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Who paid the plumbers?
This article lacks one big basic element. Where the Plumbers on the government payroll or not. Can anyone cite evidence to that. Thank you.
Nobs01 1 July 2005 17:43 (UTC)
I believe they were paid out of a secret fund, kept in the form of cash in a safe. Only a few people, among them Haldeman, had access to the money. I forget exactly where the money came from, but I think it may have been some off the record campaign funds. I'll try to look into it some more. -
R. fiend 1 July 2005 18:17 (UTC)
I beleive that is correct; they were never employees of the government. This may have to be clarified in a series of articles that speak of CREEP and the White House as one entity. I believe there should be separation between the two, seeing there apparently was no misappropriation of funds to carry these people on the government payroll to commit criminal acts. thx.
Nobs01 1 July 2005 18:42 (UTC)
Well, Howard Hunt had an office in the White House at one time, if I recall. And others were government employees (CIA or FBI, for instance). -
R. fiend 1 July 2005 20:58 (UTC)
Yes, several were at one time in the employ of the federal government; likewise, those who approved payments from the Re-election Committee had dual roles, both as White House employees and being in authority to authorized expenditures from the private, independent re-election committee. But language like this,
[1] for example, from the
Richard_Nixon#Watergate bio page
makes it sound like
CREEP held the enemies list and the
White House was responsible (i.e. the government paid money) for
dirty tricks. I'd like to clarify this. Thank you.
Nobs01 1 July 2005 21:36 (UTC)
Good point about the enemies list. Go ahead and fix it (if you haven't already). It is easy to sort of lump everyone into one category, paying no mind to the sometimes subtle differences between the groups and roles. An encyclopedia, however, should be able to differentiate. As for the White House being responsible for dirty tricks, well, that's tricky (no pun intended). Usually the "White House" refers to the Preisdent and his staff (obviously the building isn't incriminated here), and I think they can be linked to "dirty tricks", depending on what you want to count as a dirty trick. -
R. fiend 1 July 2005 21:45 (UTC)
Yes, that's all true, the employees of the White House did authorize private money for payment to dirty tricksters. That's what I wanna clarify, but it may be in several articles (
CREEP,
Plumbers,
Watergate,
Nixon, etc.) No sense piling on b.s charges like using gubmint money for private purposes, that only discredits the validity of the story as its told. Thanks again.
Nobs01 1 July 2005 21:53 (UTC)
Follow the money: Important in uncovering the conspiracy what the fact that small campaign donation cheques sent by mail to CREEP ended up in hands of the plumbers. These were never added to CREEP accounts but used as a
black fund. (Don't ask for sources, I read this somewhere in web 30 years ago. :-) --
Petri Krohn (
talk)
12:04, 25 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Published as the 40th Anniversary of Nixon's resignation approaches,
Will's column confirms that Nixon feared public disclosure of his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks. Will says Nixon established a "plumbers unit" to stop potential leaks of information that might damage him, including documentation that he believed was held by the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank. The Plumbers' later break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.