Opinion | Michael Conway: President Trump's Twitter attacks on Judge Amy Berman Jackson show his disrespect for the rule of law. - NBCNewsTHINK
, who, at the time, was presiding over the criminal trial of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Nixon had much to fear from potential disclosures in that trial because members of the so-called plumbers unit in the White House, under the direction of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy , had burglarized the office of Ellsberg's former psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, looking for dirt on Ellsberg, whose telephone had also been tapped without authorization by the FBI.
But even those actions were not enough to satisfy Nixon. According to the House Judiciary Committee's final report in the Nixon impeachment inquiry:"The president later directed John Ehrlichman to contact Judge Matthew Byrne, the presiding judge in the Ellsberg trial. On April 5 and 7, 1973 Ehrlichman met with Judge Byrne and informed him that the president was considering appointing Judge Byrne to the directorship of the FBI.
Similarly, both Trump and Nixon tried to interfere with their own Justice Departments' investigations of close advisers. In April 1973, Nixon received private briefings from Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst and the assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division, Henry Petersen, about the Watergate investigation of Nixon's aides. Nixon pledged to Petersen that he would not share the grand jury information with anyone. Nixon broke that promise immediately, passing along confidential information to the very aides under investigation.
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