In short, his CIA background would have become public knowledge probably sooner than later and he may have decided to make a pre-emptive strike by announcing it at the arraignment hearing. Your statement that I am unwilling “to admit being a CIA asset” is pure McCarthyism. I have never been a CIA asset and never will be. I wholeheartedly concur with Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and in recent years a syndicated columnist, who wrote in his July 3, 2006 newspaper column: “It is proof of the collapse of American morals and the fallen character of the American people that the American public and its elected representatives in Congress refuse to rein in the Bush regime and to hold it responsible for its monstrous crimes. “America has become a land of evil. The rest of the world hates and despises us. And we are going to pay a terrible price for it. “Bush’s belief that our superpower status makes us immune to the opinion of others goes beyond hubris into insanity.” In short, because I hold the same opinion as Paul Craig Roberts, I would make a terrible CIA asset.

John, are you not aware that I covered this subject in this very thread on February 5, 2006? Why your sudden discovery of this information? I notice that your tag team partner, Ashton Gray, wasted no time, based on your posting, of spinning a new fantasy that I knew Washington police officer Carl Shoffler and Robert “Butch” Merritt. I knew neither of these of men. If you and he wish to delude yourselves otherwise, be my guest. I am beginning to be thoroughly amused of your and Ashton’s wide-of-the-mark postings. The more outlandish the accusations and insinuations, the greater the chance that the monetary advance on my new book will be increased as you and Ashton jointly transform me into a major “key player” in the Watergate scandal. However, don’t expect me to share my monetary advance with you both as a result of your adversarial public relations work in my behalf, especially since the Forum’s credibility is the ultimate victim of your tag team fantasy strategy. Almost all of your posting in question draws directly upon the writing of Jim Hougan in his book, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. I invite Forum members and readers of this thread to contrast pages 320 to 323 in Hougan’s book with what you have posted. In the past in your scholarly writings in the Forum you have been fastidious in citing source materials to support statements that you make, which is why they are so widely read with anticipation. Why then did you omit attribution to Hougan of what you wrote above? Below is the February 5, 2006 posting that I made in this thread on this subject, which somehow escaped your attention: Not only is Mark Felt's role as Deep Throat left out of the FBI memorandum of 5/23/1973 but also omitted is the evidence that Felt was the primary cause of the Watergate coverup. The evidence is as follows: I was retained by Hunt and Liddy on June 17, the day of the burglary. On June 28, 11 days later, while I was in the U.S. Court House working on my clients' case, I was served with a subpoena to appear Forthwith before the federal grand jury. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell physically pulled me by my arm into the grand jury room. Over the next three weeks I was to testify five times before the grand jury. I refused to answer a number of questions that I believed violated the attorney-client privilege but did so ultimately after being held in contempt of court by Judge Sirica and the contempt citation being affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals. All of these events so early in the case were reported by Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post. These events had the effect of convincing my clients that they could not receive a fair trial if I as their attorney were being so badly treated. So they embarked on the coverup. Operating behind the scenes and as an instigator of my being served with a subpoena on June 28, 1972, was Mark Felt. The role of the FBI towards me, under Felt's direction, is described in a two-part article in The Advocate of Feb. 23 and March 9, 1977 titled, Revelations of a Gay Informant: I Spied for the FBI. The article is part-interview with and part-reporting concerning the gay informant, Carl Robert 'Butch' Merritt. Merritt had been employed by the FBI, under Felt's direction, and by the Washington, D.C. police, to infiltrate and spy on the New Left, which was then engaged in vocal dissent against the Vietnam war. (Felt was subsequently indicted and convicted for some of his activities against the New Left. More on this later.) The following is excerpted from the 1977 Advocate article: Two days after the Watergate burglary, Carl Shoffler (one of Merritt's former police contacts) turned up with Sgt. Paul Leeper (these officers had been two of the three to have arrested the burglars) with what Merritt recalls as an offer of ˜the biggest, most important assignment" he'd ever had. The officers, Merritt said, asked if he knew one of the Watergate attorneys. ˜They said he was gay." Merritt did not. They asked if I could get to know him. I asked them why. We'd like you to get as close as possible, they said, to find out all you can about his private life, even what he eats. Merritt says he explained that even if the attorney was gay, it wouldn't be likely that he could arrange to meet him. They said I would be paid quite well, that they weren't talking about dimes and quarters, that they were talking about ˜really big money". Merritt says that he refused the offer, but that police kept returning to him with the same request, as late as December 1972, months after the city's police claimed to have ended their Watergate investigation. Police, Merritt says, also tried to recruit him to inform on the gay community. He says he refused these offers as well. The police and the FBI, Merritt charges, began to harass him soon after he was dropped by the bureau. ˜They threatened my life, broke into my apartment at least three times, they tried to plant drugs on me, they tapped my phone," Merritt charges. Jim Hougan, in his 1984 book Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, wrote about Merritt's allegations: "If we are to believe the disaffected informant, [police officer] Shoffler told him to establish a homosexual relationship with Douglas Caddy, stating falsely that Caddy was gay and a supporter of Communist causes." Further information can be found on the following links: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...16/ai_n15396922 http://www.advocate.com/special_feature.asp?id=19186

John Simkin wrote in the final posting in the Kennedy Assassination topic of the thread titled “Ashton Gray: His repeated violations of Board Guidelines,” which thread he then closed down: “I have found Doug very helpful with my investigations into Lyndon Johnson. Hopefully he will continue to answer our questions. However, I do not expect hm to fully explain his relationship with the CIA during the Watergate scandal. Maybe he is saving this for his forthcoming book.” Anyone who has read the Forum’s thread “Douglas Caddy: Question and Answer” will find that I have previously answered all questions posed to me about the CIA: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7253 John Simkin, in his remarks above, apparently intends to leave with the reader a tantalizing smear that I have been somehow had a relationship with the CIA. One is reminded of the interrogation method of which Senator Joseph McCarthy was accused. It is said that he would pose the question to a witness “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Community Party?” When the witness denied that he had ever so been associated, it is said that Senator McCarthy would retort, “Are we merely to take you word on this?” in an attempt to harm the witness’s reputation. Substitute John Simkin for Senator McCarthy and we have him asking me, in essence: “Are you now or have you ever been employed by the CIA or knowingly participated in any of its activities?” When I state that I have not, he merely gratuitously retorts, “I do not expect [you] to fully explain [your] relationship with the CIA.” In the mid-1970's I employed the Freedom of Information Act in an attempt to obtain from the CIA any records that it had on me. I was stonewalled for a long period of time. I then appealed to Senator Barry Goldwater, whom I knew personally and who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to intervene with the CIA to release this information. He agreed to write the CIA in my behalf. A short time later I received from the CIA one document of several pages that was heavily redacted. It appeared to have been prepared as a summary of what the CIA knew about Watergate, before and after the break-in arrests on June 17, 1972. The only part that was not heavily redacted was one sentence that stated in essence “Michael Douglas Caddy has never been an employee of the CIA.” I cannot quote the exact sentence as the CIA document is in my personal and professional files in the Library Archives of the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon. This is some 2000 miles from where I reside. Even if I were to retrieve the CIA letter and quote exactly from it, most likely this would still not satisfy the John Simkin-Ashton Gray tag team. If the latter wish to engage in a fantasy that I was somehow had a relationship with the CIA, they are merely deluding themselves and adversely affecting the credibility of the Forum. The historical record rebuts their assertion. My own thought on the CIA’s involvement in Watergate is this: There is no doubt that the June 17, 1972 arrests stemmed from the discovery by Frank Wills, a security guard, of a piece of tape on a door in the Watergate complex building that housed the Democratic National Committee. Does this clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate? I would answer in the negative. There is ample evidence posted by Forum members that the CIA knew something was afoot, which stemmed from the contacts made with it by White House personnel and by Hunt and Liddy prior to June 17, 1972. The CIA is in the information gathering business. Thus, sooner or later the CIA might have made the strategic decision to act somehow on whatever information it had of Hunt’s and Liddy’s activities, perhaps adversely to Nixon’s interest. Or it might have saved the information for purposes of blackmailing or threatening Nixon. However, it did not have to reach a decision. Frank Wills, the security guard at the Watergate complex, saved the CIA from having to do this by finding the piece of tape and sounding the alert, which led to the arrests of the five burglars and the subsequent unraveling of the Nixon administration.

Dear Jack: Your valued comments are most appreciated. My thanks go to you. Below is the posting that I just made in the Watergate thread on the subject of the violations of Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray. My posting was in reply to Mr. Pat Speer on the matter. Pat: I am indebted to you and Mr. J. Raymond Carroll for posting your incisive comments on Mr. Ashton Gray’s gratuitously insulting remarks directed towards his fellow members, Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. I can assure you that if persons who have direct knowledge of historical events come to believe that by participating in the Forum they will be subjected to character assassination, the Forum will become the “kiss of death” to be avoided at all costs. This will result in all of John Simkin’s skillful diplomacy over the years in getting persons with direct historical knowledge to join the Forum going down the drain, obviously through no fault of Mr. Simkin but as the result of one or more members with malevolent and destructive tendencies. I may be mistaken but it appears that Mr. Baldwin has already been driven from the Forum and from participating in the thread that bears his name as the direct result of the offensive actions of Mr. Ashton Gray. That Mr. Gray now belatedly is editing his past posted remarks of character assassination against Mr. Baldwin probably will do little to correct the situation. I can categorically state that the only reason I decided to join the Forum was when I saw that Mr. Baldwin had joined and through the well-meaning inquiries posed by Mr. Simkin and other members was providing new information. Mr. Baldwin’s role in Watergate had always piqued my interest and I found his replies of great interest. And by the way, I apologize for mistakenly labeling you as Mr. Pat Gray in your June 23 reply and will edit the posting to correct this. This mistake on my part will probably cause some question to be posed later on in the Forum as to whether I ever knew or had a conversation with Patrick Gray while he was FBI director, knowing as I do now how some members think. In regard to the matter of my telephone conversations with the wife of Bernard Barker in the early days of Watergate, I already covered this subject in my posting of Feb. 6, 2006, which can be found in the Douglas Caddy: Question and Answer thread. It is my intention to do no more posting, besides the immediate one, until John Simkin returns from Sicily next week when he will undertake an investigation of the Record that I filed with him and Administrator Walker of a large number of violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton. I may be old-fashioned but I believe that if the Board Guidelines are repeatedly violated by a member, then the appropriate disciplinary measure should be invoked. If not, of what purpose are the Board Guidelines and why should they be observed? For the historical record, to be placed in the Forum’s archives, I am posting below an article by me about my role in Watergate that was published by The Wall Street Journal in 1998. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page March 24, 1998 WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY? By Douglas Caddy (Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer) The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures. The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years. Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail. On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room. From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights. Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.” In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?” Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with [Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.” Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?” The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney. However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.” Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice. I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham. Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.” Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

Pat: I am indebted to you and Mr. J. Raymond Carroll for posting your incisive comments on Mr. Ashton Gray’s gratuitously insulting remarks directed towards his fellow members, Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. I can assure you that if persons who have direct knowledge of historical events come to believe that by participating in the Forum they will be subjected to character assassination, the Forum will become the “kiss of death” to be avoided at all costs. This will result in all of John Simkin’s skillful diplomacy over the years in getting persons with direct historical knowledge to join the Forum going down the drain, obviously through no fault of Mr. Simkin but as the result of one or more members with malevolent and destructive tendencies. I may be mistaken but it appears that Mr. Baldwin has already been driven from the Forum and from participating in the thread that bears his name as the direct result of the offensive actions of Mr. Ashton Gray. That Mr. Gray now belatedly is editing his past posted remarks of character assassination against Mr. Baldwin probably will do little to correct the situation. I can categorically state that the only reason I decided to join the Forum was when I saw that Mr. Baldwin had placed membership and through the well-meaning inquiries posed by Mr. Simkin and other members was providing new information. Mr. Baldwin’s role in Watergate had always piqued my interest and I found his replies of great interest. And by the way, I apologize for mistakenly labeling you as Mr. Pat Gray in your June 23 reply and will edit the posting to correct this. This mistake on my part will undoubtedly cause some question to be posed later on in the Forum as to whether I ever knew or had a conversation with Patrick Gray while he was FBI director, knowing as I do now how some members think. [Hint: the answer is no.] In regard to the matter of my telephone conversations with the wife of Bernard Barker in the early days of Watergate, I already covered this subject in my posting of Feb. 6, 2006, which can be found in the Douglas Caddy: Question and Answer thread. It is my intention to do no more posting, besides the immediate one, until John Simkin returns from Sicily next week when he will undertake an investigation of the Record that I filed with him and Administrator Walker of a large number of violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton. I may be old-fashioned but I believe that if the Board Guidelines are repeatedly violated by a member, then the appropriate disciplinary measure should be invoked. If not, of what purpose are the Board Guidelines and why should they be observed? For the historical record, to be placed in the Forum’s archives, I am posting below an article by me about my role in Watergate that was published by The Wall Street Journal in 1998. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page March 24, 1998 WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY? By Douglas Caddy (Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer) The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures. The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years. Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail. On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room. From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights. Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.” In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?” Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with [Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.” Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?” The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney. However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.” Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice. I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham. Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.” Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

In accordance with the instructions of Administrator Andy Walker in his June 24, 2006 posting in the Kennedy Assassination thread under the topic of Infiltrators, Saboteurs and Fifth-Columnists, I have used the Report facility to file a number of violations of Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray. The Board Guidelines state: “You are responsible for what you post on this board. You will not use this bulletin board to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law”. Mr. Gray, who only joined the Forum on May 26, 2006, has repeatedly violated the Board Guidelines by being abusive, hateful, and harassing in his postings against two Forum members: Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. Mr. Gray has also used vituperative and threatening language against other members who find his postings to be in violation of Board Guidelines. From the Alfred Baldwin thread on Watergate: Less than a month after his joined the Forum membership, Mr. Ashton in his posting in the Alfred Baldwin thread of Watergate wrote on June 21, 2006 at 05:04 AM: “Well, you’ve made your record. Just keep sticking to your story, Mr. Baldwin. I’m walking away for now. I’ve had all of your brand of truth I can take at the moment without puking on the keyboard.” That same day, on June 21, 2006 at 6:06 P.M., Mr. Ashton wrote in the Alfred Baldwin thread: “I’m done, Mr. Baldwin. You made your record. I’ve made mine. I’m done with you, with your soul-less, conscienceless, lying co-conspirators, and with the entire evil hoax.” In his posting on the Alfred Baldwin thread, Mr. Ashton wrote on June 22 at 11:51 P.M.: “ 1. Hunt and Liddy both lied. 2. You lied. 3. All three of you lied.” Member Pat Speer replied on June 21, 2006 at 10:40 PM by posting: “Mr. Gray, what is your purpose here? You came to this Forum for exactly what? You didn’t come here to gain information, that is for certain. I doubt that Mr. Caddy or Mr. Baldwin even respond to your insulting rants.” From the Douglas Caddy, Hunt, Liddy, Mullen and the CIA thread on Watergate: Mr. Ashton in his posting on June 16, 2006 at 10:46 AM, falsely accused me of having a conversation with my client that never took place. It is a complete fabrication by Mr. Ashton, who wrote: “Surely you'll recall that you couldn't hold a conversation after June 13, 1971 in Washington, D.C. that wasn't "almost entirely consumed with" talk about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. Right? “And surely, surely you'd recall if you, Barker, and Hunt discussed the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg just a couple of months before Hunt and Barker were involved in the Fielding op that gave Ellsberg his "get out of jail free" card. Right? I mean, Hunt was your client at the time.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 16, 2006 at 6:56 PM wrote of myself: “1) Hunt Lied, 2)You lied, 3)You both lied..” Mr. Pat Speer replied to Mr. Ashton on June 16, 2006 at 8:21 P.M.: “Ashton, might I request you tone down your questions? While you have done a good job of demonstrating that Mr. Caddy, in order to keep Hunt's involvement secret, probably lied to a newspaper about a phone call from Barker's wife--(geez, isn't that what lawyers do, protect their clients?)--the relevance is not immediately apparent to some of us on the outside, who value Mr. Caddy's contributions to this forum. Your desire to play "gotcha" with Caddy is understandable, but not altogether appropriate, as he has repeatedly tried to answer any and all questions on his role in history. Ask the questions in a nice manner and I suspect he'll provide you with a response. Point out an inconsistency and he'll offer an explanation if he has one. Ditto with Mr. Baldwin, who has been nothing but a gentleman. I do sympathize with your desire to play "gotcha" however...However long the list you have for Caddy about what appears to be inconsistencies in his statements, I guarantee you it positively PALES in comparison to the mental list of questions I have for Robert Maheu, should I ever be able to ask him a question. “Please play nice.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 22 at 3:50 PM, addressed to Mr. Pat Speer, appeared to borrow the malevolent lines of Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs: “And you can take the rest of your non-sequitur, irrelevant, disruptive, off-topic, red-herring bag'o'crap message and shove it anywhere you want, as long as you don't try shoving it in my face again. “I might stop being so polite. You wouldn't want that.” Mr. Pat Speer on June 23, 2006 at 9:12 PM replied to Mr. Ashton’s latest threat against him: “As far as you reporting me to the authorities, give me a break. You come to this Forum, start insulting its members--yes, that's right, Mr. Caddy and Mr. Baldwin are members and not just visitors propped up here for your abuse--and even do a victory dance after insulting Mr. Baldwin off a thread bearing his name. And then you CRY like a child when I won't let you control the thread. Earth to Mr. Gray, this Forum was not created for your sole benefit. You decided to confront Mr. Baldwin on some possible holes in the record, and have accused him and others of being part of an ongoing conspiracy to hide the fact that the Watergate break-in was a CIA coup designed to put Gerald Ford in power. Never mind that this was many months before Ford was even in a position to reap the benefits of this coup. Never mind that Ford was not a friend of the CIA, but a friend of their political rival, the FBI, and that Ford's regime oversaw the most exhaustive investigation of the intelligence agencies in our history, spurred on in part by his own big mouth. While there is almost certainly more to the Watergate story than in the public record, your theory, frankly, appears a bit looney. Those coming to this Forum and wishing to read about Mr. Baldwin should not be subjected to reading your diatribes and ramblings without seeing that at least one member of this Forum found your distortions a bit looney, IMO. Sorry to rain on your hostility parade.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll in his posting on June 24, 2006 at 1:04 PM wrote: “Mr. Ashton Gray is accusing Mr. Douglas Caddy, directly or by implication, of being a xxxx. This is a clear violation of forum rules. Mr. Gray is clearly a truth-seeker, but throughout this thread he shows every evidence of falling into the fallacy of guilt by association. I do not have the slightest doubt that Mr. Caddy is an honest man. If he was not, then he would avoid this forum like the plague. “I gather it is true that Mr. Caddy had the misfortune to be retained to represent some unsavory characters connected to the Watergate break-in. I would guess that he now regrets that experience, and wishes he had confined himself to representing widows and orphans. It is no wonder that not everyone wants to be a lawyer, despite what they see on TV. “But it is a logical fallacy to assume, as Mr. Gray seems to do, that you can attribute the client's knowledge to his lawyer.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll, later that same day of June 24, 2005 at 5:24 PM wrote of Mr. Ashton’s repeated attacks on me: “In this case, I see no reason to suggest that a valued fellow forum member is lying. I suggest you take off that cowboy hat and replace it with your thinking cap.” The evidence would seem to indicate that Mr. Ashton Gray, who entered membership only recently on May 26, 2006, did so with a hidden agenda. No one can know what is in his mind, but his actions do meet the signs of an Infiltrator, Saboteur and Fifth-Columnist as denoted in my topic of the same title posted June 23. “Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called ‘information’ that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.” Mr. Ashton always closes his postings with his favorite motto: “Fiction doesn't leave a paper trail.” However, even in this assertion he is wrong. The fiction that he has posted since joining the Forum less than a month ago has left tell-tale paper trail, one which indicates that his actions are malevolent and destructive in their nature. My Reports of the violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray are now in the hands of the Administrator and Moderator. At stake is whether the Forum will continue to be a valuable and credible source of research information or whether it will be reduced to its lower common denominator, that of character assassination by one of its members. I am placing this topic on the Watergate and J.F. Kennedy Assassination threads of the Forum because of my past postings in each thread due to my involvement in both historical events in my capacity as an attorney.

In accordance with the instructions of Administrator Andy Walker in his June 24, 2006 posting in the Kennedy Assassination thread under the topic of Infiltrators, Saboteurs and Fifth-Columnists, I have used the Report facility to file a number of violations of Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray. The Board Guidelines state: “You are responsible for what you post on this board. You will not use this bulletin board to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law”. Mr. Gray, who only joined the Forum on May 26, 2006, has repeatedly violated the Board Guidelines by being abusive, hateful, and harassing in his postings against two Forum members: Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. Mr. Gray has also used vituperative and threatening language against other members who find his postings to be in violation of Board Guidelines. From the Alfred Baldwin thread on Watergate: Less than a month after his joined the Forum membership, Mr. Ashton in his posting in the Alfred Baldwin thread of Watergate wrote on June 21, 2006 at 05:04 AM: “Well, you’ve made your record. Just keep sticking to your story, Mr. Baldwin. I’m walking away for now. I’ve had all of your brand of truth I can take at the moment without puking on the keyboard.” That same day, on June 21, 2006 at 6:06 P.M., Mr. Ashton wrote in the Alfred Baldwin thread: “I’m done, Mr. Baldwin. You made your record. I’ve made mine. I’m done with you, with your soul-less, conscienceless, lying co-conspirators, and with the entire evil hoax.” In his posting on the Alfred Baldwin thread, Mr. Ashton wrote on June 22 at 11:51 P.M.: “ 1. Hunt and Liddy both lied. 2. You lied. 3. All three of you lied.” Member Pat Speer replied on June 21, 2006 at 10:40 PM by posting: “Mr. Gray, what is your purpose here? You came to this Forum for exactly what? You didn’t come here to gain information, that is for certain. I doubt that Mr. Caddy or Mr. Baldwin even respond to your insulting rants.” From the Douglas Caddy, Hunt, Liddy, Mullen and the CIA thread on Watergate: Mr. Ashton in his posting on June 16, 2006 at 10:46 AM, falsely accused me of having a conversation with my client that never took place. It is a complete fabrication by Mr. Ashton, who wrote: “Surely you'll recall that you couldn't hold a conversation after June 13, 1971 in Washington, D.C. that wasn't "almost entirely consumed with" talk about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. Right? “And surely, surely you'd recall if you, Barker, and Hunt discussed the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg just a couple of months before Hunt and Barker were involved in the Fielding op that gave Ellsberg his "get out of jail free" card. Right? I mean, Hunt was your client at the time.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 16, 2006 at 6:56 PM wrote of myself: “1) Hunt Lied, 2)You lied, 3)You both lied..” Mr. Pat Speer replied to Mr. Ashton on June 16, 2006 at 8:21 P.M.: “Ashton, might I request you tone down your questions? While you have done a good job of demonstrating that Mr. Caddy, in order to keep Hunt's involvement secret, probably lied to a newspaper about a phone call from Barker's wife--(geez, isn't that what lawyers do, protect their clients?)--the relevance is not immediately apparent to some of us on the outside, who value Mr. Caddy's contributions to this forum. Your desire to play "gotcha" with Caddy is understandable, but not altogether appropriate, as he has repeatedly tried to answer any and all questions on his role in history. Ask the questions in a nice manner and I suspect he'll provide you with a response. Point out an inconsistency and he'll offer an explanation if he has one. Ditto with Mr. Baldwin, who has been nothing but a gentleman. I do sympathize with your desire to play "gotcha" however...However long the list you have for Caddy about what appears to be inconsistencies in his statements, I guarantee you it positively PALES in comparison to the mental list of questions I have for Robert Maheu, should I ever be able to ask him a question. “Please play nice.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 22 at 3:50 PM, addressed to Mr. Pat Speer, appeared to borrow the malevolent lines of Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs: “And you can take the rest of your non-sequitur, irrelevant, disruptive, off-topic, red-herring bag'o'crap message and shove it anywhere you want, as long as you don't try shoving it in my face again. “I might stop being so polite. You wouldn't want that.” Mr. Pat Speer on June 23, 2006 at 9:12 PM replied to Mr. Ashton’s latest threat against him: “As far as you reporting me to the authorities, give me a break. You come to this Forum, start insulting its members--yes, that's right, Mr. Caddy and Mr. Baldwin are members and not just visitors propped up here for your abuse--and even do a victory dance after insulting Mr. Baldwin off a thread bearing his name. And then you CRY like a child when I won't let you control the thread. Earth to Mr. Gray, this Forum was not created for your sole benefit. You decided to confront Mr. Baldwin on some possible holes in the record, and have accused him and others of being part of an ongoing conspiracy to hide the fact that the Watergate break-in was a CIA coup designed to put Gerald Ford in power. Never mind that this was many months before Ford was even in a position to reap the benefits of this coup. Never mind that Ford was not a friend of the CIA, but a friend of their political rival, the FBI, and that Ford's regime oversaw the most exhaustive investigation of the intelligence agencies in our history, spurred on in part by his own big mouth. While there is almost certainly more to the Watergate story than in the public record, your theory, frankly, appears a bit looney. Those coming to this Forum and wishing to read about Mr. Baldwin should not be subjected to reading your diatribes and ramblings without seeing that at least one member of this Forum found your distortions a bit looney, IMO. Sorry to rain on your hostility parade.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll in his posting on June 24, 2006 at 1:04 PM wrote: “Mr. Ashton Gray is accusing Mr. Douglas Caddy, directly or by implication, of being a xxxx. This is a clear violation of forum rules. Mr. Gray is clearly a truth-seeker, but throughout this thread he shows every evidence of falling into the fallacy of guilt by association. I do not have the slightest doubt that Mr. Caddy is an honest man. If he was not, then he would avoid this forum like the plague. “I gather it is true that Mr. Caddy had the misfortune to be retained to represent some unsavory characters connected to the Watergate break-in. I would guess that he now regrets that experience, and wishes he had confined himself to representing widows and orphans. It is no wonder that not everyone wants to be a lawyer, despite what they see on TV. “But it is a logical fallacy to assume, as Mr. Gray seems to do, that you can attribute the client's knowledge to his lawyer.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll, later that same day of June 24, 2005 at 5:24 PM wrote of Mr. Ashton’s repeated attacks on me: “In this case, I see no reason to suggest that a valued fellow forum member is lying. I suggest you take off that cowboy hat and replace it with your thinking cap.” The evidence would seem to indicate that Mr. Ashton Gray, who entered membership only recently on May 26, 2006, did so with a hidden agenda. No one can know what is in his mind, but his actions do meet the signs of an Infiltrator, Saboteur and Fifth-Columnist as denoted in my topic of the same title posted June 23. “Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called ‘information’ that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.” Mr. Ashton always closes his postings with his favorite motto: “Fiction doesn't leave a paper trail.” However, even in this assertion he is wrong. The fiction that he has posted since joining the Forum less than a month ago has left tell-tale paper trail, one which indicates that his actions are malevolent and destructive in their nature. My Reports of the violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray are now in the hands of the Administrator and Moderator. At stake is whether the Forum will continue to be a valuable and credible source of research information or whether it will be reduced to its lower common denominator, that of character assassination by one of its members. I am placing this topic on the Watergate and J.F. Kennedy Assassination threads of the Forum because of my past postings in each thread due to my involvement in both historical events in my capacity as an attorney.

Pat: There has been some hostility, but it has been between both you and Ashton. Ashton's writing style employs sarcasam. Only after pointing out discrepancies in what Hunt says vs. what Atty Caddy says does Ashton say one of the "realities" cannot be true. Doug Caddy could just answer the questions and be done with all this....Perhaps he is too busy, but since he posted the thread on"inflitrators" in both Watergate and JFK assasination, that tells me he read the posts, thus the questions and has chosen not to answer. So we have to wonder why? This does not mean that his reply would reveal something sinister. Said reply could be perfectly innocent. We know that Mr. Hunt in all likelihood has a GREAT deal to hide.. I would like to see these questions answered as one who watched every second of the Watergate hearings, read every article and knew we were only getting a part of the truth. I wish we had others here TO ask questions of. Don't you think it would be terrific to have, for example Haldeman to ask him WHY- (what basis)- he told us in "The Ends OF Power" Nixon's use of the tern "whole Bay of Pigs thing" (6/23/72 tape) was a term Nixon employed when referring to the assassination of JFK? But he's dead and gone, so we cannot ask. I am sure there are many questions you would have of other participants as well. Ashton is merely asking questions of those participants in the event we call "Watergate" in an effort to arrive at a deeper knowledge. If you don't believe there was more to Watergate than we got, then you may not be interested in questioning anyone else. But from where I sit, I see the two events linked and have LOTS of questions. IN fact I shall ask one myself: My Caddy: How did Billie Sol come to ask you to represent him before the Grand Jury in 1984? Given that your law practice was not in criminal defense, this seems to be a legitimate question. Were you hired by Barr McClellan in May 1998 to attend a press conference in DC, re the fingerprint match? You did not go. IF you recall could you tell me why not? I realize that this was several years ago but I have been curious about these two questions since then. I appreciate your reply. (And I promise that I WON"T utilize sarcasm, regardless what your response may be.) Dawn You state, "In fact I shall ask one myself:" However, in fact you asked two questions. Why the imprecise language by you, an attorney? In answer to the two questions: (1) Billie Sol never asked me to represent him before the Grand Jury in 1984 in Robertson County. We never discussed his proposed appearance. He was represented by two attorneys, Mr. Alan Brown and Mr. Mark Stevens, both of San Antonio, Texas. On March 20, 1984 Mr. John Paschall, District-County Attorney for Robertson County, Texas wrote a letter to Messrs. Brown and Stevens. The letter's first paragraph states, "This letter is to confirm our previous oral agreement regarding transactional immunity for your client, Billie Sol Estes." Thus, your question is based on a false premise. I covered this topic previously in the Douglas Caddy: Questions and Answers topic in the Kennedy Assassination thread on Feb. 5, 2006 at 09:44 A.M. At that time I stated: "I talked to Billie Sol within a few days following his grand jury appearance in March 1984 in Robertson County, Texas. He had received transactional immunity from the prosecutor before testifying. The grand jury appearance had been arranged with Billie Sol's consent by U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples. It was my impression in talking to Billie Sol afterwards that he wanted his testimony before the grand jury to be made public and had so authorized public discussion by the prosecutor, U.S. Marshal Peoples, and his own attorney. There were a number of press reports at the time, so it would be impossible now to state which exact source of information about Billie Sol's testimony was used by the writer of a particular press report." (2) I was never hired by Barr McClellan to attend a press conference in Washington, D.C. in March 1998 on the fingerprint match issue. I wish I had been invited as I certainly would have attended. I am a strong supporter of Barr McClellan's on-going efforts to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination and the role played by a key figure in his former law firm. In fact, I am mentioned as a source in his book, Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ killed JFK. Mr. McClellan states on p. 338, "Billie Sol Estes' attorney Doug Caddy was very helpful in his legal analysis and comments. I had many contacts with him in Houston and emailed him as needed." I previously answered this question in the Douglas Caddy: Questions and Answer topic in the Kennedy Assassination thread on Jan. 24, 2006 at 08:40 A.M. At that time I posted the following: "I was not asked to attend the press conference in May of 1998 regarding the fingerprint match by print expert Nathan Darby. Barr McClellan had informed me of Mr. Darby's conclusion about the fingerprint but I did not learn about the press conference until some time afterwards. "Based on Mr. Darby's superb professional credentials, I have every reason to believe his conclusion about the fingerprint is accurate." I don't mind answering questions posed by fellow forum members whose intent is to bring truth to light. However, answering questions again that have previously been answered by me wastes my time. I am in the midst of writing a new book, which will be my sixth published book, and do not have the time, energy or inclination to answer questions that pose an inaccurate premise or are abusive in nature.

These concerns are very valid, though how to fashion steps to deal with them is difficult. John Simkin has a very deep committment to free speech, but the forum will lose its value if any Tom, Dick or Harry can join and post any kind of nonsense, as Brendan Slattery does. All prospective members have to first submit a biography and an avatar photograph of themselves before they are allowed to post. Members are supposed to be either teachers, educators or researchers (hence the name of the forum), but we are pretty flexible about that. On signing up they tick the box to agree to our Board Guidelines. If they break these guidelines repeatedly we get rid of them. The chances of any "Tom Dick or Harry" or indeed "Sue, Trish or Mary" joining are fairly remote Dear Mr. Walker: This is request that you, as Administrator, review all the postings in the Watergate section from June 1, 2006 to the present date to ascertain whether there have been violations of the Board Guidelines by any member of the Forum. Sincerely yours, Douglas Caddy

Historians and the world’s citizenry in general owe a debt of gratitude to John Simkin for creating the J. F. Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections on Spartacus. The contributions of material and information by Forum members have created a treasure trove that will be mined for years to come. So valuable have the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate archives become in disseminating this information on a world-wide basis that the Forum’s members need to face the real possibility that the Forum may soon be targeted for some form of annihilation or destruction, if it is not already. On this past Monday I attended a special event in Houston sponsored by Pacifica radio station KPFT at which Greg Palast of the BBC and The Guardian newspaper spoke. Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse, which last week hit the New York Times Best-Seller list, and of a previous best-seller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. KPFT in Houston is one of five Pacifica non-commercial radio stations in the United States, situated in major cities, whose daily public affairs programming is a constant thorn in the side of the authoritarian Powers That Be who control all three branches of the government and most of the mass media in the U.S. today. At the reception preceding the Palast lecture to a packed auditorium audience, one of the KPFT directors recounted to me how over the years the Powers That Be have sent infiltrators, saboteurs, and fifth-columnists into the Pacifica community in an attempt to take it over or at a minimum neutralize its effectiveness. These Trojan horse efforts have been repulsed successfully by the mobilization of more than a million listeners, volunteers and financial contributors who make possible the on-going educational and non-profit work of Pacifica. A similar effort in my opinion is or soon will be mounted against the Forum. Members of the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections of the Forum should be on guard to spot those who join our ranks whose motivation is to end the effectiveness of the Forum as a group effort in gathering and posting valuable information. Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called “information” that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.

Historians and the world’s citizenry in general owe a debt of gratitude to John Simkin for creating the J. F. Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections on Spartacus. The contributions of material and information by Forum members have created a treasure trove that will be mined for years to come. So valuable have the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate archives become in disseminating this information on a world-wide basis that the Forum’s members need to face the real possibility that the Forum may soon be targeted for some form of annihilation or destruction, if it is not already. On this past Monday I attended a special event in Houston sponsored by Pacifica radio station KPFT at which Greg Palast of the BBC and The Guardian newspaper spoke. Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse, which last week hit the New York Times Best-Seller list, and of a previous best-seller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. KPFT in Houston is one of five Pacifica non-commercial radio stations in the United States, situated in major cities, whose daily public affairs programming is a constant thorn in the side of the authoritarian Powers That Be who control all three branches of the government and most of the mass media in the U.S. today. At the reception preceding the Palast lecture to a packed auditorium audience, one of the KPFT directors recounted to me how over the years the Powers That Be have sent infiltrators, saboteurs, and fifth-columnists into the Pacifica community in an attempt to take it over or at a minimum neutralize its effectiveness. These Trojan Horse efforts have been repulsed successfully by the mobilization of more than a million listeners, volunteers and financial contributors who make possible the on-going educational and non-profit work of Pacifica. A similar effort in my opinion is or soon will be mounted against the Forum. Members of the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections of the Forum should be on guard to spot those who join our ranks whose motivation is to end the effectiveness of the Forum as a group effort in gathering and posting valuable information. Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called “information” that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.