Video: 'Watergate Part 12 of 30' (Sept. 15, 1972 at 2:07)

(Friday, September 15, 1972; during the Watergate scandal) — Two former White House aides, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, and the five men seized by the police inside the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, were indicted today on charges of conspiring to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee to steal documents and install bugging devices.

A Federal grand jury returned an eight-count indictment in United States District Court in Washington against the seven defendants. It included charges of tapping telephones, planting electronic surveillance devices, and stealing and photographing documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee.

The two former White House aides, who were scheduled to turn themselves in on Sept. 19, were G. Gordon Liddy, a former presidential assistant on domestic affairs and, at the time of the break-in, counsel to the finance committee for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and E. Howard Hunt Jr., a former White House consultant and associate of Liddy.

The five other men (Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis) were taken inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in an early morning raid by the Washington police.

Lawrence F. O’Brien, chairman of the National Democratic Committee at the time of the break-in and now chairman of the McGovern campaign, said in a statement: “We can only assume that the investigation will continue since the indictments handed down today reflect only the most narrow construction of the crime that was committed.”

“In particular,” O’Brien continued, “we will continue to press for a far more thorough explanation of the funding of the crime that led to those indictments.”

He added that the only way to lay the case to rest was for President Nixon to appoint a special prosecutor “not politically beholden to anyone.”