United States Department of Justice

The United States Department of Justice is both the law-enforcement institution charged with pursuing Watergate and an executive-branch department answerable to the President whose campaign and administration were under scrutiny. The book presents its work as consequential but contested: investigators traced campaign money to the burglary, prosecutors assembled evidence against senior figures, and department officials became important sources for reporters, even as the inquiry’s boundaries and independence came under pressure. Its role is therefore not simply that of a neutral institution delivering a final answer. It is an institution whose investigation revealed a widening conspiracy while repeatedly encountering limits on how far that investigation would go.

Institutional Position and Early Financial Evidence

Unlike the General Accounting Office, which investigates for Congress and operates independently of the Executive, the Department of Justice belongs to the Executive Branch and reports to the President. That distinction mattered as investigators examined whether the Watergate break-in was connected to campaign-finance violations. General Accounting Office official Hughes said the newspaper’s account had revealed for the first time that the bugging was related to campaign-finance law; he added that Maurice Stans’s reports contained nothing like the Kenneth H. Dahlberg check. The comparison placed the department within a larger institutional question: which bodies could investigate the campaign without reporting to the administration under investigation?

The money trail provided unusually concrete evidence. A cashier’s check for $25,000, drawn on the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton and payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, had been deposited 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 The combined deposit was $114,000; four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000, and the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. Against that trail, prosecutors’ evidence and campaign records could connect the secret fund to the bugging operation. The Washington Post reported that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by principal assistants to John Mitchell and kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The evidence did not make every part of the chain equally clear. Barry Bernstein asked a Justice Department official how the indictment squared with testimony from The Bookkeeper, noting that her account had been confirmed by Hugh Sloan. In the reporters’ understanding, the fund in Stans’s safe was linked to the bugging and controlled by Mitchell’s assistants. The department’s case thus helped establish the connection between campaign money and the operation, but the distinction between showing that a fund existed, identifying who controlled it, and proving who authorized particular payments remained essential.

Testimony, Records, and the Investigation’s Reach

Department lawyers and prosecutors appeared in the book as cautious gatekeepers as well as investigators. A Justice Department attorney confirmed that Watergate prosecutors were suspicious of Sally Harmony’s testimony, but said they lacked evidence to charge her with perjury. Her lack of candor was reportedly common knowledge at campaign headquarters, yet neither the reporters nor their contacts could specify what she had concealed beyond vague references to protecting others. Separately, committee employees spoke of wholesale destruction of records in the days after the break-in, but said their knowledge was secondhand and supplied no particulars. Suspicion and a possible pattern were emerging; proof of the specific acts and their authors was not yet in hand.

The investigation’s treatment of the wider political operation sharpened the question of scope. On October 7, a lawyer explained that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had checked a large portion of E. Howard Hunt’s more than 700 calls and found one to Donald Segretti. The lawyer emphasized that the dirty tricks were probably not illegal and that the department was sticking to the Watergate bugging itself. He also worried that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was acting strangely and that there was interest in the case “at the top,” without identifying where that pressure originated. The distinction was consequential: an investigative lead connected Segretti to Hunt, but the department was not pursuing the separate political-sabotage inquiry as part of its Watergate case.

A Justice Department lawyer later described the Segretti and Dwight Chapin material as technically part of the investigation but separate from the matter the department was pursuing. The reporters and editors concluded that investigators had concentrated on the narrow burglary and interception of oral communications at Democratic headquarters, while leaving aside what they regarded as a broader effort to subvert the electoral process. The department’s own boundary between the bugging case and the dirty-tricks inquiry therefore became part of the story. Its investigators could discover a connection without converting every connected political activity into a prosecutable subject.

Public comments also exposed the uncertainty around possible obstruction. On public television, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst said he did not know whether records had been destroyed and had no idea why anyone at the Committee for the Re-election of the President would tear up documents. If Robert Mardian and Fred LaRue had destroyed records, he said, obstruction of justice might have occurred. His answer identified a serious legal consequence while stopping short of confirming the underlying act.

Reporters, Sources, and Verification

The department was not only the investigating institution; its officials and attorneys were among the reporters’ most important sources. Bernstein called a Justice Department official who had earlier told him that Segretti was part of the Watergate investigation. Another attorney’s reaction to the term “ratfucking” conveyed a sense of shock that government officials might be involved in such political tactics. Yet the department’s internal knowledge did not always arrive as a clear, attributable statement. The reporters had to distinguish a lawyer’s account of investigative leads from what prosecutors had formally established and from what the institution had decided to pursue.

That distinction became especially important during preparation of the report on H. R. Haldeman’s alleged control of the secret fund. Howard Simons wanted the lead to attribute the claim not only to sworn grand-jury testimony but also to federal investigators. Bob Woodward said an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent had confirmed it and that Deep Throat had made clear investigators knew it; the attribution was changed. When Simons asked for a fourth source, Bernstein called a Justice Department lawyer who was reluctant to speak. Bernstein proposed counting to ten, with the lawyer to hang up if the story should be held. The reporters later learned that the attorney had misunderstood the instructions and intended to warn them off. The episode showed how a source’s silence could be mistaken for confirmation when a complex signal replaced an explicit answer.

The article also overstated what the testimony established. In a deliberately limited denial, Haldeman said his name had never come up in his grand-jury interviews and that he had not been asked about it. The reporters later recognized that they had moved too quickly from the evidence that Haldeman was one of five people associated with the fund to the stronger assertion that he controlled it. They had not asked Sloan whether Haldeman exercised authority or approved payments, or precisely what Sloan had been asked under oath. Their reliance on sources, deductions, and an ambiguous confirmation method had blurred the difference between association and demonstrated control. The error was not evidence that the department had proved the stronger claim; it was a warning about how even investigative information from officials could be misread when its precise basis was not checked.

White House Files and Congressional Scrutiny

The Department of Justice’s institutional vulnerability became more visible in the handling of investigative files. A Justice Department official read from a private deposition in which Charles Colson acknowledged sending Hunt to Denver shortly before March 17, 1972, to visit Dita Beard. The official said the deposition had been taken privately to spare the President’s special counsel the embarrassment of appearing before the grand jury. The account disclosed both a concrete connection and a procedural accommodation around a senior White House figure.

Later, Deep Throat described the treatment of E. Howard Hunt’s files. According to the account, on June 28 John Ehrlichman and John Dean told L. Patrick Gray that the files were “political dynamite” and should “never see the light of day”; Ehrlichman had earlier suggested that Dean drop them in the river. Gray kept the files for about a week and then placed them in a burn bag in his office. He reportedly said he had not been explicitly ordered to destroy them but understood what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted. This account made the department’s handling of evidence inseparable from the conduct of the White House officials whose actions the investigation was supposed to examine.

At Gray’s confirmation hearings, he described the Watergate inquiry as “a massive special,” “a full-court press,” and “no holds barred.” He then volunteered that he had turned the investigative files over to Dean and could not guarantee Dean had not shown them to Segretti. The disclosure complicated Gray’s assurance of an exhaustive investigation: files had passed to a senior White House official, and Gray could not account for their possible onward disclosure. The hearings turned the department’s custody and control of investigative material into a matter of public examination.

The Investigation’s Limits and Constitutional Question

As prosecutors approached the President’s closest aides, the department’s investigation reached a new point of tension. In the week before Richard Nixon’s April 17 announcement, prosecutors told Assistant Attorney General Henry E. Petersen they were on the verge of indicting several present and former aides. They insisted that the President be told personally. The prosecutors expected Nixon to announce the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman immediately; instead, he resisted for almost two weeks. They also asked him to order members of his staff to cooperate, but that cooperation did not come. The prosecutors were described as confused and disturbed by the President’s conduct thereafter.

The President’s own account of events added another complication. Nixon said he had met with Kleindienst and Petersen to review facts that had come to him through his investigation and to review the Justice Department inquiry’s progress. The description cast the President as an investigator pursuing justice while the department’s prosecutors were confronting the actions of his closest aides. The overlap between presidential involvement and departmental investigation made the department’s independence a practical question, not merely an organizational chart.

By the time reporters consulted a lawyer in the Criminal Division, the investigation had run into a constitutional problem. The lawyer said, “The Watergate investigation has run smack into the Constitution. We now must deal with the question of how the President can be investigated.” The department’s work had moved from tracing checks and interviewing witnesses to confronting the limits on investigating the head of the Executive Branch. That unresolved question completes the book’s portrait of the institution: the Department of Justice could uncover evidence and bring prosecutors to the edge of indicting senior aides, but its position within the executive government left the investigation facing pressure, contested boundaries, and a constitutional barrier at its highest level.