Paul Niemeier and others sued Watergate Special Prosecution Force for files

By Desmond Okafor · August 17, 2026

From 1976 to 1977, citizens and news syndicates fought in court to force the special counsel tasked with the Nixon investigation to surrender its secrets.

Paul J. Niemeier and Richard L. Bast spent years in court fighting to see the files the government had compiled on them. Their struggle showed that even a special force tasked with exposing a presidency's lies could become a wall of silence.

For those of us who have spent years helping families navigate the wreckage of government records, there is a specific kind of cruelty in the gap between a promise of transparency and the reality of a redaction. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) was established as a special counsel—a role designed, according to the public record, to investigate suspected wrongdoing when a conflict of interest makes it impossible for the usual prosecuting authority to act. The WSPF was the tool used to break the Nixon cover-up, but as the archival records show, the force itself eventually became the target of its own laws.

Civil No. 76-C-1244

According to a scope-and-content description from the US National Archives, the WSPF was named as a defendant in six separate lawsuits brought under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Privacy Act. These were not mere requests for information; they were legal battles fought across different jurisdictions. Paul J. Niemeier took his fight to the Northern District of Illinois in case Civil No. 76-C-1244. Richard L. Bast fought in the Eastern District of Virginia under Civil No. 76-176-A.

Other plaintiffs were not individuals, but organizations pushing for a broader public accounting. The file's catalogue entry records cases brought by Common Cause (Civil No. 77-0297), Funds for Constitutional Government (Civil No. 76-1820), and a group called Open American (Civil No. 76-0129). Even the press joined the fray, with the Congressional News Syndicate filing suit in 1977 (Civil No. 77-0882).

These cases represent a fundamental conflict over consent. The Privacy Act is intended to give individuals a measure of control over the data the state collects on them—a digital and paper-based version of bodily autonomy. When the WSPF refused to release these records, it wasn't just hiding evidence; it was denying these people the right to know how they were being perceived, categorized, and potentially endangered by a special prosecution force with immense power.

"Records Relating to Freedom of Information Act"

What remains in the National Archives is not the evidence the plaintiffs were seeking, but the record of the fight to get it. The archival description lists the contents of this series as a collection of "letters received," "copies of WSPF responses," and "office memorandums."

More telling are the "working papers" and "drafts of affidavits." In the world of government secrecy, a draft is where the real negotiation happens. It is where a lawyer decides which fact is too dangerous to include and which redaction is a legal necessity versus a political convenience. The presence of these drafts suggests a deliberative process of deciding how much of the truth the public—and the plaintiffs—could be trusted with.

This series also contains the procedural machinery of secrecy: copies of court orders, status reports made to the court, and the briefs and motions filed by the WSPF to maintain its silence. These documents are the fossils of a struggle for sunlight, recording every motion to quash and every legal maneuver used to keep the files closed.

Administrative Section

There is a revealing divide in how the WSPF organized its secrets. The archival catalogue shows that while the "Watergate Task Force" handled the prosecutorial side of the house—including the "Litigative Memorandums" concerning the prosecution of U.S. v. Mitchell, et al.—it was the "Administrative Section" that maintained the FOIA and Privacy Act litigation files.

This division created a two-tiered system. On one side, the Task Force used the full weight of the federal government to hunt down figures like John Dean, Fred La Rue, Jeb Magruder, and Herbert Porter. On the other side, the Administrative Section acted as the shield, managing the lawsuits from people like Niemeier and Bast who wanted to know what that hunt had uncovered.

Related archival series mention the existence of "Witness Files" containing FBI interviews and grand jury testimony transcripts. These are the raw materials of a prosecution, the intimate details of lives dismantled during a criminal investigation. The fact that the WSPF fought six separate lawsuits to keep these and other records from the public indicates that the "Special" in Special Prosecution Force also applied to the level of secrecy they felt entitled to maintain.

We know from the related records that the WSPF was deeply immersed in the prosecution of high-level officials. But the catalogue entry for the FOIA litigation tells a different story—one of ordinary citizens and advocacy groups staring at a closed door. The records describe the responses the WSPF sent back to these plaintiffs, but they do not record the human cost of the wait.

The catalogue describes the files as containing "copies of WSPF responses" and "working papers," but it does not say if Paul Niemeier, Richard Bast, or the advocates at Common Cause ever actually saw the truth they were suing for.