Committee to Re-elect the President

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The Committee to Re-elect the President, originally abbreviated CRP but now usually called CREEP, was a fundraising organization of United States President Richard Nixon's administration. Besides its re-election activities, CREEP employed money laundering and slush funds and was directly and actively involved in the Watergate scandal.

CREEP used US$500,000 in funds raised to reelect President Nixon to pay legal expenses for the five Watergate burglars after their indictment in September 1972, in exchange for their silence and perjury. This act helped turn the burglary into an explosive political scandal. The burglars, as well as G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, John N. Mitchell, and other Nixon administration figures, were imprisoned over the break-in and their efforts to cover it up. One illegal action that CREEP committed was breaking into the office of the psychiatrist of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg in an attempt to find material to discredit him.^[1] The leak of the Papers, Defense Department records about the Vietnam War, helped sway American sentiment towards opposing the conflict.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Prominent members

• John N. Mitchell, Director
• Fred Malek, Deputy Director
• Jeb Stuart Magruder, Manager
• Francis L. Dale, Chairman
• Maurice Stans, Finance Chairman
• Kenneth H. Dahlberg, Midwest Finance Chairman
• Hugh W. Sloan, Jr., Treasurer
• James W. McCord, security coordinator
• G. Gordon Liddy, political operative
• E. Howard Hunt, political operative
• Donald Segretti, political operative
• Fred LaRue, political operative
• Charles Colson, political operative
• Roger Stone, political operative

[edit] References