a. He ordered the attorney general to fire the prosecutor.
As the revelations multiplied and more members of his administration were implicated, Nixon maintained his personal innocence. Denying prior knowledge of the break-in or any connection to the cover-up, he famously repeated that he was "not a crook," even as the ground beneath him was crumbling. Testimony before the Senate revealed that White House conversations had been meticulously recorded, and investigators now demanded the tapes. Nixon refused, and when the special independent prosecutor he had appointed to deal with Watergate subpoenaed the tapes in October 1973, the president ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire the prosecutor. Richardson resigned in protest, as did his deputy. Solicitor General Robert Bork, as third in command, agreed to do Nixon's bidding.
These chaotic events, dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre, inflicted heavy political damage. A new special prosecutor picked up where his predecessor had left off. In early August 1974, after a unanimous Supreme Court rejected Nixon's argument that "executive privilege" entitled him to withhold the tapes, the recorded conversations revealed conclusively that Nixon had been fully involved in the cover-up from the beginning.