William Bittman and the Legal Siege of E. Howard Hunt
By Harlan Pryce ·
A federal prosecutor turned defense attorney became a target of the Watergate Task Force in a maneuver to strip E. Howard Hunt of his legal secrets.
The sanctity of the attorney-client relationship is the only shield a defendant has against the total weight of the state. When the government decides that shield is too effective, it does not simply ask for the truth; it attempts to dismantle the shield by accusing the lawyer of the crime.
This is the precise machinery utilized against William O. Bittman, a man who spent the early part of his career as a federal prosecutor known for taking down Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. By the time of the Watergate scandal, Bittman had shifted to the defense, representing Everette Howard Hunt, a career CIA officer who had specialized in the violent overthrow of foreign governments—including the 1954 Guatemalan coup and the 1961 Bay of Pigs—before becoming one of the Nixon administration's "Plumbers" tasked with plugging government leaks.
I am writing this from an archival scope-and-content description, a finding aid that catalogues the contents of a file without providing the individual pages. The summary of these records, titled "Records of the Bittman Investigation," establishes that the government did not view Bittman as a mere legal representative, but as a target.
A Participant in the Cover-Up
The public record establishes a trajectory of power and betrayal: the Watergate Task Force, the initial body charged with investigating the break-in, turned its sights on the man defending one of the break-in's architects. The record states that Bittman was "initially suspected of being a participant in the Watergate cover-up" (Records of the Bittman Investigation).
This is a calculated legal pivot. If a lawyer is simply a lawyer, the conversations between him and his client are privileged and untouchable. But if the lawyer is a "participant" in the crime, the privilege vanishes under the crime-fraud exception. The government's goal was not to prosecute Bittman for the sake of justice, but to turn Bittman into a doorway through which they could enter Hunt's mind.
The desk's reading is that the investigation of the attorney was a tactical maneuver to circumvent attorney-client privilege and extract information from Hunt via legal pressure on his representative. By threatening Bittman with the status of a co-conspirator, the Task Force sought to force a choice: the lawyer's own survival or the client's silence.
The Paperwork of Pressure
The records maintained by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force—the successor to the Task Force, appointed specifically to handle the conflict of interest inherent in the Justice Department investigating its own superiors—document the grinding process of this pressure. The file contains "copies of appointment logs, and copies of subpoenas" (Records of the Bittman Investigation).
These are the fingerprints of a siege. Subpoenas and logs are not the tools of a casual inquiry; they are the tools of a coordinated effort to map every single contact, every meeting, and every whispered word between the prosecutor-turned-defender and the spy. The records are categorized into "planning and coordination files," "witness files," and "legal and factual analysis files" (Records of the Bittman Investigation).
There is a sharp irony here. Bittman, who had once used the full power of the federal government to dismantle the leadership of the Teamsters, found himself being dismantled by that same machinery. The state knows exactly how to use its resources to isolate a target. In this case, the target was the legal bond itself.
The Missing Ledger
What is missing from these records is as loud as what is present. The archival description lists "documentary evidence" and "witness files," but it makes no mention of financial audits, payment records, or the provenance of the funds used to pay Bittman's fees.
Everette Howard Hunt was a disgraced operative, a man whose career in the CIA had ended and whose reputation was in tatters. He was not a man of independent means, yet he employed a high-powered trial lawyer. The pattern suggests that the intelligence community's internal management of Hunt's legal strategy—and the funding required to maintain it—was kept entirely separate from the prosecutorial records.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the records omit the flow of money because that money would have revealed who was actually sponsoring Hunt's defense. The desk's reading is that the financial trail, which often serves as the actual evidence of a cover-up's sponsorship, was scrubbed or diverted to a channel that the Watergate Special Prosecution Force was either unable or unwilling to touch.
The Quiet Accommodation
The "Records of the Bittman Investigation" conclude not with a trial or a sentencing, but with "recommendations" (Records of the Bittman Investigation). There is no mention of a final indictment, a conviction, or a formal exoneration. The file documents the process of the probe—the planning, the subpoenas, the analysis—but it does not provide a dispositive outcome.
This gap is a signature. When a high-profile investigation into a legal representative ends without a public resolution, it usually means an accommodation was reached in the shadows. The desk's reading is that the final non-prosecution agreement that ended the investigation of Bittman was handled in a separate, more sensitive channel, far removed from the official files of the Special Prosecution Force.
This is how the state manages its failures. It applies maximum pressure to the periphery—the lawyer, the assistant, the witness—until the desired information is surrendered or the desired silence is bought. The records we have are the blueprints of the pressure, but the results of that pressure were kept off the books.
The pattern across these records reveals a government that viewed the law not as a set of rules to be followed, but as a series of obstacles to be bypassed. By targeting William Bittman, the Task Force attempted to weaponize the legal profession against its own practitioners.
If the still-withheld pages of this investigation were released, the desk's reading is that they would show exactly what "protected" information the investigators were attempting to reach—and exactly which intelligence assets were paying for the silence of E. Howard Hunt. The cost of this operation was not just the legal fees paid to a lawyer; it was the deliberate erosion of the attorney-client privilege, a precedent that ensures the state can always find a way to turn a defendant's own counsel into a witness for the prosecution.