Watergate ping
I haven’t yet found any conclusive evidence that Mary B. McCord is related to James Walter McCord, Jr. of Watergate fame, though that possibility occurred to me as well. James McCord was aware prior to the break-ins that information about the “burglary” plan was being passed on by a British spy-turned-PI named A.J. Woolston-Smith to a Democrat publisher named William Haddad, who was in turn passing tips on to DNC chair Larry O’Brien, an ally of Ted Kennedy (and an associate of Kennedy-connected PI Robert Maheu, who also worked for Howard Hughes, named by McCord as a co-conspirator in a plan by Hunt and Liddy to break into the safe of publisher Hank Greenspun, who allegedly had blackmail information on Ed Muskie, though some suspect it was actually information about Hughes and Nixon, a pet research project of Nixon nemesis Jack Anderson, who also knew members of the Watergate team and bumped into them at the airport prior to the break-ins, but claimed he didn’t know anything about them. . .). McCord’s knowledge of this emerged during a Congressional investigation of the CIA’s role in Watergate (Nedzi Committee, which preceded the Pike Committee). In short, McCord knew that Ted Kennedy knew what he was up to. His motivation for getting caught on purpose is unknown, but he had worked for the Kennedy CIA on operations involving Lee Harvey Oswald, and McCord’s own book “A Piece of Tape” hints that he and his co-conspirators felt Nelson Rockefeller had too much influence on Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy (a widespread perception at that time, and an accurate one; but who knows if that was McCord’s real concern or another cover story). Kennedy orchestrated the escalation of the break-in investigation into an investigation of Nixon, as Geoff Shepard has documented. John Newman has recently argued that McCord was a KGB mole; I don’t know about that, haven’t worked through the data in enough detail yet, but I pass it on FWIW.
As far as Mary McCord goes, she was born in Pittsburgh in 1964 and attended Georgetown. She then clerked for Thomas Hogan and rose to head the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C before joining the Obama administration as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security, placing her second in command in that part of the organizational chart. Just before Obama left office, she was elevated to Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security. Pelosi appointed her to the J6 task force. McCord’s husband Sheldon Snook works for FISA.