Description | John Mitchell was the Attorney General for President Richard Nixon. During Nixon's first term as President, Mitchell was closely associated with Nixon's attempts to promote law and order; he was not popular with liberals. His wife, Martha, became infamous for her indiscreet comments, being known as "the mouth that roared." Toward the end of Nixon's first term, as reported in the papers, Mitchell controlled a fund to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. He was also involved in planning the burglary of of the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate Complex. He resigned as Attorney General to take charge of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), or as their opponents preferred to call it, CREEP. Although the first reports about Watergate came out before the election, Nixon won the presidency for a second term As more and more information about Watergate came out, Mitchell was indicted on March 1, 1974, along with six other Nixon officials, the "Watergate Seven," for attempting to impede the investigation. In the end, he was convicted of perjury, and after exhausting his appeals in 1977, served nineteen months of a one to four year sentence. Watergate Scandal in Wikipedia |