Free The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down by Geoff Shepard

Jaworski had wanted to protect Sirica from subsequent questions about the nature and extent of this highly unusual get-together, he could have supplied the requested information without specifically describing their ex parte meeting. Instead, his letter opened with the following sentence:
               When Messrs. Ruth, Lacovara, Ben-Veniste and I met with you and Judge Gesell at your request on Friday, December 14, you suggested that it would be helpful if we could provide you with some sense of the caseload that we would be generating for the Court over the next several months.
    We don’t know if Jaworski was protecting himself in the event their meeting became public or was somehow trying to alert Sirica to the idea that such meetings could not go unnoticed.
    There also is a separate item of interest in Jaworski’s letter—his prediction that the comprehensive cover-up indictments would be handed down by the grand jury “by the end of January or the beginning of February.” This was information that Sirica very much welcomed, because grand jury action within this time frame—before Sirica’s seventieth birthday—would allow him to appoint himself to preside over that trial.
    JANUARY 21, 1974
    The next instance of prosecutorial coordination with Sirica originated within Jaworski’s own staff. WSPF prosecutors had concluded that it was vitally important to share information they had gathered concerning President Nixon, including grand jury materials, as soon as possible with the House Judiciary Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry. Their method for doing so—an interim grand jury report—is explored in a subsequent chapter. What matters now, however, is the proposal in Lacovara’s memo of another private meeting with Sirica, the purpose of which was to make sure that the judge fully appreciated that a grand jury presentment was in the works and that he would be prepared to order its sealed report to be forwarded to the House of Representatives in the manner that WSPF attorneys desired (see Appendix D ). As Lacovara explained in his memo, “It would be most unfortunate, for example, for the grand jury to return a presentment without forewarning and then have the judge summarily refuse to receive it because of his lack of awareness of the basis for such a submission.”
    The goal of this meeting, then, was to lobby Sirica in advance of the forthcoming grand jury report and to gain his concurrence on how it should be handled, but without tipping off the other side. This meeting was particularly important because the grand jury interim report would contain a copy of the March 21st tape, which the D.C. Circuit Court had ruled could be made available only to the grand jury for the purpose of determining whether a crime had been committed. There was simply no legal basis for transferring this tape to the House. In fact, in every instance where the Congress attempted to enforce its own subpoena for these tapes, both the district court and the court of appeals would uniformly rule that they were not subject to judicial enforcement because of the constitutional separation of powers. 4
    Had the White House or any of the Watergate defendants learned of the intended grand jury interim report in advance—and particularly that it would include the March 21st tape—they could have been expected to challenge such a report as being beyond the grand jury’s authority. After all, no grand jury in the history of the D.C. Circuit hadever issued such a report, let alone on an interim basis while it continued with its investigations.
    Such a challenge would have addressed the grand jury’s authority to act in this manner in the first place, not what should be done with its report after it was issued. By keeping their initiative secret but obtaining Sirica’s advance concurrence on how it would be handled, WSPF prosecutors could obtain a significant procedural advantage over their White House adversaries.
    Such a meeting, if