Segretti–Kalmbach secret-funding relationship

The Segretti–Kalmbach secret-funding relationship connected Donald Segretti’s political sabotage work to Herbert Kalmbach, the lawyer and campaign fundraiser who paid him. The link was more than a record of money changing hands: reporting and testimony placed Kalmbach’s payments within a single covert fund that supported political espionage and sabotage. At the same time, the evidence distinguished what the reporters could establish—the payment, Kalmbach’s role in the fund, and Segretti’s recruitment—from what remained unknown about the fund’s other recipients and the full chain of command.

Discovery of the Payment

The connection came into focus as journalists traced the people and money behind Segretti’s operation. A report by Time identified Dwight Chapin as the person who had hired Segretti, noted that Gordon Strachan had also discussed the job with him, and reported that Kalmbach had paid Segretti more than $35,000. The report supplied details that the earlier account in The Washington Post had not established. A Justice Department attorney then hurriedly confirmed to Bob Woodward that Kalmbach had indeed been the paymaster for Segretti’s secret activities.

Woodward tested the significance of that confirmation with Hugh Sloan, who had worked as treasurer of the Nixon campaign. When Woodward suggested that Kalmbach must have been among the people authorized to approve payments from the secret stash in Maurice Stans’s safe, Sloan agreed, but added that Kalmbach had held some of the money in California. The answer widened the story beyond a payment to one operative: the money in California and the cash in Washington belonged to the same system, rather than to separate funds.

One Fund, Different Locations

Sloan described the fund as a single pool, wherever its cash was kept. Its money, he said, had appeared on the same burned books, and the account was called a Special Projects fund. When Woodward asked whether it was for espionage and political sabotage, Sloan confirmed that this was what it had been used for, while stressing that he had not understood that purpose at the time. His distinction mattered: the fund’s function had become clear retrospectively, but that did not mean every person who handled or authorized its money had known the nature of each project when it was undertaken.

Kalmbach’s place in the arrangement had two aspects. He had paid Segretti, and he had access to money that Sloan identified as part of the same covert fund. Sloan also said Kalmbach had distributed other money from the fund, in amounts far exceeding the payment to Segretti. He would not say how much had gone out or identify its recipients. That boundary left the payment to Segretti as a confirmed strand in a larger, incompletely traced flow of cash—not a complete accounting of the operation.

Segretti’s Account

When Bernstein later spoke with Segretti, Segretti described himself as confused, frightened, angry, and isolated. He said he wanted to tell the whole story and did not understand how he had become involved; he also said he had learned about the wider affair by reading the newspapers, because he had been told only about his own role. Asked who had kept him uninformed, he identified the White House. His account portrayed the operative’s access to information as sharply limited, even as investigators and reporters were connecting his work to people higher in the campaign structure.

The questioning proceeded slowly. Segretti resisted giving details and at first characterized his activities generally as minor political work. Eventually, he admitted that Chapin had hired him, that Strachan had discussed the job with him, and that Kalmbach had paid him. He said the first approach had come from Chapin, not from Segretti seeking employment. That account independently reinforced the earlier identification of Kalmbach as paymaster and clarified the recruitment sequence: Chapin initiated the approach, Strachan was involved in discussing the work, and Kalmbach supplied the money.

Segretti presented himself as a recent Army veteran who had been away from civilian life and was unsure what kind of law to practice. He said he had accepted a call to work for the President of the United States and doubted that Chapin knew about the most sinister activity, suggesting that Chapin had acted on instructions. These were Segretti’s claims, not proof of who issued every instruction or what each participant knew. In particular, confirmation that Kalmbach paid him does not by itself establish that Kalmbach directed the specific acts Segretti performed.

What the Link Establishes

The relationship became evidentially powerful through the convergence of separate lines of reporting: Time’s account named Kalmbach as the payer; a Justice Department attorney confirmed the paymaster role; Sloan placed Kalmbach’s California cash within the same fund as the money in Washington; and Segretti admitted that Kalmbach had paid him. Together, these details tied the operative to the campaign’s financial infrastructure and connected a payment to a fund used for political espionage and sabotage.

The evidence also leaves limits that define the relationship accurately. It does not provide a complete list of Kalmbach’s recipients, the amount Segretti personally received in the detailed account of his interview, or a precise breakdown of how particular sums were allocated among projects. Nor does payment alone prove that Kalmbach knew every purpose for which the fund was used. The importance of the link lies instead in how it made an otherwise dispersed operation more traceable: an identified recruiter, a confirmed paymaster, cash held in two locations but recorded as one fund, and an operative who said the White House had kept him ignorant of the wider enterprise.