‘In my citizen’s heart, I think it would be a good idea’ that ‘the information gathered by the grand jury should be made public,’ Vladimir N. Pregelj says of Mueller investigation.
Vladimir Pregelj, 91, was the foreman of the first Watergate grand jury. By Spencer S. Hsu Spencer S. Hsu Investigative reporter Email Bio Follow April 15 at 8:34 AM Like millions of Americans, Vladimir N. Pregelj has waited to learn more about the special counsel’s report.
Pregelj stands behind a letter he wrote to Nixon on behalf of the grand jury summoning — futilely — a president to testify in person before his fellow citizens. From his home filled with early modernist sketches and books, Pregelj recalled that his grand jury of 23 met more than 100 times its first 18 months of a two-year run, with two jurors losing their jobs as a result. Another member, a night-shift custodian at George Washington University quit the panel, she later told a reporter, because, it was too hard to be on the jury by day and the job at night and care for her 11 children.
Although federal criminal rules strictly bar grand jurors from being named, Pregelj was identified in July 1973, after John J. Sirica, then the chief judge the U.S. District Court of Washington, assembled the panel in open court and polled them to establish that they supported ordering the White House to explain Nixon’s refusal to turn over Oval Office tape recordings.
For safety and security reasons, court officials encouraged jurors early on to enter court through side doors not used by the public. Unlike the foreperson and deputy of three other grand juries working at the courthouse, the two leaders of the Mueller panel have not been identified handing up indictments in open court.
James W. McCord Jr. demonstrated how to rig a bugging device in a telephone at a May 1973 hearing. After three weeks of hearing routine street and violent crimes, they got the case of the June 17 Watergate burglary. When one burglar — James W. McCord Jr., a former CIA officer providing security for the Nixon campaign — began cooperating, it unraveled a scheme that occupied three grand juries over more than two years.
“I am hereby requesting you on behalf of the Grand Jury to appear before it,” Pregelj wrote Jan. 30, 1974 in a three-page, archived letter addressed to “Honorable Richard M. Nixon, The President, The White House,” and signed, “Vladimir N. Pregelj, Foreman, June, 1972 #1 Grand Jury.”
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