Grand jury confidentiality obligation

The Grand jury confidentiality obligation required jurors to keep their deliberations and the testimony before them secret. During the Watergate investigation, its practical boundary became important when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein considered approaching jurors for information: the rule imposed a duty of silence on the jurors, while the reporters’ reading of the law indicated that asking them questions was not itself forbidden.

Scope of the Obligation

Consulting the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the reporters found that grand jurors took an oath to conceal both their deliberations and testimony given before the jury. The obligation, as they understood it, rested on the juror. The rules appeared to contain no prohibition on outsiders asking questions, though the lawyers advising The Washington Post urged extreme caution and recommended that the reporters simply ask whether a juror wanted to talk.

The Reporters’ Approach

The distinction between a juror’s duty and a reporter’s inquiry shaped a deliberately limited procedure. Woodward and Bernstein were to identify themselves, say that an anonymous mutual acquaintance had suggested the person knew something about Watergate, and ask whether the person was willing to discuss it. They would leave if the juror did not volunteer information without prompting, and would not mention the grand jury unless the juror did so first. Ben Bradlee emphasized that they must apply no pressure or cajoling.

Working separately over the first weekend of December, the reporters tried this approach with about half a dozen people. They came away with no information. Only one person volunteered that he was a grand juror, explaining that he regarded the secrecy oath as a sacred trust; the others denied knowing anything beyond what they had heard in the media. Their failure to obtain disclosures meant that the attempted inquiries yielded no breach of the obligation.

Judicial Response

After at least one juror told prosecutors that a Washington Post reporter had visited, the matter reached Judge John Sirica. In court, he recounted that jurors had been approached but said that, according to the transcript of the prosecutors’ discussion with the grand jury, no information had been disclosed and the investigation had not been compromised. He commended the jurors for remaining silent and reminded them that their oath bound their proceedings as sacred and secret.

Sirica also made clear that the approach itself was serious in the court’s view, addressing a warning to whoever had contacted the jurors. The episode therefore exposed two distinct limits: the reporters had found no rule forbidding an outsider to ask, but the jurors remained bound to secrecy, and the court treated attempts to reach them as a matter requiring caution even when no information had emerged.