Opinion ID: 341470
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Sufficiency of the District Court's Interrogatories to the President

Text: 84 Ehrlichman's final argument is that the District Court erred in failing either to require then-President Nixon to appear as a witness at trial or answer detailed interrogatories propounded by the defendant. First, it would appear that if a subpoena duces tecum on a President may only be enforced where there is a demonstrated specific need for the testimony or the testimony is essential to the justice of the (pending criminal) case, 103 certainly a more burdensome subpoena ad testificandum would have to meet at least equal standards. Neither Ehrlichman nor any of his co-defendants, however, claims that the President specifically authorized the break-in. The Special Prosecutor disclaimed any evidence indicating Presidential authorization and the President himself denied even having had prior knowledge of the Fielding operation. In the absence of claim of direct Presidential involvement, and in view of the substitute procedure available to the defendant of propounding interrogatories, we find unpersuasive Ehrlichman's argument that President Nixon should have been compelled to appear as a witness. 85 Second, as to the detailed interrogatories submitted by Ehrlichman, we find, as did the District Court, that many of the questions were repetitive or irrelevant to the issues properly before the court. The court drafted concise questions addressed to the central issues of the Ehrlichman submission and the President answered these. Ehrlichman contends, however, that the court's interrogatories were inadequate to explore the issue whether concealment of the activities of the Room 16 unit was undertaken pursuant to Presidential order, to protect highly classified information, or whether such concealment was intended instead to mask wrongdoing. Our comparison of the interrogatories submitted by the defendant and those formulated by the court on this issue lead us to reject this contention. It appears highly unlikely that the President's answers would have differed in any significant respect had Ehrlichman's submission been adopted. Moreover, the President's response to the court's interrogatories revealed that he would have had little useful testimony to give on the question of concealment even assuming the relevance of that question to the issues at trial 104 if he had been called to testify in person. 105