# Nixon's re-election committee conspired to break into Democratic headquarters and the White House covered it up

**Verdict: Proven.** Confirmed by the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the courts, and Nixon's own White House tapes: the only conspiracy on this site that removed a sitting president.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: 1970s · First circulated: 1972 · Believed by: Confirmed by the official record; Nixon resigned rather than face conviction
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/watergate

## Summary
Five men were caught bugging Democratic Party headquarters in June 1972 with ties running straight back to the president's own re-election committee, and the ensuing cover-up, unravelled by reporters, a Senate committee, the courts and Nixon's own secret tapes, ended in the only resignation of a U.S. president in history.

## The claim
That operatives connected to President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign (the Committee to Re-elect the President, derisively nicknamed 'CREEP') broke into and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate complex, and that Nixon and senior aides then conspired to obstruct the FBI investigation, pay hush money to the burglars, and destroy evidence, all of which was true.

## Origin and timeline
- 17 Jun 1972: Five men are arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., caught planting listening devices and photographing documents.
- Jun–Sep 1972: The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, aided by a source later revealed as FBI Associate Director Mark Felt ('Deep Throat'), report links between the burglars, CIA veteran E. Howard Hunt, and Nixon's re-election committee.
- 23 Jun 1972: In a taped Oval Office conversation later called the 'smoking gun,' Nixon instructs Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to have the CIA tell the FBI to halt its investigation on false national-security grounds.
- 7 Feb 1973: The Senate votes to create the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin, to investigate the break-in and campaign activities.
- 13 Jul 1973: Presidential aide Alexander Butterfield tells the Ervin Committee, under questioning, that Nixon secretly recorded nearly all his Oval Office conversations, turning the case from testimony into evidence.
- 24 Jul 1974: The Supreme Court rules unanimously in United States v. Nixon that the president must surrender the subpoenaed tapes to the special prosecutor.
- 27–30 Jul 1974: The House Judiciary Committee approves three Articles of Impeachment against Nixon, for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.
- 5 Aug 1974: Nixon releases the 23 June 1972 tape transcript, admitting for the first time that he had ordered the CIA to obstruct the FBI's inquiry days after the break-in.
- 9 Aug 1974: Nixon resigns the presidency, the only U.S. president ever to do so, and is succeeded by Gerald Ford.
- 1 Jan 1975: A federal jury convicts former Attorney General John Mitchell and former White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The break-in was tied directly to Nixon's own re-election campaign, not a rogue operation.
  Evidence: Confirmed. Court records and the Ervin Committee's final report trace the burglars' funding and direction to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), through figures including CRP officials G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord and former Attorney General John Mitchell, who by then chaired the campaign.
- Claim: The White House orchestrated a cover-up rather than simply distancing itself from the burglars.
  Evidence: Confirmed by Nixon's own recorded voice. The 23 June 1972 tape (released under Supreme Court order and now held by the National Archives) captures Nixon directing Haldeman to have the CIA falsely tell the FBI that national security was at stake, in order to shut down the Bureau's investigation.
- Claim: Hush money was paid to keep the burglars quiet.
  Evidence: Confirmed by grand jury indictments and trial testimony. White House counsel John Dean testified, and subsequent convictions established, that campaign funds were funneled to defendants including E. Howard Hunt to secure their silence and guilty pleas.
- Claim: This was pursued and proven through partisan accusation rather than institutional process.
  Evidence: Not accurate as a characterization of how the case was actually resolved. The Ervin Committee that exposed the taping system, the federal judge (John Sirica) who pressed for the truth, the Supreme Court that ordered the tapes released 8–0, and the House Judiciary Committee that approved impeachment articles with bipartisan votes, together constitute the ordinary institutional and judicial process, not a one-sided campaign.
- Claim: Nixon personally knew about and approved obstructing the investigation, not just the actions of overzealous subordinates.
  Evidence: Confirmed in Nixon's own words. The tape recordings (which Nixon fought to keep secret all the way to the Supreme Court) capture him personally directing the cover-up within days of the break-in, which is why his own lawyers concluded impeachment and conviction were no longer avoidable.

## Why people believe it
- Because it is proven beyond any reasonable dispute: by a Senate committee, a unanimous Supreme Court, a bipartisan House committee, criminal convictions, and the president's own recorded voice.
- It is the reference case for 'the cover-up is worse than the crime': the break-in alone might have been a minor scandal, but the conspiracy to obstruct justice destroyed a presidency.
- It permanently changed how Americans read official denials, giving rise to the '-gate' suffix now attached to nearly every subsequent political scandal.
- Because it happened at the very top of government, it is often invoked (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) as proof that any powerful institution might be capable of similar conduct.

## Open questions
- What was actually said during the 18½ minutes erased from a White House tape of Nixon and H.R. Haldeman talking on 20 June 1972 (three days after the break-in) and who erased it, has never been established. Rose Mary Woods testified she might have caused up to five minutes of accidental erasure while transcribing, a demonstration reporters nicknamed the 'Rose Mary Stretch'; a forensic panel appointed by Judge Sirica instead found at least five separate, deliberate erasures, and no one was ever criminally charged over it. A 2003 National Archives attempt to recover the audio with modern forensic technology failed outright, and the original tape is preserved in case future technology succeeds where that one could not.
- What the burglars were actually looking for inside the DNC offices, and who ordered the operation, is still debated. No one was ever charged with ordering the break-in, the burglars' own later accounts conflict, and proposed targets have ranged from DNC chairman Larry O'Brien to financier Howard Hughes' payments to Nixon associates to a phone line used by a minor Democratic staffer that investigators could never fully explain. Some historians argue the burglars may have been pursuing more than one of these objectives at once, without even telling each other.
- At least two other subpoenaed White House recordings (a June 1972 Nixon phone call with campaign chairman John Mitchell and part of an April 1973 meeting with John Dean) turned up missing entirely rather than merely damaged, and White House lawyers gave shifting, inconsistent explanations for why. Neither recording was ever located or definitively explained.
- How much related conduct was never fully uncovered is unknowable. Gerald Ford's pardon in September 1974 covered any federal offense Nixon 'committed or may have committed' as president, closing off the criminal trial that might have tested his precise advance knowledge of the break-in, while the Senate committee's own final report catalogued extensive campaign surveillance and 'dirty tricks' beyond the core conspiracy that were documented but never exhaustively prosecuted person by person.

## Sources
- Final Report of the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (Watergate Committee / Ervin Committee), U.S. Senate (1974): https://www.senate.gov/about/resources/pdf/watergate-final-report-1974.pdf
- Articles of Impeachment Adopted by the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary (1974): https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/articles-impeachment-adopted-the-house-representatives-committee-the-judiciary
- Transcript of a Recording of a Meeting Between the President and H.R. Haldeman, June 23, 1972 ('Smoking Gun' tape, Conversation 741-002), Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum / National Archives (1974): https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/trial/exhibit_01.pdf
- United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, Supreme Court of the United States (1974)
- United States v. Mitchell, 377 F. Supp. 1326 (D.D.C. 1974), U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (1974): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/377/1326/2343516/
- Records of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, National Archives and Records Administration (1977): https://www.archives.gov/research/investigations/watergate
- Archivist Accepts Watergate Tape Panel Recommendations, National Archives and Records Administration (2003): https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2003/nr03-43
- Proclamation 4311—Granting Pardon to Richard Nixon, The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara (1974): https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4311-granting-pardon-richard-nixon
- Watergate's biggest mysteries remain unsolved, National Constitution Center (Scott Bomboy) (2016): https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/watergatee28099s-biggest-mysteries-remain-debated

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