The Committee for the Re-election of the President (or the Committee to Re-elect the President, CRP, but often mocked by the acronym CREEP) was, officially, a fundraising organization of United States president Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign during the Watergate scandal. In addition to fundraising, the organization was engaged in political sabotage against Nixon's opponents, the various Democratic Party politicians running in the presidential election.
History
Planning began in late 1970 and an office opened in the spring of 1971. Besides its re-election activities, CRP employed money laundering and slush funds, and was involved in the Watergate scandal. According to CRP member Donald Segretti, members actively attempted to sabotage Democratic candidates.
Edmund Muskie sabotage
In an effort to sabotage Democratic candidate Edmund Muskie, then a presidential candidate, the CRP circulated a fabricated document, called the "Canuck letter", in an effort to ruin his reputation and destroy his chances in the 1972 New Hampshire primary by framing him as biased against Americans of French-Canadian descent. They feared that he would split the vote in a 3-way race, and without him believed Wallace voters would go for Nixon. As part of this plan, in 1971 the CRP offered to pay Joseph Tommasi, a Californian neo-Nazi, , , to help. Tommasi was told to convince AIP voters to register instead as Republican; due to California's election rules, if there were too few registered voters for a party, they would be knocked off the ballot. The goal was to get the AIP's numbers either below 11,000 or less than 1/15th of 1% of all registered voters in the state. This initially resulted in only local news reports, but after the reveal of the Watergate scandal and CRP's implication in it, the story made national news, including in The New York Times. Hugh W. Sloan Jr. testified about the plan to the Watergate Commission.
The acronym CREEP became popular due to the Watergate scandal.
Legacy
Writing for Time magazine, Jonathan van Harmelen wrote that "the tactics pioneered by members of Trojans for Representative Government and later CREEP set a precedent for the sort of organized political sabotage that has become commonplace today in a digital world".