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This important, thought-provoking exposC is based on documents the author, a civil rights attorney, obtained with much difficulty through repeated Freedom of Information Act requests for FBI records regarding the Supreme Court. Further documents were obtained, by special permission, from the sealed papers of formerJustice Abe Fortas. The findings are sobering for believers, if any there remain, in the rule oflaw.
Chapter 1 briefly summarizes the FBI's use under J. Edgar Hoover of inside informants to keep track of events at Court, and its keeping of files on the "loyalty" of justices, clerks, and judicial nominees. Chapter 2 focuses on the bureau's penchant for sweeping, oten politically motivated, warrantless wiretapping and bugging programs. Here Charns documents the FBI's evasion of legal restrictions, the Court's longstanding reluctance to interfere, and the fact that justices themselves were sometimes overheard in the course of these survemances.
Chapter 3 launches the narrative of how the bureau responded to the sudden prospect that these activities might be publicly disclosed. In 1966 a criminal defendant, Fred B. Black, Jr., appealed his conviction, alleging that his conversaions with counsel had been bugged. When Attomey General Katzenbach pro3osed to admit this in open court, the xlreau's reponses included inteventions It the Justice Department, the White louse, and the Court itse designed to imit the scope of disclosure, to ensure hat its actions would be held lawful, and, Biling this, to transfer blame from the FBI Attorneys General and/or presidents vho,...