Word: weicker
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Unable to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Richard Nixon, the Senate Watergate committee in January authorized its members to send written inquiries to the President. Last week Republican Lowell Weicker, one of the committee's most persistent interrogators, became the first to do so. His questions, supplemented by numerous citations from presidential statements and public testimony, pinpoint weaknesses in Nixon's position on Watergate. It is unlikely, however, that the President will reply. Among the most pointed of Weicker's eleven queries...
...Weicker notes, Nixon himself concedes that he discussed Executive clemency for the arrested Watergate burglars with Ehrlichman in July 1972. Nixon said he told Ehrlichman that "under no circumstances" could clemency be considered. But why did the topic arise at all if, as the White House was claiming at the time, the crime was insignificant and no one close to Nixon was in any way involved? Nixon said the subject came up "as a result of news reports that clemency might become a factor." But, says Weicker, no news stories referring to clemency at that time have been found...
...Weicker notes that the FBI'S Gray, the then Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and the Justice Department's then Criminal Division Chief Henry Petersen all denied in their Senate Watergate testimony that any orders for an investigation had come to them at that time from the President. Ehrlichman, according to Nixon, did not begin investigating Watergate until March 29. Since the White House concedes that Dean revealed his own role in the cover-up to Nixon on March 21, he would hardly have been the one to appoint to gather additional facts. Who if anyone, asks Weicker...
...cited by Weicker, the four participants at that March 22 meeting with Nixon testified that Nixon did not question them about Dean's claim that each was implicated in the coverup. According to H.R. Haldeman, the discussion centered on "approaches to dealing with the situation rather than a review of the facts...
...Weicker cites a federal law stating that it is "misprision of felony" for any citizen to fail to report a crime of which he has knowledge. While the law is widely ignored, it would seem a serious matter for a President to take no action when his own aides report criminal activity to him. Although Weicker does not say so, such failure might violate the President's oath to uphold...