The Watergate Scandal began on June 17, 1972 with the arrest of a few burglars who were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex located in Washington, D.C.. The burglars that were caught had been taking government documents, as well as bugging the phones. This burglary all happened in the midst of President Richard Nixon running for re-election. There was no doubt that this wasn’t a coincidence. Four of the burglars had been previous CIA agents and were members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, which would later be known as CREEP. James McCord was the last burglar who had previously worked for President Nixon’s campaign and was the security chief of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (“Watergate …show more content…
They were caught and arrested. There was not any sufficient evidence that these men were connected to the president, but detectives later found that the burglars had the reelection committee’s White House phone number, which increased the suspicion. Nixon later gave a speech in August, denying any involvement in this scandal. In addition, according to Britannica, “the preponderance of early media reports driven by a successful White House public relations campaign, [also] claimed that there had been no involvement by the Nixon administration or the reelection committee” (“Watergate Scandal”). Naïve voters believed every word Nixon said, which led him to win the reelection in November 1972 by a landslide. In the light of everything going on, Nixon decided to appoint special Justice Department prosecutor Archibald Cox to further investigate the Watergate affair. President Nixon proved everyone’s suspicion when he began to give out hush money to those involved in the break-in. Nixon then used the help of his aides to come up with a plan to “instruct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to impede the FBI’s investigation of the crime” (History.com