June 22, 1972: FBI Director Allows White House Counsel Unprecedented Access to Investigation

The FBI’s acting director, L. Patrick Gray, authorizes White House counsel John Dean to sit in on the FBI’s interview of White House special counsel Charles Colson—in fact, the interview is conducted in Dean’s office. The order apparently originates with President Nixon, or Nixon’s senior aide John Ehrlichman, and not Gray. Dean is thus able to monitor and supervise everything that Colson says, and report his findings to the White House. Dean will be allowed to sit in on many subsequent FBI interviews of White House personnel; furthermore, all such requests for interviews will go through Dean, and Gray will even give Dean the FBI investigative reports. In its internal review of the FBI’s investigation two years later, the Office of Planning and Evaluation will call this Gray’s most “serious blunder from an investigative standpoint… obviously the furnishing to Dean by Mr. Gray of our reports allowed Dean the total opportunity to plan a course of action to thwart the FBI’s investigation and grand jury inquiry.” It is clear, the report will find, that Dean had ample opportunity to prepare White House officials as to what to say and what to conceal, and gave Dean “time to set the stage in order that the results of that investigation would be more favorable to Dean’s ultimate ends.” [O.T. Jacobson, 7/5/1974 ; Woodward, 2005, pp. 2]