Watergate

Hunt also from Washington was a CIA employee and a former White House Consultant. Hunt wrote espionage novels and had also worked on declassifying the Pentagon Papers. The question remained did Nixon know about the burglary; some people say that he had no previous knowledge about the break in but knew soon after. .
             The end of 1972 brought about much activity, which lead to a cover-up. The head of the Nixon re-election campaign, former attorney John Mitchell, denied any link to the Watergate operation, but the Washington Post reported that while serving as Attorney-General, he controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to finance intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats. Proof of a twenty-five thousand dollar cashier check that was supposed to used for the Nixon Campaign and was found in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars. Shortly after, Nixon claimed that John Dean, White House counsel, had conducted an investigation into the Watergate scandal and supposedly found that no one from inside the White House was involved. On November 11, 1972, Nixon is reelected as president in one of the largest landslides in American political history in which he took every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia with 60.8% of the popular vote. .
             The trail of the Watergate seven (Barker, Gonzalez, Hunt, Liddy, Martinez, McCord, and Sturgis) began on January 8, 1973 in Washington and was presided over by Judge John Sirica. Shortly after the trail began, Barker, Gonzalez, Hunt, Martinez, and Sturgis plead guilty. McCord and Liddy, two former Nixon aids, both of which had pleaded not guilty, are convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping in the Watergate incident. In March, McCord writes a letter to Judge Sirica in which he claims that the defendants were threatened by John Dean, Counsel to the President, and John Mitchell, the Attorney-General to pled guilty.