Word: wiretap
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just before the trial opened, however, Judge William Matthew Byrne disclosed that a Government wiretap had happened to overhear a conversation involving one of the lawyers or consultants on the defense team. "Serious, shocking, shameful," declared Attorney Leonard Boudin. The defense demanded to know who had been overheard and what had been said...
Most of Boudin's union clients left him after he was assigned by the trial court to represent Judith Coplon, a Justice Department analyst charged with espionage for the Soviet Union. (Ironically, her case, like the Ellsberg impasse last week, turned on a wiretap; Boudin won the Coplon appeal because authorities had eavesdropped on lawyer-client conversations.) Filling the gap in his practice, he began to make a name for himself in a series of passport cases: he diligently represented such noted left-wingers as Corliss Lamont, Paul Robeson and Rockwell Kent in proceedings that finally resulted...
...nearly 21 months-from April 1970 to November 1971- wiretap applications were often reviewed and granted, not by Mitchell, but by a civil service bureaucrat. An aide scrawled Mitchell's initials on many of the 375 wiretap authorizations made during that period. Since many of the cases involved are based primarily on evidence obtained by electronic surveillance, Government prosecutors find their cases collapsing after trial judges disallow the improperly authorized wiretaps. So far, 78 are being challenged in court; an appellate court has overturned the convictions of members of a smuggling organization in Miami, and a Detroit judge...
Whatever else the Nixon Administration may think of radical protesters, it takes them very seriously. Departing Attorney General John Mitchell has made no secret of the fact that he would like to use wiretaps at will whenever the Justice Department is investigating any groups it considers "committed to the use of illegal methods to bring about changes in our form of government." But what the Justice Department wants and what the courts approve are often two different things. Thus last week the department found itself in the Supreme Court, defending its desire to wiretap...
...attorneys' statement said that "Mitchell has claimed inherent power to wiretap without court approval in cases involving national security. The issue of the legality of such taps is now before the United States Supreme Court...