Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, June 29, 1973 (1/2)
Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, June 29, 1973 (1/2)
[00.02.00-Sen. INOUYE presses DEAN for hard evidence that the ENEMIES LIST was in fact used by the WHITE HOUSE to take action against individual citizens] Senator INOUYE.--- Members of the House whose names have appeared, but, to date, you have been able to tell us of the possibility of a man from CBS, and Chet Huntley. Are there an other concrete examples? I am asking you this because. Mr. Colson has gone on the air suggesting that the lists you Submitted were, a social list, that this was a list used by the White House, so that, they would not invite the names listed there for the White House dinners. [00.02.40] Mr. DEAN. I think you will note in there at, some point--first of all, that Mr. Colson, there is a memorandum to him in one of the exhibits where he was to cull out the 20 worst enemies and submit them. This was again because I was receiving- through Mr. Higby and Mr. Strachan a direct request from Mr. Haldeman that he wanted to nail this down as to the 20, or the minimum number that we could do something with. So, we went through this big thing of taking all the lists Mr. Colson had, and Mr. Colson went through and checked off through his lists what he thought were his candidates, He was the only one that I knew that dealt in these areas, I certainly--none of these people were, my enemies. In fact, most of names were unfamiliar to me. [00.03.32] As a result of that, I sent a memorandum to Mr. Higby indicating, here are the lists. Don't let it go over 20. and this was sent to Mr. Higby for Mr. Haldeman's final review. It was sent back to me and went back in the file again. Senator INOUYE. Did you know if anything ever happened to these 20 on the top--hit parade? Mr. DEAN. I cannot answer that because I think I, was realized that my office had less than enthusiasm for dealing with things like this. [00.04.05] Senator INOUYE. Are you suggesting that this listing of names was just an exercise? Mr. DEAN. As far as I was concerned, it was an exercise that I had no intention to implement; that is correct, Senator. Senator INOUYE. Are you aware of any person or any agency or any official using these lists to do harm or injury or to assist? [00.04.31-the ENEMIES LIST was mostly used by COLSON and HALDEMAN for ends unknown to DEAN] Mr. DEAN. They were principally used by Mr. Colson and -Mr. Haldeman and I don't know what they did with them. I know on one occasion I had a call regarding the fact that some of the President's friends--and these are in exhibits and I just think it, would be inappropriate now to mention the individuals' names-were having tax problems, and I was to look into those. I had Mr. Caulfield, who had--who was the person on my staff, who was the Only one, I know had a relationship with the Internal Revenue Service-because I could only deal with the Director. I did deal with one of his assistants from time to time on sensitive cases where they were just brought to our attention -if somebody in the administration was having a normal audit. just to alert the White House to the fact that such an audit was occurring. [00.05.23-DEAN discusses intervening to try to stop the IRS from auditing some Presidential friends] At any rate, as I was saying, I was told that I was to do something about these audits that were being performed on two friends of the President's They felt that they were being harassed and the like. There is a third instance there this occurred also. -Now, on the--finally, when I got around to checking on it, Mr. Caulfield sent me some information which I think is evidenced in the exhibit and a note went to Mr. Higby. Mr. Higby sent it in to Mr. Haldeman, and Mr. Haldeman wrote a note on the bottom, "'This has already ready been taken care of." So obviously, things were happening that I had no idea on. [00.06.05] Now, I would again like to defer from using names in this instance, but there was a request of an audit that was commencing on somebody who was close to the President and several people got involved in this. They said, John, you have got to do something about this, because the President is just going to hit the roof when he finds out about it. Well, I went to the Justice Department because it had already gone from Internal Revenue to the Criminal Division of the Justice Department I spoke with Mr. Erickson about it. He said, this man is just up to his teeth in the problem. I reported back to the people who were asking me. I said, just do not touch this, there is just no way; this man is in trouble and he has got to be told he is in trouble. So that was the way I handled these situations, and I thought that was the proper way the counsel's office should handle them. [00.07.01]