a. Democratic National Committee
Nixon had not run his campaign like an incumbent cruising toward a landslide re-election. CRP had aggressively raised millions of dollars in campaign gifts, including illegal contributions from major corporations. It had also unleashed an array of stealthy maneuvers designed to eliminate any possibility of an upset, and one of those maneuvers backfired on an unimaginable scale. In June 1972, five men were caught breaking in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. Administration officials categorically denied any involvement in what they dismissed as a "third-rate burglary attempt." Nonetheless, the men arrested turned out to have connections to CRP, and an FBI investigation began ferreting out evidence suggesting that high-ranking figures in the Nixon campaign had ordered the break-in. Reporters for the Washington Post, relying on an anonymous informant, uncovered some of these links after the election and thereby stoked the flames of a major political scandal.