James McCord’s Testimony Before the Senate Select Watergate Committee (1973)

In the Senate of the United States, a resolution to establish a select committee of the Senate to conduct an investigation and study of the extent of any to which illegal improper or unethical activities were engaged in by any persons, acting individually or in combination with others, in the presidential election of 1972, or any campaign campus or other activity related to it. From Washington, impact brings you gavel to gavel video tape coverage due to days hearings by the Senate Select Committee and Presidential Campaign activities. Here is an vaccine new correspondent, Robert McNeil. Good evening, and welcome to the second day of coverage of the Urban Committee hearings. It was a day of startling testimony by convicted Watergate conspirator James McCord as he recalled his part in the break-in and explained why he did not go along with the cover-up.

In late March he decided to talk, giving new life to the entire case. McCord said that he started asking questions when he saw that Jeb McGruder would be a government witness. He said that meant perjury from a gruder. Between sessions today he explained that a fair trial might have changed his role. Totally a new ballgame, and since then that was what I was trying for to get sort of back up and start all over again with a fair trial which was not reinstalling because of the budget testimony that occurred and because some were going to be a fair trial and some were not, as I said, in the testimony that's been referred to me to be the proper foreign program of American justice. Whether I would have at point in time, I would have told the story is totally different matter and I would have been under totally different circumstances and it's about to compare. The hearings began calmly as McCord read from a summary he had prepared at his work for the committee to re-elect the president and his participation in the

court against breaking. Why had he done it? He was asked because the former FBI and CIMN replied he was under the impression that two of the highest government lawyers, John Mitchell and Attorney General and John Dean, White House counsel, backed the break-in. McCord said G. Gordon Liddy, one of the two convicted conspirators who was not actually caught on the scene, told him that Mitchell and Dean backed the plan. But Hawaii Senator Daniel Inoue asked whether McCord wasn't aware that breaking and entering and wiretapping were illegal. Yes, McCord admitted. Members of the committee were also alarmed and intrigued by McCord's assertion that he received information from the Justice Department's internal security division. Outside the hearing room, Republican Senator Lowell Wiker said he was very disturbed that such justice department data was made available to the Republicans, even if information was also given to the Democrats. But committee interceding to be at its highest point, when McCord explained how a friend who works at the Treasury Department asked him to plead guilty saying nothing, take a short jail turn,

and await objective tendency that would be grounded within a year's time. The friend's name is John Jay Caulfield. He's the man James McCord said delivered the crucial