CRP's concealed campaign-finance system

The concealed campaign-finance system at the Committee for the Re-election of the President was a cash pool maintained outside ordinary campaign accounting and used for sensitive political projects, including the Watergate operation. Its significance lies not only in the money it gathered, but in the chain of authorization and concealment that reporting gradually reconstructed: cash entered a safe, senior aides directed disbursements, the sole account sheet was destroyed, and officials promoted a security explanation that Hugh Sloan said did not match the committee’s normal procedures.

Formation and Financial Structure

The fund’s money came from cash contributions to Richard Nixon’s campaign. Hugh Sloan, the committee treasurer, later said that the fund had existed for more than eighteen months. Cash received at committee headquarters was placed directly in Maurice Stans’s safe; at any given moment, Sloan estimated, the safe probably held about $700,000. That estimate describes the likely cash on hand, not a precise total of the fund’s expenditures or a verified account balance.

A separate investigation by the General Accounting Office traced money associated with the fund. Its investigator described hundreds of thousands of dollars in unaccounted cash and a cash slush fund that included money obtained by cashing Kenneth H. Dahlberg’s $25,000 check. In the underlying bank records, the $25,000 cashier’s check, drawn on the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton and payable to Dahlberg, was deposited on April 20 with four Mexican checks. The combined deposit was $114,000; four days later Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000, and the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately.

The General Accounting Office’s report, released on August 26, listed eleven apparent and possible violations of the new campaign-finance law and referred the matter to the United States Department of Justice for possible prosecution. It said that Stans maintained a secret cash slush fund of at least $350,000 in his office. The report connected that fund, at one time, to the cash from Dahlberg’s check and the four Mexican checks. Woodward and Bernstein reported the Mexican transfer operation while setting aside separate allegations about Stans’s fundraising tactics for further investigation; the General Accounting Office investigator confirmed the substance of the money-laundering operation.

Records, Disbursements, and Authority

The Bookkeeper described the fund’s surviving accounting trail as a single lined sheet, the only record of its distributions, which had been destroyed. She had seen it more than once and updated it whenever money was paid out. About fifteen names appeared on it, with a distribution amount beside each; as payments continued, the amounts grew. She believed six people were involved, while Sloan knew the broader story and had handed out money. The discrepancy between the roughly fifteen names on the sheet and the smaller number she considered involved remained an investigative question, not a settled accounting conclusion.

Sloan’s account clarified how authorization worked. When first asked for money, he telephoned John Mitchell at the Justice Department; Mitchell told him to release it. The calls began in 1971 and, Sloan said, took only seconds. Mitchell initially had sole authority to approve expenditures, which was later passed to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder. Sloan thus described a routine that made the transactions seem small within a campaign budget exceeding $50 million, even as the money was being directed from an unreported cash pool.

The totals reported at different stages refer to different evidence and should not be collapsed into one figure. The General Accounting Office investigator identified a fund of at least $100,000 that included money from Barker’s account; the agency’s later report put Stans’s secret fund at no less than $350,000. Sloan placed the relevant total closer to $300,000 and said the fund had operated for more than eighteen months. His estimate of about $700,000 in the safe concerned the cash likely present at any given time. Together, these accounts show the scale of the concealed system while preserving the uncertainty in its exact aggregate receipts, balances, and disbursements.

Watergate and the Security Explanation

Before June 17, Sloan said, no one had told him a specific purpose for the money. He had heard neither the label “convention security” nor “security fund” until after the Watergate break-in. Then, within the Committee for the Re-election of the President, a story circulated that money drawn by G. Gordon Liddy, Magruder, and Porter had been intended to secure the Republican convention, and that Liddy had diverted his share to pay for the bugging. Sloan doubted that account: legitimate security costs, he said, were carefully budgeted, paid by check, and reported to the General Accounting Office. As treasurer, he would have expected to be told if the withdrawals had served that purpose.

The public explanation took shape alongside the reporting. A former administration official told Bernstein that Liddy had supervised a large fund and that campaign officials planned to let him take the blame, presenting the money as protection against an attack on the President at the convention. On August 16, Clark MacGregor, then the committee’s finance counsel, made the first public effort to assign responsibility to Liddy, saying that Liddy had spent campaign money on his own initiative for convention security. In a later telephone conversation with Woodward, MacGregor said he did not know why Liddy had wanted cash and denied knowing what was happening. The contrast between the committee’s security account and Sloan’s description of ordinary, separately documented security spending made the explanation increasingly difficult to reconcile with the financial evidence.

Disclosure and Political Consequences

After the Watergate indictments, Woodward read a draft about campaign workers’ information to Deep Throat, who urged him to state the case more strongly. Deep Throat said the money in Stans’s safe had financed the Watergate bugging and other intelligence-gathering activities. He identified John Mitchell’s top assistants as among those who controlled the fund, while declining to say whether Mitchell had prior knowledge of the break-in. He also said that wiretap logs had reached some of the same Mitchell aides who disbursed the spying money.

The resulting Washington Post account placed the fund at the center of the investigation: several principal assistants to Mitchell, the former manager of Nixon’s campaign, controlled money held in a special Committee for the Re-election of the President account. The report said that more than $300,000 had been earmarked for sensitive political projects, that Liddy was among the recipients, that records had been destroyed, and that Sloan’s resignation followed his suspicions about Watergate. Its larger consequence was to show that the indictments had not ended the conspiracy and that campaign employees might still be able to answer unresolved questions.

The disclosures also connected the fund to a higher level of campaign authority. Sloan said Mitchell had repeatedly authorized expenditures while serving as Attorney General, although Sloan’s account alone did not establish that Mitchell knew the money would finance the Watergate bugging. Later, Magruder told federal prosecutors that Mitchell and White House Counsel John Dean had approved and helped plan the bugging operation; he also said Mitchell and Dean later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. These later allegations strengthened the reported connection between campaign leadership, the operation, and its aftermath, while remaining distinct from what Sloan had personally established about the fund’s payment process.

The fund’s story therefore advanced through records, financial tracing, and testimony rather than through a single complete ledger: the bank deposits exposed a route for cash, the destroyed sheet testified to the loss of the accounting record, and Sloan’s calls to Mitchell identified a mechanism of authorization. As official explanations shifted toward convention security and individual misuse, the reporting connected the cash system to Watergate and to broader political intelligence activity. The resulting confrontation helped bring the Washington Post’s allegations into public view; after Richard Nixon’s April 30 address, White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler apologized to the paper and its reporters for earlier criticism of their investigation.