How Did President Nixon Exposed The Plumbers?

President Nixon, according to Olmsted, always worried about conspiracies of un-American forces.
Reason for this was mainly the public disclosure of the Pentagon Papers which exposed the lies about the Vietnam war “and its cynical disregard for American soldier’s lives.” (149)
Nixon was determined to fight the leak who exposed the papers to the public, namely Ellsberg, a disillusioned former Pentagon and state department analyst. To fight him, Nixon was determined to use any means necessary. The president’s men founded a unit within the White house which called themselves the “plumbers”. The name was chosen because they were looking for “leaks”. In the end, Olmsted claims, they were rather bad producing more leaks than they plugged.
Ironically, even though people knew more about their government than ever before, they were also never as suspicious of it hiding more and bigger secrets.
Amongst other things, Nixon secretly started bombing Cambodia. He mislead the public with the aid of false reports because he apparently wanted to avoid “a public outcry”. The New York Times found out about and published the secret of the bombing. Nixon became paranoid and reacted in a way that would cost him his job. He ordered illegal surveillance of journalists and administration members whom he suspected of leaking the secret, Olmsted points out.
An interesting point Olmsted makes is that Nixon later excused his crimes “by arguing that presidents before him had engaged in conspiracies all the time”.
He claimed that the essence that people will understand is: “you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say…the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.” (155)
Nixon, determined to fight this conspiracy of leakers, resolved to leak documents himself. He was sure that he could distract the public from his own secrets and crimes by exposing dark secrets from the past. “The Nixon administration, in short, tried to restore Americans’ faith in the government and the ‘infallibility’ of the presidency by proving the fallibility and dishonesty of previous presidents.” (157)
Amongst other crimes, Nixon had his aides spy on, sabotage, burglarize and steal in order to fight the Democratic candidates for Re-election. In 1972, one team got caught while breaking in the Watergate office building to replace a malfunctioning bug they had installed