ANNAPOLIS – Delegate Sheila E. Hixson, D-Montgomery, has been subpoenaed by a lawyer to testify in a defamation lawsuit against Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy.
Ida “Maxie” Wells, a former Democratic National Committee secretary, seeks $5.1 million from Liddy for claiming in speeches that the Watergate break-in was a conspiracy to retrieve photographs that would have tied the wife of then-Chief White House lawyer John Dean to a call-girl ring.
Liddy also claimed Wells kept pictures of call girls in her desk at the DNC in Washington.
Hixson, 67, who was a DNC staff member from 1969 to 1975, said she knew Wells, but “not very well. I remember she was on the staff with me.”
Hixson said she had “no idea” why she was asked to testify by Wells’ lawyer, David M. Dorsen, and couldn’t comment on it.
Dorsen did not return messages left at home and in his office.
“It was 30 years ago,” Hixson said. “We didn’t know why” burglars broke into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate in Washington.
Hixson’s lawyer, Jack Quinn, didn’t know why Hixson was subpoenaed either. But he said Liddy’s claims as outlined in the lawsuit are a “total lie. They’re outrageous.”
Liddy served four years and four months in prison for arranging the June 17, 1972, burglary that started the chain of events that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. He now hosts a conservative radio talk show.
The lawsuit, according to The Associated Press, says Liddy claims Wells “kept photographs of prostitutes in her desk at the DNC; showed them to visitors to the DNC; and then placed phone calls to the call-girls ring to arrange the meeting between the visitors and the prostitutes.”
Dorsen told a Baltimore federal court Wednesday the Watergate burglary was not an attempt to remove potentially embarrassing photographs of John Dean’s future wife from Wells’ desk, according to the AP.
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