![]() They were crimes that would make even Donald Trump blush.Įllsberg was not acquitted because a jury found him not guilty his trial was thrown out for extreme government misconduct.Įllsberg’s memoir about his foreign policy career, his personal transformation, and the Pentagon Papers saga, aptly titled Secrets, details this incredible story and so much more – including the nationwide manhunt for him that lasted almost two weeks, where the FBI could not catch him. Nixon’s aide would later try to bribe Ellsberg’s trial judge with the FBI director job, the CIA would illegally create psychological profiles of him, and the justice department had to admit it had overheard Ellsberg on warrantless wiretaps that they had lost or destroyed. ![]() The psychiatrist’s office was just the tip of the iceberg in the government’s criminal scheme. To this day, there’s no evidence Nixon directly ordered the Watergate break-in, but there is direct evidence the White House tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg through multiple illegal means. “ has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.”Įvery word of that refers to Daniel Ellsberg. Article 2, section 2 of the charges read: The articles were never voted on by the full House of Representatives, because Nixon accepted the inevitable, and resigned. Ellsberg’s impact can be even found in the draft impeachment articles against Nixon. ![]() As the history professor Christian Appy recently wrote, it’s just one of many seeds involving Ellsberg that sowed Nixon’s demise. No, it was created to discredit Daniel Ellsberg.īefore the Democratic National Committee was even on the Plumbers’ radar, they were tasked with breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to dig up dirt on him, a blatant crime that would surface at Ellsberg’s trial. You see, contrary to popular belief, the “Plumbers”, the criminal unit set up in the basement of the White House and currently the subject of an HBO miniseries, was not formed to break into the vaunted Watergate Hotel. Yet little did he know at the time, he had driven Nixon mad with rage and would ultimately lead to the president’s undoing. It was the summer of 1971, and the war initially continued on, unabated. His goal was to stop the war, but – at least at first – Ellsberg thought the leak of the Pentagon Papers was a failure. He would first help write, and then leak to the New York Times, what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page top secret government report that detailed two decades of lies about the Vietnam war. A graduate of Harvard, he was in the upper echelon of the Washington DC elite, when he volunteered to go to Vietnam and slowly came to the realization he must do everything he can to stop the war – even if it meant going to prison. For those too young to remember (or like me, not born yet), Ellsberg was a brilliant Vietnam analyst who had worked for the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger.
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