Nixon's Fixers and the Paper Trail of the Deputy Special Prosecutor
By Desmond Okafor ·
The attorneys for a resigned president fought a quiet war over which files the law could touch, leaving a map of what Richard Nixon feared most.
Richard Nixon’s presidency ended in the shame of resignation, but the wreckage he left behind was a minefield of buried evidence. The men he hired to stop the leaks ended up stealing the secrets of the state, leaving a trail of ruined lives and a corrupted justice system.
This account is drawn from an archival scope-and-content description rather than the records' own pages. What survives is a ledger of a struggle—a series of requests and refusals that outline the exact boundaries of a cover-up. The records, maintained by the Office of the Deputy Special Prosecutor, an entity tasked with the independent investigation of corruption, consist of "copies of correspondence with the White House and attorneys for Richard M. Nixon concerning requests for documents of interest to the various task forces" (the record).
Room 16 and the Art of the Leak
The centerpiece of this paper trail is the Plumbers Task Force. The public record establishes the Plumbers, also known as the Room 16 Project, as a covert White House Special Investigations Unit created a week after the Pentagon Papers hit the press in 1971. Nixon designed them to be his "fixers," a unit meant to stop the bleeding of classified information. They began as a response to leaks but quickly devolved into a criminal enterprise, culminating in the botched break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who had exposed the lies of the Vietnam War.
The record identifies the Plumbers as a primary focus of the document requests. Here, the connection is visceral: the very men tasked with "plugging leaks" became the leak themselves, their illegal activities eventually leading to the Watergate break-in. The Plumbers were not merely employees; they were the physical manifestation of Nixon's paranoia, operating from the shadows of the White House, the official workplace of the president and the nerve center of the Executive Office of the President.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the desk's reading is that these records document the mechanics of refusal rather than the evidence of guilt. The record does not give us the damning memos or the lists of targets; it gives us the correspondence about the requests for those documents. It is a record of the fence, not the garden. The focus is on the friction between the Deputy Special Prosecutor and Nixon’s legal team, a choreographed dance of "we cannot provide this" and "you are not entitled to that."
The Dairy and the Ambassador
Beyond the Plumbers, the record lists a series of other specialized units: the Campaign Contributions (Dairy) Task Force, the Campaign Contributions (Ambassadors) Task Force, the International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) Task Force, and the Dirty Tricks Task Force. For each of these, the record establishes they were units of interest to the prosecution, but the specifics of their operational histories are not on file in this series.
The naming convention here is telling. The public record shows Nixon's administration as a monolith of power, but the record breaks that power into granular, almost absurd categories. Why a "Dairy" task force? Why separate "Ambassadors" from general campaign contributions?
The pattern suggests a strategy of compartmentalization. By breaking systemic political corruption into isolated financial or administrative incidents—splitting the graft into "Dairy" and "ITT" silos—the administration could treat each as a localized error rather than a centralized policy of bribery. It is the administrative equivalent of a firebreak, designed to ensure that if the "Dairy" files burned, the "Ambassadors" files would remain untouched.
A Buffer for the Prosecutor
The records were not held by the Special Prosecutor himself, but by the Office of the Deputy Special Prosecutor. In the hierarchy of an investigation, the Deputy is often the one who does the grinding work, the one who handles the daily skirmishes with opposing counsel.
This is where the connection between the legal strategy and the political survival of the era becomes clear. The White House and Nixon's attorneys were not negotiating with the face of the prosecution; they were negotiating with the office that managed the paperwork. The desk's reading is that the administrative burden of tracking these requests was delegated to the Deputy level specifically to insulate the Special Prosecutor from the friction of direct negotiation. It allowed the head of the investigation to remain the impartial arbiter while the Deputy absorbed the bruising blows of the White House's resistance.
Moreover, the absence of intelligence agency principals in this specific correspondence is a glaring gap. The Plumbers were heavily entwined with former intelligence operatives, yet the records show a dialogue between lawyers and the White House, not between the prosecutor and the CIA or FBI. The pattern suggests that these records track only the "political" layer of the conspiracy. The "operational" layer—the actual spying, the break-ins, the wiretaps—was handled through non-prosecutorial channels or scrubbed from the correspondence before it reached the Deputy's desk.
The Map of Executive Privilege
The correspondence between the White House and the Special Prosecutor's office was never about the pursuit of truth; it was about the definition of boundaries. Every request for a document was a test of how far the law could reach into the private thoughts of a president. The attorneys for Richard Nixon were not defending a man; they were defending a concept: the idea that the president is a law unto himself.
The records function as a map of Executive Privilege. By looking at what the White House refused to hand over to the Plumbers Task Force or the Dirty Tricks Task Force, we can see exactly which categories of data the administration deemed untouchable. The redactions and the gaps in the record are not accidents; they are the fingerprints of the people who decided what the public was allowed to know about the subversion of their own democracy.
The desk's reading is that a full release of the documents requested in these files—not just the records of the requests themselves—would show a seamless integration of state power and criminal activity. The current record shows the armor; the missing pages would show the wound. The withholding of the actual evidence, leaving us only with the correspondence about the evidence, protects the legacy of a system that believes the president's secrets are more important than the law's requirements.
Who paid for this? The American public paid in the currency of trust. When the government creates "Dirty Tricks" units and then spends years arguing over which documents the prosecutors can see, it isn't just protecting a president; it is protecting the precedent. The pattern established here—the use of specialized task forces to hide systemic graft and the use of deputy-level buffers to stall justice—did not end with Nixon's resignation. It became the blueprint for every subsequent administration that found the truth inconvenient.