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In June 1976, one of the team members has disclosed to TIME, they swooped down on Washington's J. Edgar Hoover Building, "virtually with guns drawn," in hopes of seizing evidence before it could be hidden or destroyed. The raiding party took control of a number of rooms, and "we combed the place." Nonetheless, they came away emptyhanded. By granting immunity to 53 FBI agents in exchange for information, Pottinger eventually built a case against members of the FBI's Squad 47, based in the bureau's New York office, which spearheaded the Weatherman investigation.
Bell reviewed this evidence last April and approved an indictment against the supervisor of Squad 47, John Kearney, 55, on five counts of illegal wiretapping, intercepting mail and conspiracy. That action drew a storm of protest from the FBI's ranks. By Bell's estimate, letters ran 100 to 1 against his decision. Some agents took the unprecedented step of even picketing the FBI's New York headquarters. Morale sagged in FBI offices across the country.
The Attorney General promised further prosecutions. But, obviously reluctant to pursue the case further, he delayed on the chance that the judge in any Kearney trial would throw out the indictment. Instead, Kearney's lawyer, famed Washington Defense Attorney Edward Bennett Williams, went to court and demanded so much information from the FBI that the trial was repeatedly postponed.
In December, Bell decided to concentrate on tracking down the FBI decision makers who had ordered the illegal actions. When he announced the indictments of Gray, Felt and Miller, he dropped the charges against Kearney. According to Bell, his problem was that while trying to investigate the FBI, he also had to run it. Said he: "I have to consider what's good for the FBI."
Bell's strategy of prosecuting only high-level officials kicked up another storm: four of the Justice Department attorneys involved in the investigation resigned in protest. Said Stephen Horn, one of the four: "There were a whole lot of agents stonewalling us. We could not investigate. Everybody knew it."
TIME has learned that the cover-up included not telling investigators immediately about documents stored for five years in a filing cabinet in the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Among them were memos from Mark Felt—dubbed "one-liners" by investigators—giving Edward Miller explicit orders for break-ins and other illegal activities. The cabinet, say FBI sources, was tucked away in a corner of a little-used public room of the building and only came to light when a low-level employee suggested that it was an eyesore and should be thrown out. But it was opened first—and lo, the much-sought-after evidence was inside. Justice Department officials find the FBI's story bizarre to the point of incredibility—one calls it a "fairy tale." The investigators believe that someone stashed the documents in the cabinet to hide them, that the "discovery" was actually a result of pressure from their probe and that whoever hid the documents apparently decided that they could no longer be safely withheld.