Chuck Colson Pleads Guilty to Obstruction of Justice in Ellsberg Case, Serves Seven Months

On June 21, 1974, Charles Wendell “Chuck” Colson—Nixon’s Special Counsel and the official known as the President’s “hatchet man”—pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with attempts to discredit Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Colson received a sentence of one to three years and a $5,000 fine. Originally charged along with John Ehrlichman and members of the White House Plumbers for the September 1971 break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Colson’s guilty plea resulted in all other charges against him being dropped. He admitted to leaking information from Ellsberg’s confidential FBI file to the press, but denied organizing Hunt’s burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

Colson had recruited former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt as a White House consultant, and though Hunt never worked directly for Colson, he performed several assignments for Colson’s office before joining the Plumbers unit. Colson hoped that revelations about Ellsberg could be used to discredit the anti-Vietnam War movement, demonstrating the administration’s strategy of destroying whistleblowers’ reputations rather than addressing the government misconduct they exposed. In his 2005 book “The Good Life,” Colson expressed regret for attempting to cover up the incident, though by then he had reinvented himself as a prison ministry leader.

Colson served seven months in the federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama, becoming the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges before his release on January 31, 1975. His relatively brief imprisonment for serious crimes against a whistleblower established another dimension of the accountability failure in Watergate: plea bargains allowed key figures to admit to limited charges, serve minimal time, and avoid full exposure of their criminal activities. While Colson’s personal transformation after prison—founding Prison Fellowship Ministries in 1976 and Justice Fellowship in 1983—became a narrative of redemption, the light sentence sent a clear message that government officials who weaponize confidential information and coordinate illegal operations against whistleblowers face minimal consequences. This would have lasting implications for how future administrations treated those who exposed government wrongdoing.