The Criminal Indictment Of President Nixon For Watergate Has Finally Been Unsealed

In 1974, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's office delivered a 55-page document laying out the evidence that President Richard Nixon had engaged in criminal activity to Congress. Until today, almost no one had read the so-called Road Map, because it was under seal at the National Archives. Lawyers Stephen Bates, Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes filed a petition to have the Road Map unsealed last month, and they explained in a blog post why they thought it ought to be made public:

The three of us filed a petition on Thursday to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that seeks to rectify this problem… We did so because the document is of significant historical interest and significant contemporary interest. As we will explain in this post, which is drawn from declarations that we and others filed in the matter, the Road Map is one of the few significant pieces of Watergate history that remains unavailable to the public. The document is also keenly relevant to current discussions of how [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller should proceed. It is possible that it is even relevant to discussions taking place within the Mueller investigation itself.

[Lawfare]

Their petition was successful, and today the National Archive posted the Road Map and a trove of other previously sealed documents related to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's Watergate investigation. You can read the Road Map — which dispassionately lays out pretty much the entirety of the Special Prosecutor's evidence against Nixon — here:

The documents released today also include the criminal indictment, approved by a grand jury, against President Nixon on four criminal counts: bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and obstruction of a criminal investigation. Jaworski decided to let Congress decide how to proceed against Nixon instead of directly indicting Nixon, and Nixon subsequently resigned (and was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford).

You can read the rest of the long-sealed documents over at the National Archives' website.