CRP's Post-Break-In Cover-Up and Record Destruction

The Committee for the Re-election of the President’s post-break-in cover-up joined the destruction of financial and operational records to a campaign of silence inside the organization. In the days after the Watergate arrests, Robert Mardian and Fred LaRue directed the committee’s response, records were removed and destroyed, and employees were steered away from subjects investigators might pursue. The effort did not erase every trail: Hugh Sloan’s account, scattered testimony, and the reporters’ reconstruction of the committee’s finances made the missing records themselves part of the story.

Background: a hidden fund and a pressured staff

The reporting began with fragments rather than a complete account. Committee employees spoke of records being destroyed soon after the break-in, but acknowledged that some information was secondhand and that they lacked specifics. The reporters also learned that people in positions to know about the bugging, especially secretaries, might not have been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Interviews with committee personnel were held at headquarters, in the presence of a committee lawyer or Mardian, rather than at employees’ homes. Some employees said they had been told not to volunteer information unless agents asked a question they could not evade, particularly about committee finances.

The atmosphere made those fragments significant but difficult to verify. During evening visits to employees’ homes, one person trembled and pleaded with Bernstein to leave before others saw him; another began to cry. The employees’ fear persuaded the reporters that the story reached beyond the arrested burglars, even as it made direct confirmation harder. One employee said she had been followed to lunch with a reporter and questioned afterward about their conversation. Employees were also forbidden to speak to the press without specific clearance, even to identify their job titles.

The committee’s secret fund supplied a concrete financial trail. A cashier’s check for $25,000, payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, was deposited on April 20 with four Mexican checks, bringing the deposit to $114,000. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. A subsequent Washington Post account reported that funds for the espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants to John Mitchell and kept in a special committee account. It said the fund contained more than $300,000 for sensitive political projects, that G. Gordon Liddy received money from it, and that records relating to the account had been destroyed. These figures and transactions illuminated the fund’s operation, but did not by themselves establish who authorized every expenditure or what every payment financed.

The cleanup and the missing records

Sloan, the committee’s former treasurer, gave Bernstein a more direct account of the cleanup. He said the records had been destroyed after the Watergate arrests, not immediately after the new campaign disclosure law took effect on April 7. Among the material lost were six or seven ledger books, each about half an inch thick, listing contributions received before the law took effect. Sloan described a general house-cleaning after the bugging. The destroyed material also included wiretap memoranda and a single-sheet accounting of the secret fund, including withdrawals by Bart Porter, Jeb Magruder, and Liddy.

The reporters’ reconstruction placed the response under the direction of Mardian and LaRue, whom Mitchell had selected to handle the committee’s reaction to the bugging. Sloan said that they had engineered that response. He described Mardian as having joined the committee after the money had been distributed, but said that after June 17 Mardian had learned what there was to know and, with LaRue, began running the response in consultation with Mitchell. Sloan identified destruction of records as part of that response.

Robert Odle’s role connected the removal of records to the later handling of the investigation. According to information Bernstein read to an FBI agent, Odle spent the weekend after the break-in taking an inventory of committee files and removing records; some may have been destroyed. After the destruction, the committee assigned him to provide the FBI with the documents it requested. The reporters’ draft described the relevant records as already gone by the time the FBI began examining the committee’s files. Thus the official production of requested documents took place after an internal inventory and removal, leaving investigators to work with a record set that had already been altered.

Silence as part of the response

Sloan did not describe an explicit order to lie. Instead, he recalled being told to maintain unity: “Hold ranks,” or “Keep the ship together.” Asked whether that meant lying, he left Bernstein to draw his own conclusion, while conceding that it was not an unreasonable one. Sloan said committee employees were advised to avoid particular subjects when questioned by the FBI, prosecutors, or the grand jury. The reporters also heard that superiors had suggested responses to likely questions. Interviews at headquarters took place with committee lawyers or Mardian present, and employees were cautioned especially about financial matters.

The limits on speech reached beyond interviews with investigators. Staff members were barred from speaking to reporters without clearance, and one employee’s account of being followed to lunch and interrogated afterward illustrated how a private conversation could become a source of pressure. Promotions also complicated the picture: the reporters learned that some employees considered likely to know damaging information received promotions in the weeks after the arrests. The evidence supported a pattern of constrained disclosure, although it did not make every promotion proof of a deliberate reward or establish precisely what each employee knew.

Sloan’s own reluctance showed the competing pressures on a potential witness. He told Bernstein the situation was worse than the public account suggested and said that his suspicions about the worst had prompted him to leave. Yet his lawyers had advised against making a public statement because it could be used against him in a civil suit arising from his role as campaign treasurer. Sloan wanted to clear his name and believed the press should uncover the truth, but he was also protecting himself from legal exposure. His account therefore supplied important detail while retaining clear limits: he said he had no absolute proof that Mitchell knew of the bugging before it happened, relying instead on the money, secondhand information, and his understanding of the people and the committee.

Exposure, confirmation, and consequences

The reporters tested their reconstruction against Sloan before publication. Bernstein read him a draft alleging a large-scale destruction of records, instructions to close ranks, restricted answers to investigators, and the removal of material by Odle. Sloan confirmed virtually the entire story. His confirmation strengthened the account, but it did not turn every inference into direct proof: Sloan’s claims about Mitchell’s prior knowledge, in particular, remained partly circumstantial.

An FBI agent’s reaction provided a different kind of confirmation. When Bernstein read him notes describing Odle’s removal of records, the destruction of memoranda about wiretapped Democratic officials, and Mardian and LaRue’s direction of the committee response beginning June 19, the agent insisted that the information could only have come from FBI interview reports known as 302s. He threatened that the reporters could be subpoenaed if they published a story based on government files. The agent’s anger did not independently prove every allegation, but his belief that the details matched protected investigative material underscored how closely the reporting tracked the inquiry.

The revelations altered the meaning of the original fund story. The Watergate indictments had not ended the underlying conspiracy, and committee workers still held information that could answer questions about it. Sloan also told the reporters that the secret fund had continued to exist after the arrests, with money transferred from Maurice Stans’s safe to LaRue; at the time, they could not confirm the transfer or determine how the money had been spent. Later, James McCord’s testimony that payoff money had come directly from the committee gave the possibility of continued funding a more specific connection to the effort to buy the conspirators’ silence. That later disclosure did not itself establish that every destroyed record concerned hush money, but it showed why the fund’s survival and the missing accounts mattered.

The episode’s significance lies in the connected mechanism it brought into view: a secret account financed sensitive political activity; after the arrests, records that could document the account and related operations were removed or destroyed; and the people who might explain them faced legal advice, organizational pressure, monitoring, and restricted access to investigators. The cleanup was not proof, by itself, of every senior official’s prior knowledge of the break-in. It was evidence of a consequential effort to control what could be reconstructed afterward—and of how that effort, through frightened employees and surviving traces, became visible.