Word: agnew
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...publicly assailing Henry E. Petersen as the key figure in a plot to ruin him, Spiro Agnew is taking on a formidable opponent. A savvy bureaucratic infighter who has risen higher in the Justice Department than any other civil service employee, Petersen has many influential defenders in Washington. He is the plain speaking, rugged Chief of the Criminal Division, whose engagingly blunt testimony before the Senate Watergate committee won the respect of millions of television viewers...
There are, nevertheless, serious flaws in Petersen's record, which lend substance to some of Agnew's complaints against him. He was indeed, as Agnew said, a key figure in the Justice Department's mishandling of wiretap authorizations that has jeopardized more than 300 cases against organized crime, involving possibly 1,000 defendants (TIME, March 27, 1972). As an aide to Will Wilson, then Chief...
...Agnew is also at least partly right in his contention that Petersen mishandled Watergate. He apparently did work closely with ousted Presidential Counsel John W. Dean on the case, and Dean later admitted being part of the coverup. The original investigation failed to turn up evidence of who had authorized the wiretapping and how it was financed, partly because Petersen refused to pursue leads involving $89,000 in suspect Nixon campaign funds. Petersen relied on the testimony of the Nixon re-election committee's Jeb Stuart Magruder at the trial of the original defendants, even though the committee treasurer...
...whether Petersen has been the source of some news leaks regarding the Agnew investigation, as Agnew claims, there is no doubt that he has. But Petersen has not been, by any means, the sole source of news leaks in the case...
...Agnew claimed that the Wall Street Journal had been given a copy of a letter from the Justice Department notifying him that he was under investigation even before he had received it. That was flatly denied by Norman Miller, chief of the Journal's Washington bureau. Said Miller: "The Vice President is in error. Our story was not based on a letter...