 Laird secretly informed the Solicitor General, Erwin Griswold, who was prosecuting the "New York Times" for threatening national security, that there were only "six or seven paragraphs in the whole thing that were a little dangerous" and those paragraphs had already been published.As Griswold had not read the Pentagon Papers in their entirety, he needed advice from the Defense Department about just what precisely was in the 2.5 million words that made up the papers that were allegedly threatening the national security of the United States.Griswold agreed with Laird, and when arguing for the president before the Supreme Court he undermined his own case by saying the list of material to be banned was "much too broad".