Charles Colson and the Legal Gambit to Silence Watergate
By Marcus Boone ·
He was the first of Nixon's inner circle to go to prison, but before the cell door closed, he tried to burn his indictment by claiming the news had poisoned the jury.
The men who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters were just the beginning of a campaign to dismantle the American legal system from the inside. By May 1974, the first of those insiders, Charles Colson, was fighting for his freedom by attempting to turn the public's knowledge of his crimes into a legal shield.
Colson served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon and earned the reputation of the administration's "hatchet man" for his willingness to execute the president's most aggressive impulses. He would eventually be named as one of the Watergate Seven and plead guilty to obstruction of justice for his attempt to defame Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. He became the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges, serving seven months in the federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama.
In a desperate bid to avoid that cell, Colson attempted to flip the script of the Watergate scandal. On May 1, 1974, he filed a motion to dismiss the indictment against him. His argument was simple: the public knew too much. To support this, he submitted "Appendix B," a collection of "Press Clippings and Summaries of Television News Coverage Relating to Watergate" (The Document). In this filing, Colson argued that "massive pre-trial publicity had precluded the possibility of a fair, impartial trial" (The Document).
This was not a request for justice, but a tactical attempt to weaponize the First Amendment against the judicial process. Colson was not asking the court to ignore the facts of the case; he was asking the court to ignore the jury's ability to process those facts because the media had already told them what to think.
The Hatchet Man's Mirror
There is a profound irony in Colson claiming that the press had rendered his trial unfair. The public record establishes that Colson's own career was defined by the active destruction of fairness. His attempt to defame Daniel Ellsberg was not a passive act of politics; it was a calculated effort to use the machinery of the state to ruin a man's reputation and invalidate his evidence.
Now, the man who had spent years attempting to steer public perception through coercion and smear campaigns found himself terrified of a public that had finally seen through the curtain. The record shows a man who believed the press should be a tool for the powerful, but who cried foul the moment that tool began to carve into his own skin. By submitting Appendix B, Colson was attempting to turn the transparency of the Watergate scandal—the very thing that brought the administration's crimes to light—into a legal defect.
The Corporate Firewall
While Colson was using the press as a shield for his own survival, the administration was maintaining a strict separation between the political noise of Watergate and a deeper, more systemic rot. In related archival series, we find "Witness Files"—individual records on persons who were witnesses or possible witnesses in the International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) investigation (The Document).
International Telephone and Telegraph was a global telecommunications giant that became the center of a separate scandal involving allegations that the administration had offered to intervene in an antitrust suit against the company in exchange for political contributions. The presence of these separate witness files suggests a deliberate strategy of containment.
The desk's reading is that the administration maintained a strict firewall between the political optics of the Watergate scandal and the systemic corporate corruption of the ITT investigation. By treating them as unrelated legal threats, they hoped to keep the public focused on the "third-rate burglary" of Watergate while the more profound arrangements between the White House and corporate capital remained in the shadows. The ITT files are not press clippings; they are the internal bookkeeping of corporate influence, a different species of crime that the administration did not want bleeding into the public narrative of the Watergate trials.
The Bellwether Strategy
Colson's motion to dismiss was not a lone act of desperation. When viewed alongside the "Presidential Tape Recordings Provided Pursuant to the Grand Jury Subpoena," the pattern suggests a larger legal experiment (The Document). The White House was forced to turn over these tapes in July 1973, providing a raw, unfiltered record of the administration's intent to obstruct justice.
If the tapes provided the evidence, Appendix B provided the potential escape hatch. The desk's reading is that Colson was being used as a legal bellwether to test the viability of "pretrial publicity" as a mechanism for dismissing indictments. If the court accepted that the press had poisoned the well for the "hatchet man," that same precedent could be applied to higher-ranking principals in the administration. Colson was the first to be imprisoned, but he was also the first to test whether the administration could successfully argue that the truth was too widely known to be legally processed.
A Performance of Effect
Crucially, Appendix B is not an intelligence file; it is a curated exhibit. It consists of newspaper clippings and TV summaries—the same materials any citizen could have found at a newsstand or watched on a living room television. It lacks the internal analysis, the sentiment tracking, or the counter-intelligence responses that would accompany a government's actual media monitoring program.
This is a distinction with a massive consequence. The document shows the effect of the coverage—the headlines and the summaries—but it carefully omits the intent. The pattern suggests that the file is a curated exhibit of effect rather than a record of intent, omitting the internal White House strategies used to provoke or steer the very media coverage Colson claimed was "massive."
Colson was not a victim of a media frenzy; he was a participant in a managed ecosystem of information. The administration did not just watch the news; they attempted to manufacture it. By presenting the clippings as an external force that had "precluded" a fair trial, Colson was attempting to cast the White House as a passive observer of its own downfall.
The desk's reading is that the still-withheld pages of the administration's internal communications would show that the "massive publicity" was not a chaotic accident, but a battlefield the White House believed it could control until the tapes proved otherwise. Colson's motion was the final attempt to use the narrative of "media bias" to protect the architects of a criminal enterprise.
In the end, the gamble failed. Colson went to Maxwell Prison, and the precedent he sought to establish—that the truth is a form of prejudice—did not save the men around him. But the strategy lived on. The attempt to disqualify the legal process by citing the "poison" of public reporting became a blueprint for future administrations seeking to evade accountability. The pattern started with a hatchet man in a panic, but it ended by attempting to convince the American court system that the public's right to know is a threat to the defendant's right to a fair trial. The cost of this strategy was the erosion of the belief that the law applies equally to those who manufacture the news and those who merely report it.