The Washington Post Report on CRP's Secret Campaign Fund exposed a chain of political financing and authorization reaching into John Mitchell’s tenure as Attorney General. Its importance lay not merely in identifying a hidden fund, but in showing how Mitchell had approved its expenditures before becoming Richard Nixon’s campaign manager, while carefully distinguishing evidence of authorization from proof that the fund directly financed the Watergate break-in.

The Fund Behind the Reporting

The report described a secret Republican fund used to gather information about Democrats. According to sources involved in the investigation, Mitchell personally controlled it while serving as U.S. Attorney General. Beginning in the spring of 1971—nearly a year before he left the Justice Department to manage Nixon’s campaign on March 1—he approved withdrawals from the fund. The chronology made the story especially consequential: the alleged authorizations were not confined to Mitchell’s later role in the campaign, but began while he held the nation’s highest law-enforcement office.

The article placed those claims within a broader account of the fund’s operation. An earlier Washington Post report had said that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by principal Mitchell aides and kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. That account, it reported, contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects; Gordon Liddy had received money from it, relevant records had been destroyed, and Hugh Sloan’s suspicions about Watergate had led to his resignation. The later Mitchell report sharpened the question of who could authorize the money behind those activities.

The Authorization Chain

Sloan’s description supplied a concrete mechanism. When he was first approached for money, he called Mitchell at the Justice Department. Mitchell would tell him to distribute it, and the calls began in 1971. Sloan described the procedure as routine and said it had seemed insignificant within a campaign budget exceeding $50 million. The ordinary form of the transactions did not make their implications ordinary: the reporters understood the account to mean that Mitchell had authorized campaign expenditures for apparently illegal activity against political opponents while still Attorney General.

Mitchell was one of five people who could control the fund, but Sloan said he had initially been the sole person authorized to approve expenditures. Later, that authority passed to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder. The newspaper identified former Commerce Secretary Maurice H. Stans and Magruder among four people, besides Mitchell, subsequently authorized to approve payments. It described the other two only as a high White House official involved in the campaign and a campaign aide outside Washington. The article also explained that withdrawals were made by Liddy, Robert Mardian’s fellow campaign operative Porter, and Magruder; Sloan’s account helped the reporters distinguish the people who received cash from those who authorized its release.

The report did not collapse every link in that chain into a claim of direct financing for the break-in. It said that the Watergate grand jury’s investigation had not established that the intelligence-gathering fund directly financed the illegal eavesdropping. Instead, it characterized the fund’s primary purpose, on the basis of the Post’s sources, as financing widespread intelligence-gathering operations against Democrats. The distinction mattered: the evidence established a secret political-finance system and a route of approval, while leaving a specific connection between that fund and the bugging unproven.

Denial and the Meaning of Its Wording

The Committee for the Re-election of the President resisted the report. After an initial response that the sources were bad and were providing misinformation, committee spokesman Powell Moore returned with a statement after speaking to Mitchell. It said there was “absolutely no truth to the charges in the Post story” and that neither Mitchell nor Stans knew of a disbursement from an alleged fund as described by the newspaper or controlled committee expenditures while serving as government officials.

Bernstein examined the language closely. The statement denied the charges as framed, and denied control of expenditures, but did not deny that the fund existed or that money had been disbursed. Sloan’s account also made the distinction between approval and payment significant: Sloan handled the distribution, while Mitchell approved it. In Bernstein’s reading, the denial could be technically accurate in its narrow wording without answering the central allegation that Mitchell had authorized the expenditures. The dispute therefore became a contest over both the facts and the terms in which those facts could be denied.

Seeking Mitchell’s own response, Bernstein called him at the Essex House in New York and asked for Room 710. He identified himself and explained that the next day’s story would say Mitchell had controlled secret committee funds while Attorney General. The episode brought the reporting’s central question directly to the subject of the allegations, after the committee had declined to discuss their specifics. The article recorded the denial, but the narrowness of its wording left the authorization evidence at the heart of the story.

From a Fund Story to a Political Crisis

The report belonged to a widening investigation rather than an isolated revelation. A separate account had already described the espionage fund, its payments, and the destruction of records; the Mitchell story added a senior official’s role in approving expenditures and located the beginning of that authority in 1971. Elsewhere in the investigation, Democratic Party chairman O’Brien filed a $1 million civil-damages suit against the campaign committee, citing Charles Colson’s potential involvement and arguing that the emerging facts pointed toward the White House. That public challenge reflected how quickly the break-in was becoming a dispute about political responsibility beyond the burglars themselves.

The White House’s response widened the conflict over the press as well as over the fund. Although Time had developed information as damaging as the Post’s, the White House selected the Post as its target. Newspapers around the country reported the President’s men’s anger; by setting its credibility against the newspaper’s, the White House gave the Post’s allegations greater currency. Subsequent telephone records published by The New York Times documented calls involving Donald Segretti, the White House, Dwight Chapin, and Howard Hunt. Those records concerned a broader network of political operations, not the fund’s authorization chain, but they made it harder to dismiss the investigation as unsupported insinuation.

Later developments placed the allegations in a still larger account of responsibility. Jeb Stuart Magruder told federal prosecutors that Mitchell and White House Counsel John Dean had approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation, and that they later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. Those later claims went beyond what the fund report itself had established; they should not be mistaken for proof that its money directly paid for the eavesdropping. In his April 30 address, Nixon accepted responsibility for the actions of the campaign leadership while announcing the resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The next day, press secretary Ronald Ziegler apologized publicly to the Post and its reporters for his earlier criticism, acknowledging that the newspaper had been wronged in light of events. The fund story’s lasting force came from the steps it made visible—secret money, delegated authorization, and carefully bounded denials—without pretending that every step in the larger conspiracy had already been proven.