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Beginning April 15, 1973, Nixon kept in almost daily touch with Henry Petersen, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, as the President cooperated fully in the Watergate investigation. St. Clair admitted that the President sometimes got confidential information from Petersen about the progress of the Justice Department's probe and passed it along to his suspect subordinates. This was not done to protect them, St. Clair argued, but to let them know that others were talking to the grand jury and so they must tell the truth. It was this kind of action by the President, sweepingly claimed St. Clair, "that resulted in Dean and Magruder cooperating with the prosecutors and the subsequent breaking of the case."
The defense brief handled other allegations against the President in far less detail. Dismissing charges that Nixon had violated the Fourth Amendment's protection of individual privacy by ordering wiretaps on Government officials and newsmen between May 1969 and February 1971, it argued that the taps were then perfectly legal and were justified by interests of national security. If Nixon had not called for such wiretaps to plug leaks from the National Security Council, St. Clair argued, "he would have failed in his constitutional responsibilities."
As for Nixon's creation of a secret White House squad of investigators, called the "plumbers," the brief argued that this too was a proper effort to protect national security and that "the President never explicitly or implicitly authorized anyone associated with this unit to commit illegal acts," including the Ellsberg burglary. Surprisingly, St. Clair claimed that Nixon deserves credit for informing the judge in the Ellsberg trial of this burglary since "there was no legal obligation to report the break-in." In fact, the judge had been seeking information about the Government's investigatory tactics against Ellsberg for weeks and dismissed the case when he learned of this White House-directed breakin.
As for charges that Nixon traded a rise in milk-price supports for a pledge of large campaign contributions from dairy producers, the brief repeated the President's public contention that he acted in response to general political and economic pressures rather than in return for campaign funds. Congress was pushing for such a raise in support, the brief noted, and Nixon might have been compelled by legislation to enact the raises anyway, because vetoing such a bill would have been politically unwise.
Finally, the brief tried to rebut charges that Nixon used the IRS machinery to harass political opponents. St. Clair contended that if Nixon's aides wrote memos to IRS officials seeking special tax treatment of political opponents, no such tax harassment was actually carried out. Ironically, the brief cited the "highly principled" character of the President's appointed IRS commissioners as substantiation that no White House pressure influenced them.