Richard Nixon paid hush money and tried to frame the CIA
By Desmond Okafor ·
Silence was bought with cash and the CIA was used as a shield for the White House; the archival records of these crimes remain catalogued in the National Archives.
American voters spent years believing the White House was a sanctuary of law, while behind the scenes, a president bought the silence of his subordinates. The cost was the integrity of the executive branch and the reputations of intelligence officers used as pawns in a criminal cover-up.
For decades, the granular details of how the Nixon administration attempted to scrub its tracks have been housed in the US National Archives. A specific series of records, identified in the archives' catalogue as "Prosecution Memorandums," provides a map of the evidence the government gathered against its own chief executive. These are not the trial transcripts themselves, but the internal work product of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF)—the lawyers tasked with finding the truth when the usual channels of justice were compromised.
According to the public record, a special counsel is appointed specifically when a conflict of interest exists for the usual prosecuting authority. In the case of Watergate, the conflict was absolute: the Justice Department could not be expected to objectively prosecute the man who appointed its leadership. The WSPF was the remedy, and their internal memorandums show exactly how they weighed the evidence of a presidency in collapse.
"hush money"
The file's catalogue entry records that the series contains memorandums detailing the "liability of potential defendants resulting from the payment of 'hush money.'" This phrasing cuts through the political euphemisms of the era. The White House did not simply manage a crisis; it operated a payroll for silence.
The prosecutors were not just looking for the source of the funds, but calculating who among the conspirators had crossed the legal line from loyalty to criminal complicity. By tracking the liability of these "potential defendants," the WSPF was building a ledger of who had been bought and who could be flipped. These records were maintained by the Watergate Task Force, serving as a ledger of bribes that the administration hoped would never surface.
Framing the Agency
Perhaps the most cynical effort recorded in the archival description is the White House's attempt to use the intelligence community as a fall guy. The catalogue entry notes the existence of a "narrative chronology of events showing White House efforts to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the cover-up of Watergate-related activities."
This was not a passive failure of communication, but an active attempt to shift the blame. The administration sought to weave a narrative where the CIA's clandestine capabilities were the primary engine of the cover-up, effectively shielding the Oval Office by pointing toward the Agency's known history of covert action. The WSPF's narrative chronology suggests that the prosecutors saw this for what it was: a calculated effort to burn one government institution to save a man.
September 1972
The scope of the investigation is further anchored by two specific memorandums prepared by Earl Silbert, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. The catalogue entry indicates these documents summarize the status of the investigation at two critical junctures: September 1972 and June 1973.
September 1972 marks the period immediately following the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The gap between that date and June 1973 represents the window during which the cover-up tightened and the WSPF began to dismantle it. These memos capture the investigation in real-time, documenting the shift from a "third-rate burglary" to a systemic conspiracy involving the highest office in the land.
Beyond these memorandums, the National Archives holds related series that flesh out the WSPF's evidentiary trail. There are copies of transcripts from three different grand juries and typed transcripts of Presidential tape recordings. The prosecutors even kept an archive of news clippings and reports regarding the "constitutional history of executive privilege," the primary legal shield Nixon used to withhold evidence from the investigators.
Other records, such as the "Records Relating to Pre-Trial Statements," contain FBI interviews and Senate Select Committee testimony. These documents, along with the Prosecution Memorandums, form a comprehensive record of a government at war with itself.
The catalogue entry specifies that the Prosecution Memorandums in this series do not relate to the individuals prosecuted in U.S. v. Mitchell, et al. This leaves a lingering question about the "potential defendants" who were identified in the hush money memos but never saw the inside of a courtroom. The records describe the evidence and the liability, but they do not explain why certain names remained in the files and never appeared on an indictment.