THE ADMINISTRATION: The Fight Over the Future of the FBI

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California lawyer, Donald Segretti, who had been named in news accounts as having been hired to disrupt and spy on the campaign of Nixon's potential Democratic opponents. Segretti, too, had reportedly been paid out of secret cash from the re-election committee. Later, when three FBI agents insisted on pushing the Watergate investigation to question White House involvement, two of them were transferred by Gray to bureaus outside Washington and one retired rather than be transferred.

The heat—mainly from newsmen—continued, and the Justice Department eased its restrictions on Gray. He then permitted his agents to interview 14 White House aides. But he accepted the condition that Dean, who had been assigned by the President to conduct his own investigation and was not representing the White House aides, sit in. This could have discouraged any official who might have wanted to volunteer information implicating the White House.

When FBI agents similarly interviewed 58 employees of Nixon's re-election committee, Gray permitted top attorneys for that committee to listen. Worried about this inhibiting presence, three of those who were interviewed asked to see FBI agents alone. After they did so, Gray forwarded transcripts of their second interviews to Dean. One such employee, Judith Hoback, claimed that she told no one about the second interview—but was promptly summoned by her superiors at the committee and asked what she had secretly told the FBI.

Perhaps most damaging of all was Gray's admission to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had passed along to Dean summaries of the Watergate telephone conversations that had been illegally intercepted by the wiretappers. Thus if the convicted eavesdroppers had actually overheard anything that would be harmful to the Democrats, it was made available to the White House.

Under tough questioning by the Judiciary Committee on these and other points, Gray seemed genuinely injured by the notion that he had restricted his agents in the investigation. "I pushed the button on this investigative juggernaut," he insisted. "I couldn't have stopped them—no man could have stopped them." In cooperating with someone like Dean, he said, "you've got to operate on a basic presumption of regularity. He was counsel to the President of the United States." Gray had relayed information from the telephone taps to the White House because it was "within the official chain of command of the United States Government."

Turning almost as obsequious toward the Senators as he had been toward the White House, Gray offered to let any Senator inspect the FBI'S massive collection of material on its Watergate investigation—a task that would take at least a week of eight-hour days. Gray testified that those FBI files show that 1) Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, had paid Segretti out of re-election committee funds and 2) the hiring of Segretti had been arranged through Dwight L. Chapin when Chapin was Nixon's appointments secretary.

Those disclosures by Gray suddenly threw him into some disfavor at the White House. Nixon protested at a press conference last week that for the FBI to furnish "raw files" (unverified, often unattributed information) to a congressional committee "and then to have them leak out to the press could