144 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 1 JANUARY 2021
conduct of both criminal investigations simultaneously in circumstances
where both subjects of the investigations had, less than a year earlier, won
the election in a landslide. News of the Department of Justice’s investigation
into Agnew soon leaked, and Agnew went on the offensive, accusing the
Department of Justice of engaging in a “witch hunt” and slamming the press
for reporting unsubstantiated and false allegations. If he had thought to coin
the phrase “fake news”, he would have. Playing to his base, he said:
Irrespective of the claims of certain individuals in the Department of Justice,
it was not through my fault that this became a non-secret procedure,
but through deliberately contrived actions of individuals in the prosecutorial
system of the United States, and I regard those as outrageous and
malicious. And if we find, in fact, that in Baltimore or in Washington, individuals
employed by the Department of Justice have abused their sacred
trust and forsaken their professional standards, then I will ask the President
of the United States to summarily discharge those individuals.8
Agnew’s supporters loved it. A barrage of hate mail arrived for Attorney
General Richardson, and many Republican senators rallied to Agnew’s
defence. Speculation was rampant that the Republican Attorney General
was secretly (that dreaded of all things) a Democrat! Agnew engaged in a
public campaign to distract from the criminal charges he was potentially
facing by casting aspersions on the Justice Department and the “corrupt”
media reporting on leaked information about the scandal without identifying
its sources.
In the meantime, Agnew had learned that another potential witness, bagman
Jerry Wolff, was going to be deposed. He therefore enlisted the assistance
of White House Chief of Staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman. Haldeman, who
kept an audio diary, made this entry on April 10, 1973:
Wednesday, April 10th, the President got me in first thing this morning.
Vice President called me over today and said he had a real problem,
because Jerry Wolff, who used to work for him back in Maryland, and
then brought him to Washington with him, is about to be called by the
U.S. Attorney up there who’s busting open campaign contribution cases
and kickbacks to contractors. It seems that Wolff kept verbatim records of
meetings with the Vice President and others back over the years.
He made the point that George Beall, who’s Glenn Beall’s brother, is the
U.S. Attorney there. And that if Glen Beall would talk to him, he could
straighten it out. The Vice President’s tried to get him to, but apparently
not successfully. So, he wanted me to talk to Glenn Beall, which, of
course, I won’t do, in order to verify a White House awareness and concern.
He feels the publication of this stuff would finish the VP because
Wolff was with him for so long.9
What Agnew was proposing was to get the Republican senator for Maryland,
Glen Beall, to speak to his younger brother, George Beall, who was the