CRP hush-money payments to Watergate defendants

CRP hush-money payments to Watergate defendants turned a secret campaign fund into evidence of a continuing effort to contain the Watergate case. James McCord’s testimony connected the payments to the Committee for the Re-election of the President; Hugh Sloan’s account traced money from Maurice Stans’s safe to Fred LaRue after the arrests. The evidence exposed a possible financial mechanism for buying silence, while leaving the precise amount, the full chain of direction, and what prosecutors knew at the time unsettled.

The fund behind the payments

The reported payments emerged from a fund that had already drawn scrutiny as a source of money for political espionage. The Washington Post reported that funds for the Watergate operation were controlled by several principal assistants to John Mitchell and held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The account contained more than $300,000 for sensitive political projects; G. Gordon Liddy received money from it, records had been destroyed, and Sloan’s resignation was linked to his suspicions about Watergate. Those details made the fund more than a campaign-finance irregularity: it supplied a possible route connecting political operations to the men arrested at the Watergate complex.

The earlier movement of money offered a concrete, but not complete, trail. A $25,000 cashier’s check 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 Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000, and the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. That transaction documented the movement of campaign money into the espionage fund’s orbit; it did not, by itself, establish that this particular deposit financed hush payments. The distinction matters: the later reporting connected a continuing pool of secret cash to payments after the arrests, but the available account did not trace each dollar from the April deposit to a defendant.

Disclosure and the July transfer

For months, the reporters had heard that the secret fund did not simply disappear after the arrests. Sloan had told them that money was moved from Stans’s safe to LaRue, but they could not confirm the account or establish how the money had been spent. McCord’s testimony changed the evidentiary picture: he testified that cash payoffs to the Watergate conspirators had come directly from the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The connection had been suspected since January; the testimony supplied an inside statement linking the organization to the payments.

A Committee for the Re-election of the President official, previously friendly but unwilling to discuss specifics, reacted to the disclosures with anger and disillusionment. When Bob Woodward raised LaRue’s involvement, the official said LaRue would not lie under oath and would say that he had helped pay the men off. This was a prediction about what LaRue would say if questioned, not a report of sworn testimony already given. Woodward then called Sloan, who was not surprised by the allegation; Sloan said he had always suspected the worst, though that did not make him an eyewitness to the payment itself.

Sloan placed the transfer in July, after the arrests but before the money had become public. He said Stans approved it and described keeping cash on hand as a way of doing business. Sloan presumed someone had told Stans to make the transfer, but explicitly lacked knowledge of who that might have been. His account therefore supported the existence and timing of a transfer from Stans’s safe to LaRue, while leaving the source of any instruction unverified.

The amount and the conduits

When Woodward tried to establish the sum, Sloan would not give a direct figure. The two circled estimates in their old guessing game: more than $100,000, more than $50,000, between $50,000 and $100,000, and then which side of $75,000. Sloan placed the amount within $5,000 of $75,000. Woodward thought it was probably $80,000 but decided to use $70,000. The published figure was thus a cautious reporting choice, not an exact accounting established by Sloan’s answer.

McCord’s testimony also identified possible conduits. He named Kenneth Parkinson and Dorothy Hunt, the wife of E. Howard Hunt, as people through whom payments reached the conspirators. LaRue’s reported role and these alleged intermediaries suggested that the money did not necessarily pass directly from a central fund to each defendant. The accounts offered pieces of a payment chain, but they did not provide a complete ledger showing every transfer, recipient, or participant’s knowledge.

Authorization, silence, and the investigation

Separate testimony about the earlier espionage fund sharpened the question of authority without resolving every link in the later payments. Sloan said that when he was first approached for campaign money, he telephoned Mitchell at the Justice Department and Mitchell told him to distribute it. Such calls began in 1971; Mitchell initially was the sole person authorizing expenditures, with authority later passed to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder. This account implicated senior campaign figures in the operation of the fund, but did not establish that Mitchell personally authorized the specific July transfer to LaRue or each payment to a defendant.

The discovery took place amid signs of pressure and enforced silence inside the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Employees Bernstein visited at home were frightened; one pleaded with him to leave before others saw him, and another began to cry. The committee bookkeeper told Bernstein that people had already lied to the grand jury, and said that Sally Harmony and others had lied. Sloan later described an unwritten instruction to hold ranks and keep the organization together, which he considered consistent with lying. These accounts help explain why a fund and its transfers could remain obscured, but they do not independently prove who directed the hush payments.

Sloan said he had not been asked by prosecutors about the money transferred from Stans’s safe. A Justice Department official told Woodward that prosecutors were examining every penny of committee money to determine whether it had gone to payoffs. That answer showed that the inquiry encompassed the question, not that investigators had already confirmed this particular transfer as a payment source. The distinction between evidence, suspicion, and investigative scope remained central to the reporting.

The payments also belonged to a wider effort to contain the consequences of Watergate, but separate acts should not be collapsed into one proven transaction. Jeb Stuart Magruder told prosecutors, according to three sources, that Mitchell and John Dean had approved and helped plan the bugging operation, and that they later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. In another episode, Alexander Butterfield’s account, relayed by Deep Throat, described instructions concerning E. Howard Hunt’s files and their destruction. Together these disclosures placed the payment allegations within a broader pattern of concealment; they did not make every alleged act part of the same cash transfer. The central revelation was narrower and more consequential: the secret campaign fund appeared to have survived the arrests and may have been used to keep the Watergate defendants silent, while the record still left important questions of amount, authorization, and prosecutorial knowledge open.