Key figures from the Watergate era, closely involved in events that culminated in the 1974 resignation of president Richard Nixon, blasted late on Tuesday a former top FBI official who leaked information about White House wrongdoings and brought the scandal to a head.
They insisted the 91-year-old man had violated professional ethics by choosing to fight illegal activity through the media rather than proper law enforcement institutions.
Former Federal Bureau of Investigation deputy director Mark Felt revealed earlier on Tuesday that he had secretly fed to Washington Post reporters information about crimes committed by members of the presidential entourage, who spun an intricate web of political espionage and vendettas against those perceived as Nixon’s enemies.
The reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who had protected Felt’s identity for over three decades, confirmed he was indeed the source dubbed ”Deep Throat,” who had helped them ”immeasurably” in their Watergate coverage.
But people, who used to work for Nixon, said Felt was wrong in choosing to go to the press.
G Gordon Liddy, a Nixon operative who engineered the ill-fated 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Campaign headquarters in the Watergate complex and served four and a half years in jail for it, said Felt had ”violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession” by taking his information outside legal channels.
”If he possessed evidence of wrongdoing, he was honour-bound to take that to a grand jury and secure an indictment, not to selectively leak it to a single news source,” Liddy, now a popular conservative radio talk show host, told CNN television.
Liddy suggested that Felt had been also aware of information that was damaging to the Democratic Party but chose to keep silent about it, thus unmasking himself as person driven by partisan politics.
Former Nixon White House attorney Leonard Garment said he believed the former FBI official kept his role in Watergate secret for 31 years ”because he felt that what he had done could well be considered dishonorable”.
”The question at heart here,” Garment said, ”is … when government persons, having private, secret, confidential information, are justified to become the whistle-blower and defy or ignore their sworn obligation to maintain security and go to the
press with it.” – Sapa-AFP