Pressures on Nixon

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33454, 8 February 1974, Page 9

Pressures on Nixon

(N.Z.P A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, February 7. President Nixon is under powerful new pressure from Congress to co-operate fully with its impeachment and Watergate investigations. I The House of Representatives yesterday overwhelm-; ingly asserted its authority to call President Nixon to account for his behaviour in the scandal. And a member of the Senate Watergate committee posed Mr Nixon a series of searching questions, apparently aimed at demonstrating that the President committed;

asserted his claim of Executive privilege in explaining to Judge Gerhard Gesell that he had refused a subpoena from the Senate Watergate com-' Imittee because he felt that to [release the information it (sought would contradict the [national interest. , In a letter to Judge Gesell, |he said that the committee (would make public the conitents of the five tape-record-ings it sought. The tapes are of conversations between the President and his former (counsel, John Dean, who has ■ accused the President of beiing aware of the cover-up. ; Mr Nixon also said that the [release of the tapes might ; prejudice the rights of defenjdants being tried for involve[ment in the Watergate con- ( spiracy. But the special Watergate prosecutor, Mr Leon Jaworski, said that the release of <the tapes would “add only iimarginally” to the pre-trial ■ publicity surrounding the de- • 'fendants. ■

a crime by not notifying lawenforcement officials as soon as he heard of misdeeds by his subordinates. Just a week after Mr Nixon told the Congress “one year of Watergate is enough,” the House of Representatives voted 410 to four to arm its Judiciary Committee with broad powers of inquiry, including the right to subpoena the President himself and order him to surrender his private documents on the case. The President has resisted efforts by the Senate and by special prosecutors to obtain his private papers on the case, citing the doctrine of “Executive privilege.” Republicans joined Democrats in approving the inquiry powers for the Judiciary Committee. Sources on both sides of the lower chamber said that the vote was in no wav a measure of sentiment for impeaching the President. Rather, they said, it was an affirmation of the House’s Constitutional power to conduct an inquiry on possible impeachment. One of the questions submitted to the President by Senator Lowell Weicker (Republican, Connecticut) was this: “When you learned of Watergate crimes on March 21 (1973) the law' required you to turn this evidence over ‘as soon as possible’ to ‘a judge or person of civil authority,’ . . . Which judge or law enforcement official did you contact?” The President has said that he ordered White House aides to investigate the cover-up of top-level involvement in the burglary of Democratic Partv headquarters on June 17, 1972. Those aides, in Senator Weicker’s view', were not lawenforcement officials. Mr Nixon, meanwhile, re-