Watergate grand jury transfers investigative materials to the House

Watergate grand jury transfers investigative materials to the House marked a crucial turn from criminal investigation toward congressional judgment of the President. The grand jury did not itself impeach Richard Nixon or deliver a verdict on his responsibility; it sent Judge John Sirica a report and evidence, recommending that the House Judiciary Committee receive them as prosecutors argued that the Constitution barred indicting a sitting president.

From secret funds to a wider investigation

The referral followed an investigation that had traced the Watergate operation beyond the burglars to the Nixon campaign’s concealed finances and senior aides. A $25,000 cashier’s check payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg had been deposited with four Mexican checks, making a total deposit of $114,000. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The check supplied a concrete financial link amid a widening inquiry into campaign money and the break-in.

The Washington Post reported that funds for espionage were controlled by principal assistants to John Mitchell and held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Its account described more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, payments to Gordon Liddy, destroyed account records, and Hugh Sloan’s resignation after he became suspicious of Watergate. Sloan later told the reporters that, beginning in 1971, he had called Mitchell at the Justice Department for authorization to disburse money. Mitchell initially held sole authority to approve expenditures and later delegated authority to others, including Jeb Magruder. Sloan’s account connected campaign payments to decisions made while Mitchell was Attorney General, while leaving the reporters to establish what particular expenditures had funded.

The inquiry also encountered fear and silence inside the campaign committee. During evening visits to employees’ homes, Bernstein met people who pleaded with him to leave or broke down in tears. The committee bookkeeper said that people had already lied by the time the grand jury first called her, and that Sally Harmony and others had lied, though she did not specify what they had concealed. Employees also spoke secondhand of records being destroyed soon after the break-in. These fragments pointed toward obstruction, but they were not all firsthand or independently specified evidence.

From burglary allegations to obstruction indictments

The reporting and prosecution increasingly focused on whether the break-in had been authorized and whether its participants were later silenced. Jeb Magruder told federal prosecutors that John Mitchell and John Dean had approved and helped plan the bugging operation. He also said that Mitchell and Dean later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. The Washington Post corroborated the allegations through sources who said Dean had told them the same account; one source further said that H. R. Haldeman had approved virtually every aspect of the cover-up, including payments to the conspirators, and that Dean wanted to tell the grand jury everything if he could reach a deal.

A separate strand concerned the handling of E. Howard Hunt’s files. Deep Throat told Woodward that, at a June 28 meeting, John Ehrlichman and John Dean had characterized the files as politically explosive and said they should never become public. According to this account, L. Patrick Gray kept the files for about a week before putting them in a burn bag; Gray said he had not been explicitly ordered to destroy them but understood that this was what Ehrlichman and Dean wanted. The episode supplied a specific alleged act of concealment, alongside the broader claims about payments and the planning of the burglary.

By late February 1974, the special prosecution force had obtained guilty pleas from Jeb Magruder, Bart Porter, Donald Segretti, Herbert Kalmbach, Fred LaRue, Egil Krogh, and John Dean. Eight corporations and their officers had also pleaded guilty to illegal contributions to the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Dwight Chapin was under indictment for perjury, while John Mitchell and Maurice Stans were on trial on obstruction-of-justice and perjury charges. On March 1, the grand jury that had indicted the original Watergate burglars returned its major indictments in the cover-up case, charging seven former White House and campaign aides with conspiracy to obstruct justice: H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, John Mitchell, Gordon Strachan, Robert Mardian, and lawyer Kenneth Parkinson.

The report and its route to Congress

Along with those indictments, the chief Watergate grand jury gave Judge Sirica a briefcase containing a report and accompanying evidence. The handoff was indirect: the jurors recommended that the materials be turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, and the report first went to Sirica. The account described the evidence as a staggering case against the President according to Deep Throat and others; it did not present that characterization as a finding that Nixon had been convicted or adjudged guilty.

The prosecutors’ constitutional position shaped the route the materials took. They had argued strongly that the Constitution precluded indicting an incumbent President. The grand jurors therefore recommended referral to the House, whose constitutional authority includes the sole power to impeach. The grand jury’s action moved information gathered in a criminal inquiry into the institution charged with deciding whether presidential conduct warranted impeachment, without resolving that decision in advance.

A conflict with Nixon’s call to move on

The transfer came against the backdrop of Nixon’s public appeal to end the controversy. On January 30, addressing a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, he declared, “One year of Watergate is enough,” and urged the country and Congress to turn to other matters. The March indictments and the grand jury’s referral pointed in the opposite direction: the investigation was reaching senior former aides, and its evidence was being placed before the House for consideration.

The House Judiciary Committee had begun the first investigation in more than a century into possible impeachment of a President. The grand jury’s recommendation did not compel the committee’s judgment, but it made the criminal inquiry’s collected material available to the congressional process. Its significance lay in that institutional passage: where the prosecutors saw a constitutional barrier to charging a sitting President, the grand jury directed the evidence toward the body empowered to consider impeachment.