The President Tapping Phones for Political/Foreign Policy Reasons

With all the press focused on the NSA getting records of calls from the US to and from suspected terrorists abroad - I thought it was worth while to look back at the actions of President Lyndon Johnson. According to Richard Allen's oral history given to the people at the Miller Center of Public Affairs - LBJ had his phones tapped to try and find out if anyone was interfering with the Paris Peace Accords and the Vietnamese (both North and South). Allen was the foreign policy advisor to candidate Richard Nixon at the time:

There's been a recent book on this very topic about the interference in the elections. She [Anna Chennault] tried to get to me. I wouldn't permit her to talk to me, but President Johnson then tapped our telephones. This is the second highly illegal action, I think. Well of course, he may have thought he had a legitimate right to if he suspected national security, but it was a political campaign after all, and he did tap our phones - illegally.

The phone taps were carried out by the CIA in what Allen calls, "the first proven illegal investigation of a U.S. citizen by the C.I.A."

This is the very sort of thing that the left would have you believe that Bush is carrying out. What is strange is when you look at history you see JFK tapping Martin Luther King's phones, LBJ going after Richard Allen or Clinton allowing good ole boy buddies pour over the FBI files of potential political rivals. In fact the very act that Bush is using to legally monitor the communications "to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order" was an act signed into law by Jimmy Carter (Executive Order #12139).

What Bush is doing in monitoring the phone records (as opposed to the phone taps noted above) is both legal and necessary in the fight against radical Islam. The folks on the left don't seem to trust Bush because they know how their leaders have acted in similar circumstances. Projection pure and simple.

Two more quotes from Allen that I found noteworthy.

On the CIA's ability to keep secrets, "There are more secrets in the Department of Agriculture than in our Central Intelligence Agency."

On Richard Nixon, "There was a lot of good in him [Richard Nixon] in terms of policy, but not to much good in terms of human relations."