Turns out Alito also defended the Regan administration in warantless
wiretaps.
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito defended the right of government
officials to order domestic wiretaps when he worked for the Reagan Justice
Department, documents released Friday show.He advocated a step by step approach to strengthening the hand of
officials in a 1984 memo to the solicitor general. The strategy is similar
to the one that Alito espoused for rolling back abortion rights at the
margins.The release of the memo by the National Archives comes when President
Bush is under fire for secretly ordering domestic spying of suspected
terrorists without a warrant. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen
Specter, R-Pa., has promised to question Alito about the administration’s
program.The memo dealt with whether government officials should have blanket
protection from lawsuits when authorizing wiretaps. “I do not question that
the attorney general should have this immunity,” Alito wrote. “But for
tactical reasons, I would not raise the issue here.”Despite Alito’s warning that the government would lose, the Reagan
administration took the fight to the Supreme Court in the case of whether
Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, could be sued for authorizing a
warrantless domestic wiretap to gather information about a suspected
terrorist plot. The FBI had received information about a conspiracy to
destroy utility tunnels in Washington and kidnap Henry Kissinger, then
national security adviser.
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Well Alito was right. When the case went to the Supreme Court the did loose
and Supreme Court ruled that the Attorney General and other high officials could
be sued for wiretaps. This should help put the nail in his coffin a little more.