Word: sirica
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...crumbling. White House Counsel John Dean had warned Nixon on March 21 that "there was a cancer growing on the presidency." Dean spirited documents from his own files out of the White House, put them in a bank safe-deposit box and gave the keys to Sirica. When the White House on May 14 asked Sirica to return the Dean documents, the judge refused. He would keep the originals and give copies to new Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the Ervin committee staff...
...Sirica complied with a Senate committee request by giving limited immunity against prosecution to Dean and another suddenly talkative witness, Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy director of Nixon's re-election committee. They could
...still be prosecuted, but not on the basis of evidence gleaned solely from their televised testimony. Sirica also flashed a judicial green light for the hearings to proceed as planned by rejecting a Cox motion that television and radio coverage of Dean's and Magruder's testimony be banned. Cox had argued that the wide publicity could jeopardize future criminal cases against individuals...
...greatest contribution yet to public understanding of a historic and confusing event ?and the Watergate intrigue in all its ramifications was surely one of the most complex and convoluted stories in American political history. More than all of the news accounts, more than the proceedings in Judge Sirica's courtroom, the Senate Watergate hearings dramatized the issues and personalities, permitting millions of Americans to make up their own minds about whom to believe and whom to doubt...
That brought Judge Sirica back on center stage and in an unfamiliar and challenging role. In 16 years on the federal bench, Sirica had handled a wide gamut of criminal trials and civil suits, including highly complex antitrust cases. But now he was being asked to rule on an unprecedented claim by the Executive Branch that a President is immune from subpoenas because the courts have no power to enforce any order against him; that only the impeachment process of Congress can touch him. Moreover, argued Nixon's legal consultant, University of Texas Law Professor Charles Alan Wright, Nixon...