Liddy's Clowns

Who knows how many words have been written since Tuesday's revelation that 'Deep Throat' is a man named Mark Felt who once was the second-most powerful man at the FBI? Bloggers are blogging, writers are writing and everyday citizens are writing letters to the editor:

From an era of huge disgrace of the presidency, we now know who had the courage to keep the Watergate story going for two persistent reporters and an editor who had the insight to see the story of the decade unfolding.

And now, G. Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson are frothing at the mouth, bad-mouthing W. Mark Felt - "Deep Throat" - as if he were the criminal. Liddy says that Felt should not have leaked anything but should have gone through channels. I am sure Liddy would have liked that.

Let's see: Should Felt have gone to his boss, who was far too new in the job to know much at all? Should he have gone to the attorney general? That would have been John Mitchell. Or later, Richard Kleindienst, who quickly resigned? Or should he have gone to the White House counsel? That would have been John Dean. Maybe he should have gone to Bob Haldeman? Now there's a possibility for an appropriate handling of it all.

Liddy and his college of clowns will always be the bums in that episode, will always be the criminals. Felt was trying to get the job done with the only options available to him.

They say hell hath no fury like a reformed sinner. I don't see Liddy, though furious, as being reformed!

With all due respect, I don't think somebody like Chuck Colson is off-base here. Colson, in part, spent his time in federal prison as a result of his improperly possessing, as White House counsel, a lone, solitary and single--one!--FBI file.

Now, how much information did Felt pass to Woodward and Bernstein of a similar nature? Say what you will about the conduct of the Nixon administration after the break-in, but there is still the small matter of the law.

It's not unreasonable to wonder if Mitchell at Justice or Dean at the WH would have played straight with Felt. If you conclude that they would not have and naively suggest there was nowhere else to go however, I must disagree.

This post at the Corner quotes a relative of a former FBI Special Agent familiar with Felt and one who had significant contact with him inside the Bureau at the time. The agent's position offers a legal alternative to what our letter-writer passes off as simply inevitable:

Dad's take is that Felt should have done something with the info he had, but going to the WaPo was illegal and, more important to my dad, a betrayal of his oath of office. Dad 's position is that Felt should have gone to the grand jury, which would have been independent of FBI, DOJ and White House control, personal consequences be damned.

And what of Congress? As the second-most powerful man at the FBI and one who had previously worked as a Congressional staffer, surely Felt had contacts there that could have handled an investigation and made such public without improperly leaking legally sensitive information. Is that an unreasonable question to ask? I do not believe so.

There is no doubt that what Nixon and his administration--including Liddy and Colson--engaged in after the break-in was illegal and beyond inappropriate; but there was a right way and a wrong way for Felt to deal with it, whatever his motives for doing so. Ignoring such with hand-wringing and moralizing about how rotten 'Nixon's gang' was simply doesn't cut it. There is, still, the small matter of the law.