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Book Cloak and Gavel

Download or read book Cloak and Gavel written by Alexander Charns and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The separation of powers becomes a meaningless cliche as Alexander Charns - using the Federal Bureau of Investigation's own files - reveals how that agency undermined the independence of the U.S. Supreme Court for a half-century. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's goal was simple: to push the Supreme Court to the right on issues of civil rights and criminal law. His techniques ranged from illegal wiretapping to spreading disinformation, from using Justice Abe Fortas as an informant to trying to hound liberal Justice William O. Douglas off the bench. Cloak and Gavel, the definitive work on the FBI-Supreme Court relationship, is based on thousands of pages of FBI documents that Charns fought for eight years to obtain. One 2,000-page file was released only after he filed hundreds of Freedom of Information requests and brought lawsuits against the FBI. It establishes Hoover's strategies to influence the Senate confirmation process, incite the public against the Warren court, lobby for legislation to counteract judicial rulings, and use numerous informants inside the Court to both monitor and influence it. Charns was given special permission to conduct research using Justice Abe Fortas's papers, which had been sealed until the year 2000. These papers proved Fortas had acted as an informer for the White House and for the FBI during his tenure on the bench. Fortas ultimately left the Court in disgrace after an ethics scandal unrelated to his informant role. Charns also suggests that Hoover's death did not end the FBI's attempts to influence Congress and the federal judiciary - as evidenced by the role of the FBI in the explosive Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Senate hearings in 1991. Until now, no onehas examined the ultimate constitutional violation - the FBI's attempts to influence the Court by any means available.

Book Cloak and Gavel

Download or read book Cloak and Gavel written by Alexander Charns and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2022-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cloak and Gavel" . . . is the product of an eight-year struggle to force the FBI to reveal its Supreme Court snooping. Charns got . . . hard evidence that Hoover attempted to monitor the court's private deliberations and manipulate some of the justices." Wall Street Journal, A13, 9/1/92 "The FBI's scandalous techniques ranged from illegal wiretapping, to disinformation campaigns, to using Justice Abe Fortas as a Bureau informant." Harvard Law Review, Vol 106, p. 812. "[A] bonanza of Supreme Court history, providing depth and perspective to some great cases of our time." St Louis Post-Dispatch, 10/18/92.

Book The Long Reach of the Sixties

Download or read book The Long Reach of the Sixties written by Laura Kalman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Americans often hear that Presidential elections are about "who controls" the Supreme Court. In The Long Reach of the Sixties, eminent legal historian Laura Kalman focuses on the period between 1965 and 1971, when Presidents Johnson and Nixon launched the most ambitious effort to do so since Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack it with additional justices. Those six years-- the apex of the Warren Court, often described as the most liberal in American history, and the dawn of the Burger Court--saw two successful Supreme Court nominations and two failed ones by LBJ, four successful nominations and two failed ones by Nixon, the first resignation of a Supreme Court justice as a result of White House pressure, and the attempted impeachment of another. Using LBJ and Nixon's telephone conversations and a wealth of archival collections, Kalman roots their efforts to mold the Court in their desire to protect their Presidencies, and she sets the contests over it within the broader context of a struggle between the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government. The battles that ensued transformed the meaning of the Warren Court in American memory. Despite the fact that the Court's work generally reflected public opinion, these fights calcified the image of the Warren Court as "activist" and "liberal" in one of the places that image hurts the most--the contemporary Supreme Court appointment process. To this day, the term "activist Warren Court" has totemic power among conservatives. Kalman has a second purpose as well: to explain how the battles of the sixties changed the Court itself as an institution in the long term and to trace the ways in which the 1965-71 period has haunted--indeed scarred--the Supreme Court appointments process"--

Book Diary of an Exploding Judge

Download or read book Diary of an Exploding Judge written by M. A Czarnecki and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It doesn’t pay to be an outspoken Jewish girl in a small Southern town, battling drug-dealing cops, a corrupt judge and backstabbing lawyers. Star, a brash young public defender, is charged with murdering the judge presiding over the biggest trial of her career. Randleman County, North Carolina is a frontier mix of homegrown trouble and imported woe on the Cape Fear River. Racial tensions flare when a white deputy sheriff kills an unarmed Lumbee Indian boy. The District Attorney declares the shooting accidental. The deputy's patrol car explodes in front of the courthouse. Jimmy Ray Oxendine, a Lumbee, and explosives expert, is charged. Star is appointed to represent Jimmy Ray, a man some proclaim to be a political prisoner. There’s another explosion. Presiding Judge Owen Otis O'Brien, nicknamed Death Row O for sending so many men to the death chamber, dies in his canary yellow Lincoln Town Car on the second day of Jimmy Ray’s trial. This time Star is charged with murder. Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court (Univ. of Illinois Press 1992)

Book The Burglary

    Book Details:
  • Author : Betty Medsger
  • Publisher : Knopf
  • Release : 2014
  • ISBN : 0307962954
  • Pages : 609 pages

Download or read book The Burglary written by Betty Medsger and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2014 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary: An account of the 1971 break-in of the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists cites their roles in triggering major changes in the FBI and confirming that J. Edgar Hoover had run a personal shadow-FBI.

Book The Listeners

    Book Details:
  • Author : Brian Hochman
  • Publisher : Harvard University Press
  • Release : 2022-03-22
  • ISBN : 067427573X
  • Pages : 369 pages

Download or read book The Listeners written by Brian Hochman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They’ve been listening for longer than you think. A new history reveals how—and why. Wiretapping is nearly as old as electronic communications. Telegraph operators intercepted enemy messages during the Civil War. Law enforcement agencies were listening to private telephone calls as early as 1895. Communications firms have assisted government eavesdropping programs since the early twentieth century—and they have spied on their own customers too. Such breaches of privacy once provoked outrage, but today most Americans have resigned themselves to constant electronic monitoring. How did we get from there to here? In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US government’s wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike. From wayward lovers to foreign spies, from private detectives to public officials, and from the silver screen to the Supreme Court, The Listeners traces the long and surprising history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States. Along the way, Brian Hochman considers how earlier generations of Americans confronted threats to privacy that now seem more urgent than ever.

Book The FBI Encyclopedia

Download or read book The FBI Encyclopedia written by Michael Newton and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, America's most famous law enforcement agency, was established in 1908 and ever since has been the subject of countless books, articles, essays, congressional investigations, television programs and motion pictures--but even so it remains an enigma to many, deliberately shrouded in mystery on the basis of privacy or national security concerns. This encyclopedia has entries on a broad range of topics related to the FBI, including biographical sketches of directors, agents, attorneys general, notorious fugitives, and people (well known and unknown) targeted by the FBI; events, cases and investigations such as ILLWIND, ABSCAM and Amerasia; FBI terminology and programs such as COINTELPRO and VICAP; organizations marked for disruption including the KGB and the Ku Klux Klan; and various general topics such as psychological profiling, fingerprinting and electronic surveillance. It begins with a brief overview of the FBI's origins and history.

Book The Middle Times

    Book Details:
  • Author : D.S. MacLeod
  • Publisher : AuthorHouse
  • Release : 2010-07-13
  • ISBN : 1449078508
  • Pages : 426 pages

Download or read book The Middle Times written by D.S. MacLeod and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a familiar time, one so ancient it lies deep within all our bones, surfaces a glimpse into the endless age old struggle between life and death, light and darkness, good and evil. This struggle festers throughout our blood, drives our choices, our quests, and our wars. During the Times Before the first battle between these forces of light and darkness clashed resulting in the Shadow Years marking the beginning of The Middle Times. Evil is defeated and The Years of Plenty follow, yet again, giving way to another time of war, The Indigo Years. During this transitional peaceful time, a charming Grenelvin family excursion of exploration leads down a dangerous mystifying path of hidden secrets and treachery inevitably uncovering evil during the Rise of the Goblin King. This Orlok goblin seeks independence from his unending servitude to the Lord of Darkness and Shadow and will destroy the Wolde to achieve nothing less. The new determined spirit of youth engages the old sinister evil in this beginning mystifying tale of intrigue known as the Middle Times. Visit www.middletimetales.com

Book Wild Bill

Download or read book Wild Bill written by Bruce Allen Murphy and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 2003 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Orville Douglas was both the most accomplished and the most controversial justice ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. He emerged from isolated Yakima, Washington, to be dubbed, by the age of thirty, “the most outstanding law professor in the nation”; at age thirty-eight, he was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, cleaning up a corrupt Wall Street during the Great Depression; by the age of forty, he was the second youngest Supreme Court justice in American history, going on to serve longer—and to write more opinions and dissents—than any other justice. In evolving from a pro-government advocate in the 1940s to an icon of liberalism in the 1960s, Douglas became a champion for the rights of privacy, free speech, and the environment. While doing so, “Wild Bill” lived up to his nickname by racking up more marriages, more divorces, and more impeachment attempts aimed against him than any other member of the Court. But it was what Douglas did not accomplish that haunted him: He never fulfilled his mother’s ambition for him to become president of the United States. Douglas’s life was the stuff of novels, but with his eye on his public image and his potential electability to the White House, the truth was not good enough for him. Using what he called “literary license,” he wrote three memoirs in which the American public was led to believe that he had suffered from polio as an infant and was raised by an impoverished, widowed mother whose life savings were stolen by the family attorney. He further chronicled his time as a poverty-stricken student sleeping in a tent while attending Whitman College, serving as a private in the army during World War I, and “riding the rods” like a hobo to attend Columbia Law School. Relying on fifteen years of exhaustive research in eighty-six manuscript collections, revealing long-hidden documents, and interviews conducted with more than one hundred people, many sharing their recollections for the first time, Bruce Allen Murphy reveals the truth behind Douglas’s carefully constructed image. While William O. Douglas wrote fiction in the form of memoir, Murphy presents the truth with a narrative flair that reads like a novel.

Book Better Days Ahead

    Book Details:
  • Author : Charlie Valentine
  • Publisher : English Mill Press
  • Release : 2006
  • ISBN : 9780977218707
  • Pages : 406 pages

Download or read book Better Days Ahead written by Charlie Valentine and published by English Mill Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is America in the 1950s. Four different families play out their individual lives in different parts of the country.... Circumstances compel three of the families to head West to California for a fresh start for their children. No one can predict the high-stakes drama and devasting results that ensue when their lives intersect. This tale, the first in a trilogy, follows the families as they struggle with their lives, loves, and longings."--Cover, p. 4.

Book Hoover s War on Gays

    Book Details:
  • Author : Douglas M. Charles
  • Publisher : University Press of Kansas
  • Release : 2015-09-18
  • ISBN : 0700621199
  • Pages : 472 pages

Download or read book Hoover s War on Gays written by Douglas M. Charles and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-09-18 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the FBI, the “Sex Deviates” program covered a lot of ground, literally; at its peak, J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious “Sex Deviates” file encompassed nearly 99 cubic feet or more than 330,000 pages of information. In 1977–1978 these files were destroyed—and it would seem that four decades of the FBI’s dirty secrets went up in smoke. But in a remarkable feat of investigative research, synthesis, and scholarly detective work, Douglas M. Charles manages to fill in the yawning blanks in the bureau’s history of systematic (some would say obsessive) interest in the lives of gay and lesbian Americans in the twentieth century. His book, Hoover’s War on Gays, is the first to fully expose the extraordinary invasion of US citizens’ privacy perpetrated on a historic scale by an institution tasked with protecting American life. For much of the twentieth century, when exposure might mean nothing short of ruin, gay American men and women had much to fear from law enforcement of every kind—but none so much as the FBI, with its inexhaustible federal resources, connections, and its carefully crafted reputation for ethical, by-the-book operations. What Hoover’s War on Gays reveals, rather, is the FBI’s distinctly unethical, off-the-books long-term targeting of gay men and women and their organizations under cover of “official” rationale—such as suspicion of criminal activity or vulnerability to blackmail and influence. The book offers a wide-scale view of this policy and practice, from a notorious child kidnapping and murder of the 1930s (ostensibly by a sexual predator with homosexual tendencies), educating the public about the threat of “deviates,” through WWII’s security concerns about homosexuals who might be compromised by the enemy, to the Cold War’s “Lavender Scare” when any and all gays working for the US government shared the fate of suspected Communist sympathizers. Charles’s work also details paradoxical ways in which these incursions conjured counterefforts—like the Mattachine Society; ONE, Inc.; and the Daughters of Bilitis—aimed at protecting and serving the interests of postwar gay culture. With its painstaking recovery of a dark chapter in American history and its new insights into seemingly familiar episodes of that story—involving noted journalists, politicians, and celebrities—this thorough and deeply engaging book reveals the perils of authority run amok and stands as a reminder of damage done in the name of decency.

Book Cross Border Cosmopolitans

Download or read book Cross Border Cosmopolitans written by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa. By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.

Book The Hidden Life in Freemasonry

Download or read book The Hidden Life in Freemasonry written by Charles Webster Leadbeater and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 1926 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Masonic fellowship differs from all other societies in that candidates for membership have to join it blindfold, and cannot receive much information about it until they actually enter its ranks. Even then the majority of Masons usually obtain only the most general idea of the meaning of its ceremonies, and seldom penetrate further than an elementary moral interpretation of its principal symbols. In this book it is the object, while preserving due secrecy upon those matters which must be kept secret, to explain something of the deeper meaning and purpose of Freemasonry, in the hope of arousing among the Brn. a more profound reverence for that of which they are the custodians and a fuller understanding of the mysteries of the Craft. Although the book is primarily intended for the instruction of members of the Co-Masonic Order, whose desire, as is expressed in their ritual, is to pour the waters of esoteric knowledge into the Masonic vessels, the author hopes nevertheless that it may appeal to a wider circle, and may perhaps be of use to some of those many Brn. in the masculine Craft who are seeking for a deeper interpretation of Masonic symbolism than is given in the majority of their Lodges, showing them that in the ritual which they know and love so well are enshrined splendid ideals and deep spiritual teachings which are of the most absorbing interest to the student of the inner side of life.

Book Coverage of the Supreme Court and Congress

Download or read book Coverage of the Supreme Court and Congress written by William Dale Harrison and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Wiretrapping and National Security

Download or read book Wiretrapping and National Security written by Jeff Allen Hale and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The American archivist

Download or read book The American archivist written by Society of American Archivists and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes sections "Reviews of books" and "Abstracts of archive publications"