Meier is interviewed by the Watergate Committee for 7 hours – a second day is called one week later. Meier is trying to provide information valuable enough that the IRS would drop tax evasion charges against him. “I want to prove my statements to you,” he told them, “I don’t want to say it’s my feeling Richard Nixon has money in the Bahamas. I want to say this is why, this is what I was told and this is who told me. These are serious charges. I don’t want to talk in general, without having to prove what I’m saying.” {Meier knew that fugitive financier Robert Vesco secretly contributed two hundred thousand dollars he later secretly contributed to Nixon’s 1972 campaign was used in part to finance the Watergate break-in. Vesco’s firm, named Investors Overseas Services, was designed to hide money in illegal off-shore accounts. He lived in the Bahamas for a while before stealing $224 million and disappearing into Central America.}
At that point, Watergate investigator Scott Armstrong—who later worked on The Final Days with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—explained to Meier, “We are not conducting an investigation of Summa [Hughes’s holding company] or of Hughes. We are conducting an investigation of the 1972 campaign.” That was, in fact, the Senate committee’s mandate, but clearly, those were impossible ground rules, rather like investigating cancer over the telephone.
10/13/1973