In The First Hour of Watergate

[Douglas Caddy]

[From my forthcoming book, IN THE FIRST HOUR OF WATERGATE]
 

 

How the CIA Set-Up the Arrest of the Watergate Burglars and then Orchestrated the Cover-up Without Ever Being Exposed

 

By Douglas Caddy

Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

Member Emeritus of the Texas and District of Columbia Bars

 

Copyright 2023-2024 by Douglas Caddy

Permission granted to reproduce in whole or in part when this source is cited

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

     In early 1970 the Central Intelligence Agency received information that President Richard Nixon was quietly planning to create a super entity that would go beyond the legal functions of existing government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and National Security Agency. Nixon had lost faith in the existing agencies to meet the challenges posed by domestic and foreign enemies to the country’s national security. He believed that the reports he regularly received from existing agencies were self-serving and misleading as to their alleged successful operations. He wanted a new entity to supplement these existing agencies that would use extralegal and sometimes illegal means to protect the nation. The new program that evolved was the Huston Plan that Nixon developed with Tom Huston, a presidential aide.

    Three high officials in the CIA at the time remembered the threat that their agency had faced in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy blamed the CIA for the Bay of Pigs debacle by declaring “I will splinter the CIA up into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.” Two years later JFK was assassinated in Dallas. These officials were all hardcore veteran intelligence agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II whose modus operandi was that the ends justify the means. The OSS ceased to exist in 1945. The CIA was created in 1947 pursuant to the National Defense Act of that year sponsored by President Harry Truman.

     These hardened CIA officials were Director Richard Helms, General Counsel Laurence Houston, and Chief of Counter-Intelligence James Angleton.  In 1970 in response to the Huston Plan they developed a counter plan designed to place their spy inside the White House who would report back regularly on anything that would affect the CIA. They chose longtime CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, also a World War II veteran of the OSS, to be their spy because he personally knew Charles (Chuck) Colson who was Special Counsel to President Nixon. Hunt and Colson were both graduates of Brown University and active in the Brown University Alumni chapter in Washington. The three CIA officials recognized that the White House would not hire Hunt if he came directly from the CIA. To get around this obstacle Hunt at age 64 took retirement from the CIA and was given a lucrative annuity. Helms then arranged for him to be placed in the Robert Mullen Company in Washington. The CIA was active behind the scenes in incorporating the Mullen Company in 1959 but this relationship was a closely held secret. Hunt joined the staff of the Mullen company on May 1, 1970, which was when and where I met him for the first time. We quickly became close friends after we discovered we knew a mutual friend, William F. Buckley. I was not an employee of the Mullen Company but had been assigned to work there in 1969 for a year by my employer, General Foods Corporation, which was a client of the Mullen Company.

     Hunt strategically began cultivating his relationship with Colson that led to him being offered a part-time consulting position in the White House. He began work there on July 6, 1971, while he remained a part-time employee of the Mullen Company. At his request I had submitted a letter of reference in his behalf to the White House. Colson assigned Hunt to the White House Plumbers Unit whose task was to ferret out leaks of classified information to outside sources that the President felt threatened the national security such was believed Daniel Ellsberg had done with the Pentagon Papers. Soon thereafter Hunt’s consulting job was broadened in November 1971 when Gordon Liddy, another member of the Plumbers Unit who had been asked to develop an intelligence gathering plan for Nixon’s reelection campaign, brought Hunt onto his team as second-in-command. Together they developed the far-out Operation Gemstone, which Attorney General John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign chairman, initially rejected in January 1972.   John Dean later described his recollections of this meeting to President Nixon on March 21, 1973, that “Liddy laid out a million-dollar plan that was the most incredible thing I have ever laid my eyes on: all in codes, and involved black bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes, uh, to weaken the opposition, bugging, uh, mugging teams. It was just an incredible thing." Hunt’s contributions to the plan were those devised clandestinely by the CIA.

      In April 1972 Liddy informed Hunt that his superiors had approved the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building. Hunt reported this immediately to Helms as Hunt’s loyalty was never to Nixon but to the CIA. Helms. Houston and Angleton recognized immediately that they had been presented a unique opportunity utilizing Hunt to co-op the Republican burglary plan to use it to drive Nixon from office, which would end the immediate threat to the agency posed by the Huston Plan and an even more far serious one. Their conspiracy, in contrast to the larger conspiracy that killed President Kennedy, was a small one in that it was comprised of the three. Hunt’s role as their spy was indispensable until he later became expendable. The origin of the idea of the break-in of the DNC was developed within the CIA that used Hunt to subtly implant it in the mind of Liddy, who started pushing the idea with the White House.

     In mid-April 1972 Hunt telephoned me at the law firm in Washington, D.C. where I had accepted a position as an associate attorney after I left employment by General Foods and requested that I meet with him and Laurence Houston, CIA’s General Counsel, the next day at 4 p.m. at a restaurant on the Maryland side of the Potomac River (the CIA’s headquarters was on the Virginia side.) I agreed to attend the meeting even though Hunt did not disclose its purpose and I did not know Houston. The meeting as it turned out has been burned into my memory to this day. This is because of its extraordinarily bizarre nature in that ostensibly I was offered employment to become a CIA agent for a specific project in Nicaragua whose purpose was to compromise the leaders of the pro-communist Sandinista leaders when in actuality the real intent of the interview unbeknownst to me was to scope me out for something else if a certain event in the future happened in Washington, D.C. This turned out to be Watergate that broke two months later in which I suddenly and unexpectantly found myself being retained by Hunt and Liddy as the original attorney for the Watergate Seven.

      Without the knowledge of the expendable Hunt, the three conspirators proceeded to set up the five Watergate burglars who were arrested in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972, inside the DNC. Liddy and Hunt evaded arrest because they were in a room in the adjacent Watergate Hotel and fled promptly from there after being alerted to the arrests by their lookout stationed across the street. The trap set by the conspirators had been sprung. All that remained for them to do was to orchestrate the criminal cover-up using Hunt to enact it employing the CIA’s longtime mantra that “money is the cheapest commodity” when a crisis arises in carrying out an important operation. Within days of the arrests under pressure from Hunt the White House initiated the cover-up that was being run clandestinely by the CIA. I was the first person approached to accept “hush” money to pass it on to the five arrested five burglars and to Hunt and Liddy, which I refused to do.

     The only real threat to the exposure of the CIA’s role in Watergate occurred in the first hour after the arrests of the burglars inside the DNC.  This occurred when Hunt, who had escaped, made a telephone call to an unnamed person using an unsecured phone from the burglars’ lookout room in the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street from the DNC.  Alfred Baldwin was the burglars’ lookout stationed in the room. Here is his subsequent testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee about Hunt showing up in the room shortly after the arrest of the five burglars:

“He went into the bathroom and came out and said, ‘I have got to call a lawyer, where is your phone?’ I said, ‘It is right over there.’ And he went over, he dialed a direct number because in the motel room if you want to place a long distance call you have to go through the desk, so he dialed 8 as I would do when I would dial a local number and he dialed a direct number. I paid no attention to the conversation. I proceeded to the balcony, continued to watch and, I did hear him say, ‘I have got $5,000 cash on me now, Al, for bail or bonds if you need it’ and something to that effect, ‘will you go right down or should I go down,’ and I believe that was it.”

     Exposing herein the unnamed person who Hunt called in the first hour will lead inevitably to the unraveling of the controlling role that the CIA played behind the scenes in Watergate that has never been revealed before.

     Why was this person never exposed whose name Hunt did not disclose when he made his telephone?

     It was because in the first weeks of the case Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert, Chief Judge John Sirica, aided and abetted by U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit attempted to frame me as being as a principal in the criminal break-in of the DNC by alleging Hunt called me from the lookout room in the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge.

     On July 12, 1972, less than a month after the arrests of the five burglars, Judge Sirica, in a courtroom packed with the press, viciously attacked me and impugned my professional integrity. The judge declared:

“You see, to put the matter bluntly, if the government is trying to get enough evidence to indict Mr. Caddy as one of the principals in this case even though he might not have been present at the time of the alleged entry in this place, I don’t know what the evidence is except what has been disclosed here, if the government is trying to get an indictment against Mr. Caddy and he feels that way and you feel that it and the rest of your attorneys feel it, all he has to say is I refuse to answer on the grounds what I would say would tend to incriminate me. That ends it. I can’t compel him to say he knows Mr. Hunt under the circumstances. He doesn’t do that, understand? He takes the other road. He says there is confidential communication. Who is he to be the sole judge whether or not it is confidential or not? That is what I am here for.”

     The next day, July 13, I went before the grand jury and refused to answer certain questions on the grounds that to do so would violate the attorney-client privilege. I did this on the advice of five attorneys who were counselling me. A short time later I was back before Judge Sirica who held me in contempt of Court and jailed me.

     My attorneys appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ordered my release pending a full hearing on the issue. The New York Times that next day, July 14, carried an article, “Court Holds Attorney in contempt of court.”

     On July 18 the Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Sirica contempt order. I was faced with the decision of refusing to answer the questions before the grand jury that would cause me to be jailed again or to testify before the grand jury.

     What was happening to me did not go unnoticed by the White House. Here an excerpt from the Oval Office tapes of a prolonged discussion between President Nixon and John Ehrlichman on July 19:

Ehrlichman: That fellow [Douglas] Caddy, the lawyer who wouldn’t answer questions because it was privileged communications, refused to answer, the Judge cited him for contempt. He appealed to the local Court of Appeals. They affirmed the trial judge and he’s now down there answering questions, as far as I know.

President Nixon: That’s probably what’s breaking it up.

Ehrlichman: It could well be.

President Nixon: Who is Caddy the lawyer for?

Ehrlichman: Caddy is a 37- year- old lawyer who was very active in the YAFs, the very conservative Young American [for Freedom].

President Nixon: Who does he represent?

Ehrlichman: He represented the five guys who got caught the night they were caught, and he was at the police station within minutes after the police brought the prisoners there. He’d been called by someone on the outside. Well, I think what happened is that Hunt was in the neighborhood, and when saw those guys get caught or heard it over a bug, he called Caddy and Caddy went and tried to arrange bail and advised them not to talk and so forth. So he’s been asked by the grand jury who called you? And he refused to answer.

President Nixon: That would bring Hunt into it…

Ehrlichman: It would bring Hunt in, it would bring Liddy in. And this guy [Caddy} has an indirect connection with Colson because he is the attorney for Colson’s secretary, who is in the process of getting a divorce. But that’s as close as it comes to the White House.

President Nixon: Well, I don’t think that a problem.

Ehrlichman: No, that’s not a problem. That’s sort of a tangential thing. But he will not, Caddy will not disclose much beyond what was already going to be disclosed. So it is not going to add too much to the trouble…

President Nixon: Do you mean that the Circuit Court ordered an attorney to testify?

Ehrlichman:  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.

President Nixon: Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?

Ehrlichman: Well, he could, I suppose. They don’t have to grant certiorari. I don’t know the answer to that.

President Nixon: But he is now testifying?

Ehrlichman: My understanding he is going in this morning. Now he can go down there and refuse and take it to the Supreme Court. I don’t know. I just don’t have those facts.

     While President Nixon and Ehrlichman were talking in the Oval Office I went back before the grand jury and answered all the questions that the prosecutors posed to me. At one point there was a lull in the questioning, and I spoke up and testified, “I kept receiving these mysterious phone calls from” and at that instant prosecutor Seymour Glanzer abruptly cut me off from saying anything more and instead directed me to answer another unrelated question. The three prosecutors, headed by Earl Silbert, did not want to hear what I had to say about the mysterious phone calls. The phone calls were about the “hush” money for the defendants that I refused to accept.

     This was a crucial point In the Watergate investigation. A year later after the coverup was exposed the three prosecutors became afraid of what could happen to them when they realized what they had done in cutting off my testimony about the mysterious phone calls in the prior year. Here is the full story:

     On the eve of the July 4, 1972, holiday, about two weeks after Watergate broke, I received a telephone call at the law firm from a stranger, a man who identified his name as Bob Kane. He said that he wanted me to transmit hush money cash to the Watergate defendants. He told me to name the amount of money and he would deliver it in a laundry bag. I was startled by what he said and asked him if the defendants he was talking about were the five burglars who had been arrested and others who might not have been arrested. He replied, “that is a good question” and said he would call me back later with the answer. He did call back the next day and said that the money would be used for all seven of my clients, the five arrested burglars and the two who had escaped, who were Hunt and Liddy. I told him I would have to think further about the matter, and that he should call me back on July 6^th and 10 a.m. and I would have an answer for him.

     Immediately after taking this call, I went to see the managing partner of the law firm for which I worked. He was Jerome Powell, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney. After I recounted the calls that I had received from the mysterious Mr. Kane, Powell told me that any meetings with this man would have to take place within the law firm, not outside. He went on to declare that we possessed no real knowledge of who this man was and who he represented. He said that the man could be related to the criminal conspiracy behind the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building. If he was, then if I were ever to accept money from him for transmission to the defendants that I would become part of the conspiracy and be forced to do thereafter whatever the conspirators ordered. He said that he would assign Robert Scott, a partner in the law firm, to be present with me when I received the call back from Mr. Kane.

     On July 6^th at the appointed time Mr. Kane called back. He asked if I had an answer for him. I replied forcefully and in a stern voice, ‘I do not know who you are, I do not know what you are calling about, and I want nothing to do with you or with the matter you are calling about. Do I make myself perfectly clear?” I heard the caller utter a strangled gasp of shock and then he hung up. Robert Scott was present when this call took place. Neither Powell nor I had told him what the call would be about. He asked me about the brief telephone conversation, and I told him to check with Powell.

      Six days later, on July 12^th, less than a month after the arrests of the five burglars, Chief Judge John Sirica in a courtroom packed with the press, charged me with being a principal in the case and threatened to hold me in contempt of court if I did not answer the questions propounded to me by the prosecutors before the grand jury. The next day, July 13^th, Judge Sirica held me in contempt of court and ordered me jailed after I refused to answer certain questions before the grand jury that I and my lawyers believed were protected by the attorney-client privilege. On July 18^th the U.S, Court of Appeals upheld Sirica’s order holding me in contempt of court.

     On July 19^th I went before the grand jury and answered all the questions that the prosecutors asked me. As I have recounted, there was a lull in the questioning, and I spoke up declaring that “I kept receiving these mysterious phone calls from…” and at that instant prosecutor Seymour Glanzer cut me off and instead directed me to answer another question.

     After the Watergate coverup was exposed followed by the criminal trials of those persons implicated in the cover-up, the Senate Watergate Committee held public hearings.

     Here is testimony of Herbert Kalmbach, President Nixon’s personal attorney, before the Senate Watergate Committee on July 16, 1973:

Mr. Dash: Now, what was the first instruction you received to give the money?

Mr. Kahlbach: Again, as I have tried to reconstruct this, Mr. Dash, the first instruction that I received, which I passed to Mr. Ulazewicz, was to have Mr. Ulasewicz give $25,000 to Mr. Caddy. I don’t know much of Mr. Caddy. I understand that he is an attorney here in Washington. And as I recall it, that was probably from approximately July 1 through July 6 or 7. I would either talk to Mr. Dean or Mr. [Fred] LaRue [a presidential aide.] I would then call Mr. Ulasewicz who, in turn, would call Mr. Caddy. He would have some response from Mr. Caddy and I would call back up to Mr. Dean or Mr. LaRue.

Mr. Dash: What was the response from Mr. Caddy?

Mr. Kalmbach: Well, the sum and gist of it was that Mr. Caddy refused to accept the funds.

Mr. Dash: In that manner?

Mr. Kalmbach: That is correct. That was the end-all. There were several telephone calls, but the final wrap-up on it was that he refused to receive the funds.

     The Watergate case prosecution from its inception was legally flawed because of the actions of the prosecutor Earl Silbert and his two associates, of Chief Judge John Sirica, and of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This is because it deprived the seven Watergate burglars of a fair trial by the attempt to frame me, their defense attorney, as being a principal in the crime. When all was said and done, I was never indicted, or named an unindicted co-conspirator, or named as a defendant in the Democratic National Committee lawsuit or disciplined by the bar or asked to testify before the Senate Watergate Committee. The actions by the prosecutors and the courts had the effect of adding impetus to the ensuing cover-up that was being run clandestinely by the CIA. More importantly, the actions ensured that the role of the CIA was missed in the subsequent multi-party investigations into the case.

     The real victims of Watergate were President Richard Nixon who was driven from office and the America people who lost faith in their government as a result of the scandal that was legally flawed from the beginning.

Edited February 11 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

I have posted this Introduction to my forthcoming book, IN THE FIRST HOUR OF WATERGATE, because on this past Saturday, June 17, 2023, my computer was hacked resulting in making it virtually inoperable. No monetary demand was made upon me. My Word document of my book manuscript was taken over by an outside party. That party does not want my story of what really happened in Watergate to be told publicly.

Fortunately, I had a subscription to Dell Premium Technical Support. A brilliant Dell technician worked with me on the phone for nine hours to restore my computer. It is now fully operational although the outside party may try to sabotage it again. 

My Dell Premium Support case was no. 170304667. The brilliant technician was K. Sharma. Ultimately, with my permission he deleted everything from my computer. It was a total void. Then he installed the factory original computer content. After downloading all the updates, I had a virgin new computer with everything that I had lost - including my Word manuscript - installed again. It was a kind of modern miracle.

My book will have approximately twenty chapters. Here are those completed to date: 

Chapter One: The Senate Watergate Committee Report

Chapter Two: How I First met Howard Hunt

Chapter Three: I join a law firm and Hunt accepts a White House position

Chapter Four: The steps that led to Watergate

Chapter Five: The burglars arrest and Hunt's mysterious phone call soon afterwards as reported by Alfred Baldwin

Chapter Six: Who was the lawyer that Hunt called from the Howard Johnson Motor Inn

Chapter Seven: How I got involved as an attorney in the Watergate case

Chapter Eight: The flawed 1974 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals on Liddy's appeal of his conviction

These chapters and those remaining to be written in the next few months will supplant the present accepted version of Watergate.

Contact: mikec2012@aol.com Telephone 713-867-3476. I reside in Houston, Texas

 

Edited August 11, 2023 by Douglas Caddy

[Lawrence Schnapf]

@Douglas Caddy very interesting. I presume you have read Geoff Shepard's books? he makes a strong case for misconduct and abuses by the parties you suggest along with the Senate Watergate counsel.... 

[Douglas Caddy]

On 6/25/2023 at 1:08 AM, Lawrence Schnapf said:

@Douglas Caddy very interesting. I presume you have read Geoff Shepard's books? he makes a strong case for misconduct and abuses by the parties you suggest along with the Senate Watergate counsel.... 

When Geoff Shepard's book was published years ago, I contacted him and tried to interest him in what I knew. His brief reply was a polite brushoff.

My forthcoming book will contain voluminous evidence supporting the assertions that I make in my Introduction.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

@Douglas Caddy  I'm really surprised. seems he would have been interested in what you had. 

[Douglas Caddy]

13 hours ago, Lawrence Schnapf said:

@Douglas Caddy  I'm really surprised. seems he would have been interested in what you had. 

My 1998 Wall Street Journal article drew no response of interest from Geoff Shepherd.

This 1998 article in The Wall Street Journal puts in proper 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 July19 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 Sirica, 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 trial, 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.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

I had been impressed with Geoff Shepard's analysis. his lack of response to you is incredibly disappointing. 

[Douglas Caddy]

1 hour ago, Lawrence Schnapf said:

I had been impressed with Geoff Shepard's analysis. his lack of response to you is incredibly disappointing. 

The Federalist Society last fall had a seminar on Watergate at which Geoff made the legal presentation and commentary on it was by a panel of distinguished judges. He did a superb job and the panel almost always voiced agreement and support for the points he made that were based on his solid research. 

[Lawrence Schnapf]

I watched it! I have read and listened to all his presentations and books.

[Douglas Caddy]

2 hours ago, Lawrence Schnapf said:

I watched it! I have read and listened to all his presentations and books.

Judge Laurence Silberman was a panel member and his mind was a sharp as ever. He passed away a few weeks later but is remembered to this day of being a great jurist.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

must have been fun to practice law in those days before computers, internet, etc. When I tell my students how that i used to have to photocopy pages from case books and scotch tape the page excerpts onto brief that I wrote by hand on legal pad they look at me like i have three heads....  

[Jonathan Cohen]

On 6/23/2023 at 3:38 AM, Douglas Caddy said:

     The real victims of Watergate were President Richard Nixon who was driven from office and the America people who lost faith in their government as a result of the scandal that was legally flawed from the beginning.

"Driven from office?" Do you actually expect anyone familiar with the facts of this case to believe that?

[Lawrence Schnapf]

@Jonathan Cohen Have you read any of Geoff Shepard's books? He was a counsel in the Nixon White House. The historical narrative is incomplete. I believe Watergate and the JFK assassination had common links. Nixon threatened to rip the scab off the "Bay of Pigs" thing which Haldeman said was Nixon code for the JFK assassination. Once Ford became Veep, Nixon became expendble. They knew Ford would fight to keep the secrets   

[Jonathan Cohen]

On 7/1/2023 at 12:56 PM, Lawrence Schnapf said:

@Jonathan Cohen Have you read any of Geoff Shepard's books? He was a counsel in the Nixon White House. The historical narrative is incomplete. I believe Watergate and the JFK assassination had common links. Nixon threatened to rip the scab off the "Bay of Pigs" thing which Haldeman said was Nixon code for the JFK assassination. Once Ford became Veep, Nixon became expendble. They knew Ford would fight to keep the secrets   

Yep, I've read them, and I think they're a load a BS. Nixon was "driven from office" by nothing more than his own words and actions.

[Douglas Caddy]

On 7/2/2023 at 1:11 PM, Jonathan Cohen said:

Yep, I've read them, and I think they're a load a BS. Nixon was "driven from office" by nothing more than his own words and actions.

You have rushed to a judgment based on reading only the Introduction to my forthcoming book, IN THE FIRST HOUR OF WATERGATE. The book will have approximately twenty chapters. I have finished writing the first ten. A lot more evidence and information will be provided in the remaining chapters. 

Here is a key sentence from my Introduction: "Houston and Angleton recognized immediately that they had been presented a unique opportunity utilizing Hunt to co-op the Republican burglary plan to use it to drive Nixon from office, which would end the immediate threat to the agency posed by the Huston Plan and an even more far serious one."

 

 

 

Edited February 11 by Douglas Caddy