Watergate Prosecutors Sifted Nixon's Secret Tapes for Other Crimes
By Miriam Adler ·
Private conversations captured without consent between 1971 and 1973 were sorted by prosecutors seeking crimes beyond the Watergate break-in, though many names remain in the dark.
Private citizens and government aides stepped into the Oval Office believing their conversations were confidential, only to be recorded as unwitting subjects of a presidential obsession. The cost was a total collapse of trust in the executive branch and the transformation of the White House into a listening post where the president could review the vulnerability of his guests long after they had left the room.
February 16, 1971
The file's catalogue entry records a series of typed transcripts derived from a larger collection: "Sound Recordings of Meetings and Telephone Conversations (Nixon Administration)," dated from February 16, 1971, to July 18, 1973. This period encompasses the height of the Nixon administration's power and its subsequent descent into paranoia. To a medical ethicist, the nature of these recordings is an affront; they represent a massive, non-consensual experiment in surveillance conducted by the head of state against his own subordinates and visitors.
For those two years, the Oval Office was not a place of diplomatic exchange or governance, but a recording studio for the benefit of one man. The people who entered that room—senators, cabinet members, foreign dignitaries—did not sign a waiver. They did not know they were being archived. They were treated as data points to be stored and later weaponized, their private tones and hesitant admissions preserved in a magnetic medium that the administration spent years trying to shield from the law.
"Other Than the Watergate Conspiracy"
History has a tendency to flatten the Nixon tapes into a single narrative: the "smoking gun" and the cover-up of the Democratic National Committee headquarters break-in. But the National Archives catalog reveals a different, wider scope of scrutiny. There is a specific series of transcripts dedicated to "Investigations Other Than the Watergate Conspiracy."
This distinction is critical. It indicates that the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) found enough evidence on those tapes to suggest that the corruption was not a single conspiracy, but a pattern. The WSPF was not just looking for the architects of a burglary; they were sifting through the recorded lives of countless individuals to find other crimes, other betrayals, and other abuses of power that had nothing to do with the events of June 17, 1972. The tapes became a map of a much larger landscape of wrongdoing, one that the prosecutors had to transcribe by hand just to make it searchable.
Deputy Special Prosecutor
According to the public record, a special counsel is a lawyer appointed to investigate cases where a conflict of interest exists for the usual prosecuting authority. The WSPF operated in this capacity, stepping into the void left by a compromised Department of Justice. The catalogue entry notes that the transcripts in this series were prepared by WSPF staff and maintained by the Office of the Deputy Special Prosecutor.
This suggests a rigorous, secondary layer of legal triage. While the primary Watergate task force handled the core conspiracy, the Deputy Special Prosecutor's office was the repository for the "other" investigations. They were the ones dealing with the fallout of Nixon's recording habit, translating hours of clandestine audio into typed records that could be used in court.
Related archival series show the breadth of this effort. The "Witness Files" include FBI interviews, WSPF memorandums, and witness affidavits. These are the paper trails of people whose lives were upended by the revelation that they had been recorded. The "Other Watergate Cover-up Pleadings" list names like John Dean, Fred La Rue, Jeb Magruder, and Herbert Porter—men who became the faces of the administration's legal collapse. But the existence of the "Other Than" series suggests there were others, people whose names did not make the front pages but whose voices were nonetheless captured and analyzed by the state.
Who was on the tapes?
Because we are looking at the catalogue's scope-and-content description rather than the transcripts themselves, the specific identities of those targeted in these "other" investigations remain obscured. We see the organizational chart of the WSPF and the notebooks of the grand jury room, but the actual words of the victims and suspects are locked in the files.
What we do know is that the WSPF received these recordings pursuant to a grand jury subpoena on July 23, 1973. From that moment, the tapes ceased to be Nixon's private library and became evidence. The typed transcripts served as the bridge between a secret recording and a public trial.
The record leaves us with a haunting gap: the full list of people whose privacy was violated for the sake of these "other" investigations. The catalogue describes the existence of the files, but it does not name every unconsenting subject caught in the web. We are left to wonder how many other lives were scrutinized in the quiet of the Deputy Special Prosecutor's office, far from the noise of the Watergate headlines.