Watergate figure discusses Ohio ethics rules

John Dean addresses attorneys at Sinclair class.

Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill Friday, March 31, 2006, on the censure of President Bush. Dean said Friday that Bush's conduct in connection with domestic spying exceeds the wrongdoing that toppled his former boss from power.

DENNIS COOK/AP Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill Friday, March 31, 2006, on the censure of President Bush. Dean said Friday that Bush's conduct in connection with domestic spying exceeds the wrongdoing that toppled his former boss from power.

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By Lou Grieco, Staff Writer Updated 10:56 PM Friday, August 19, 2011

DAYTON — Watergate figure John W. Dean thought his client was Richard M. Nixon. Dean said Friday that the real client was the office of the presidency, and the difference cost Dean dearly.

“I have no question that I crossed the line and entered a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” the former White House Counsel said. “I’m not quite sure when I crossed the line.”

But Dean said that ethics rules Ohio adopted in 2007 would have clarified the client relationship and given him options to skirt attorney-client privilege after he learned of past and planned criminal actions.

Dean, who served four months in prison after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, addressed more than 60 lawyers at an Ohio State Bar Association ethics class. The class at Sinclair Community College was Dean’s sixth in the state this week.

Dean focused much of the four-hour class on the incidents in the week that followed the June 17, 1972, arrests of the Watergate burglars, a time when “everything you could do wrong as an attorney, we did wrong.”

Dean spoke of a park bench meeting with G. Gordon Liddy, one of the burglary’s organizers, in which Liddy confessed to a prior break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and talked about plans to get bail money and other financial support to the five accused burglars.

Dean said felt he could not report that information, due to attorney-client privilege, which keeps conversations between clients and lawyers confidential. Under the ethics rules of the era, the privilege was near absolute, he said.

“The only remedy for most people was to quietly resign,” Dean said. “Today, the rules allow you to disclose.”

The American Bar Association re-examined the lawyer’s code of ethics following Watergate, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The bar proposed changes, which would allow attorneys to override their duty of confidentiality in some circumstances, but the states balked – until the Enron scandal a decade later, Dean said.

When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a reaction to Enron, passed in 2002, it included rules for minimum standards of conduct for attorneys practicing before the Securities and Exchange Commission. This move by the federal government to regulate the legal profession scared the state bar associations, who moved to have the states adopt new ethical standards similar to what the American Bar Association had recommended since the 1970s, Dean said.

An analysis handed out by Dean and Cleveland attorney James D. Robenalt, Dean’s co-presenter, states that had Dean been under the Ohio rules, he would have been required to report information about future obstruction activity, such as the payment of hush money to the burglars.

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