Nixon's cover-up left a paper trail of potential witnesses and draft indictments
By Desmond Okafor ·
People caught in the orbit of the 1972 burglary were scrutinized in name files and draft indictments that tracked their every word for the Special Prosecution Force.
Potential witnesses in the Watergate cover-up were reduced to "name files," their lives dissected by federal agents and prosecutors to see who would break. For these individuals, the cost of proximity to power was the sudden, jarring transition from government employee or political operative to a target of a grand jury.
Name files
The US National Archives catalogue entry for a series titled "Witness Files" describes a collection of records focused on the people the government questioned during the investigation into the Nixon administration's efforts to hide the 1972 Democratic National Committee burglary. These were not just summaries; the archive's scope-and-content description notes that the files contain "copies of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports" and "Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) memorandums of interview."
When a person becomes a "name file," they cease to be a citizen with a private life and become a data point in a criminal strategy. The catalogue entry records that these files include grand jury testimony summaries and draft indictments. A draft indictment is a particular kind of psychological weight—a document that outlines exactly how the state intends to destroy a person's liberty, often circulated and analyzed as a "working paper" before it ever reaches a courtroom.
These records show a pipeline of pressure. The documents were collected by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia before the WSPF was even established, meaning the surveillance and questioning of these individuals began long before the specialized prosecution force took over. The files include not only the official reports but the raw correspondence—letters received and letters sent—that mapped the desperation and the deals of the era.
"Impressions formed"
The scrutiny did not stop with the suspects or the witnesses. The archival records for "Records Relating to Jury Selection" show that the state’s gaze extended to the ordinary citizens called to judge the case. The catalogue entry describes "information sheets on individual jurors" that contained "annotations reflecting impressions formed by Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) attorneys during questioning."
There is something deeply unsettling about the phrase "impressions formed." It suggests a process of psychological profiling where attorneys weren't just looking for legal impartiality, but were reading the souls and biases of jurors to determine how they could be managed. It is a reminder that in high-stakes political trials, the jury is often treated as another variable to be solved, rather than a group of peers.
This climate of monitoring extended to the very physical space of the investigation. The archives list "Records Concerning Office Visitors," which consist of sign-in cards, sign-out cards, and registers kept by the Federal Protective Service. Every person who entered the WSPF offices was logged, creating a permanent record of who was talking to whom, and when.
U.S. v. John Dean
The legal machinery documented in these archives processed a variety of actors in the Nixon circle. The "Other Watergate Cover-up Pleadings" series lists specific court filings for those caught in the dragnet. Among them are the records for U.S. v. John Dean (Criminal No. 886-73), U.S. v. Fred La Rue (Criminal No. 556-73), U.S. v. Jeb Magruder (Criminal No. 715-73), and U.S. v. Herbert Porter (Criminal No. 74-32).
While the public record of the Watergate scandal focuses on the eventual resignation of Richard Nixon in August 1974, these files remind us of the grinding legal work that happened in the shadows of the headlines. The records include a series on the "constitutional history of executive privilege," gathered by the Office of the Deputy Special Prosecutor. This was the intellectual battleground where the administration attempted to claim that the President was above the reach of the law, while the prosecutors worked to prove the opposite.
Across these various series, the pattern is one of total documentation. The state recorded the testimonies of the witnesses, the impressions of the jurors, and the arrivals of the visitors. The archival description for the pleadings ends with a mention of "motions to quash a grand jur," a fragment that captures the ongoing attempts by the accused to stop the machinery of the grand jury from turning.
The files remain as a ledger of how the Nixon administration's attempts to conceal its actions resulted in a secondary system of surveillance and profiling, directed at anyone who might have known too much.