Chapter+2

Chapter 2 - JUNE 17, 1972 / AUGUST 1, 1972 / OCTOBER 10, 1972

By: Jenn T, Chloe C, Tori T, Brian K, and Taylor =June 17, 1972= One June 17, 1972 five men were caught by the police as they were attempting to break into and wiretap the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel and office complex. They were found to be in possession of burglary tools, cameras, film, and pen-size tear gas guns. Three of the men were soon found to be Cuban exiles, while one was Cuban-American. Their leader was none other than James McCord, a former CIA agent and a security coordinator for President Richard Nixon’s Committee for the Reelection of the President. Two days later John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denied any connection to the crime. Later, police also charged E. Howard Hunt Jr., a former White House aide, and G. Gordon Liddy, a CREEP finance counsel, as accomplices to the crime. The men were waiting now for their trial, and in the meantime Nixon insisted that he had no connection to the scandal, allowing him to be successfully reelected for a second term. At the trial, during the conviction, the U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica read a letter from McCord stating that Nixon was indeed involved, and that the White House did an extensive cover-up to hide any evidence connecting them to the break-in.

__**August 1, 1972**__

A $25,000 cashier's check from the Nixon Administration (Committee to Re-elect the President) was deposited into Bernard L. Barker's account. Barker was a real estate owner and one of the conspirators in the break in. He denied all involvement in the Watergate scandal saying claiming he had “no idea” where the check came from and why. The check was written by the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Fla., and sent to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the President's campaign finance chairman for the Midwest. The check was then transferred into Barker’s account. When asked about the deposit, Dahlberg said, "In the process of fund-raising I had accumulated some cash...so I recall making a cash deposit while I was in Florida and getting a cashier's check made out to myself. I didn't want to carry all that cash into Washington." This check was vital to the prosecution of Nixon’s staff as it was the tip of the iceberg as to how his administration, mainly CREEP, was able to operate.

Bernard Barker after his arrest.


 * __October 10, 1972__**

FBI agents establish that the Watergate break-in stems from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon reelection effort. Both at the White House and within the President's re-election committee, the intelligence-sabotage operation was commonly called the "offensive security" program of the Nixon forces, according to investigators. The most significant finding of the whole Watergate investigation was that numerous specific acts of political sabotage and spying were all traced to this offensive security which was conceived and directed in the White House and by President Nixon's re-election committee. There were three attorneys have told The Washington Post that, as early as mid-1971, they were asked to work as agents provocateurs on behalf of the Nixon campaign. They said they were asked to undermine the primary campaigns of Democratic candidates by a man who has been identified in FBI reports as an operative of the Nixon re-election organization. All three lawyers, including one who is an assistant attorney general of Tennessee, said they turned down the offers, which purportedly included the promise of "big jobs" in Washington after President Nixon's re-election. Law enforcement sources said that probably the best example of the sabotage was the fabrication by a White House aide of a celebrated letter to the editor alleging that Sen. Edmund S. Muskie condoned a racial slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent as "Canucks." This letter was published in the Manchester Union Leader Feb 24, less than two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. It in part triggered Muskie's politically damaging "crying speech" in front of the newspaper's office. In the end federal agents found out that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential candidates and disrupting their campaigns.



//http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23799.html// //http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0861886.html// //[]// [] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/watergate/chronology.htm#1970 [] [] [] []
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