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Kleindienst, who could be sent to jail for as long as a year but may get a suspended sentence, is only the second former Cabinet officer in history to be convicted of a crime. (In 1929 Albert Fall, President Warren G. Harding's Secretary of the Interior, was given one year for bribery in the Teapot Dome scandal.) Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski agreed to let Kleindienst plead guilty to a misdemeanor, in part because the former Attorney General had cooperated with the investigation of the ITT affair.
In the House, the Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry seemed to be moving more slowly last week than originally expected. Chairman Peter Rodino planned to hold the first televised public session this week. But it appears the week will again be spent behind closed doors as the committee continues to hear evidence accumulated by the staff in its investigation of 41 allegations of wrongdoing by the President. Last week the staff presented evidence on the Watergate cover-up and how $450,000 in funds from Nixon's reelection campaign was paid as "hush money" to the seven original Watergate conspirators. This week the committee will hear about Nixon's taxes, campaign financing and campaign "dirty tricks." At the earliest, the public phase of the hearings may not begin until next week.
Even though the committee members had promised to keep the staff evidence confidential, excerpts of its transcript of a Sept. 15, 1972 conversation between Nixon and two top aides leaked. In a letter to Rodino, Presidential Attorney James St. Clair protested that the leaks were "prejudicing the basic right of the President to an impartial inquiry on the evidence." St. Clair demanded that all further proceedings be conducted in public "so that the American people can be fully informed with regard to all the evidence presented." Rodino recommended instead that Nixon release all the Watergate-related tapes and other documents that he has refused to yield to the committee and Jaworski.
The leaked excerpts contained material deleted as irrelevant from the White House transcript of the Sept. 15 meeting. Although the omitted passages offered no new evidence of Nixon's guilt or innocence, one of them did provide a fresh example of his vindictiveness. In it the President said that the Washington Post, which was vigorously investigating the Watergate scandal, would have "damnable, damnable problems" in renewing the licenses of two television stations that it controls. Nixon also said of Attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who was representing both the Post and the Democratic National Committee at the time: "We're going to fix that son of a bitch."
Relevant Conversations. The committee sent two new subpoenas to the President. One demanded eleven tapes of his conversations with aides on April 4, June 20 and June 23, 1972. Special Counsel John Doar said the tapes are needed to determine if Nixon had prior knowledge of the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters on June 17, 1972, and if he participated in the beginning of the cover-up the following week.