The American public had barely stopped talking about Richard Nixon's infamous Watergate tapes and his decision to authorize domestic snooping when then-President Gerald R. Ford authorized the FBI to carry out warrantless electronic surveillance inside the United States.
A classified memo from the president, dated December 19, 1974, authorized the attorney general "to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
The two-page memo (PDF), signed by Ford, states that "I have been advised by you and the Department of State that such surveillance is consistent with the Constitution, Laws and Treaties of the United States."
The "you" referred to was then-Attorney General William B. Saxbe, a former Republican senator from Ohio who served for two years as Ford's attorney general. Saxbe now has the distinction of being the oldest living Republican senator. The memo suggests that Saxbe had told Ford that warrantless wiretapping of US residents is constitutional.
"Ford was completely motivated by defending against the Cold War threat of the Soviet Union," John Laprise, the Northwestern University communications professor who first obtained the memo, told Politics Daily's Andrew Becker. "This could be Bush after 9/11 or Obama after becoming president, but it's President Ford 35 years ago, coping with Cold War struggles. It's really a stunning document that raises all sorts of questions."
