Dates: March 1, 1972 – September 5, 1972
During the 1972 presidential election, Nixon political strategist Murray Chotiner served as head of the Ballot Security Task Force for the Nixon campaign,[84] a job that The Washington Post described as “largely token”.[6] It was a job that assembled election law Republicans for the purposes of voter suppression. At the instructions of John Mitchell, in March 1971, he hired out-of-work reporter Seymour Friedin to present himself as a working journalist and travel with the campaigns of various Democratic presidential hopefuls. Friedin sent reports back to Chotiner, who edited them, had them typed by his secretary, and forwarded them to Mitchell (who had resigned as Attorney General in 1972 to manage Nixon’s re-election bid) and Haldeman. When Friedin secured other employment in August 1972, Chotiner replaced him with Lucianne Goldberg, who remained in that capacity for the remainder of the presidential campaign. The two journalists were collectively code-named “Chapman‘s Friend”, and were paid $1,000 per week plus expenses from Chotiner’s law office account, with the account reimbursed by the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP).[85] The Committee reported the payments as reimbursement of his expenses, which the General Accounting Office opined was a violation of federal election law.[84] Chotiner, however, stated that there was “nothing underhanded or illegal” about the arrangement,[12] and Watergate prosecutors later chose not to prosecute CRP officials concerning the payments, deciding they could not prove criminal intent.[86]
The first spy codenamed “Chapman’s Friend,” assigned by the Nixon camp to infiltrate the Democratic opposition was Seymour K. Friedin, a journalist who spied on various Democratic presidential campaigns for the Nixon White House until September 1972, when he got a job as London bureau chief for the Hearst newspapers.