Last week the FBI released files from background investigations conducted when the Senate confirmed William Rehnquist as Supreme Court justice in 1971 and as chief justice in 1986. The documents became available after Rehnquist’s death in response to requests from news organizations and researchers under the Freedom of Information Act. ( Alex Charns, an attorney and author of Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court, provided the documents below and on the following five pages.)
Some of these newly released files show that in both 1971 and 1986, the White House directed the FBI and/or the Justice Department to suppress or counteract testimony unfavorable to Rehnquist’s civil rights record by digging up unflattering information about these witnesses. The page below, written before the 1971 hearings, shows Assistant Attorney General (and subsequent Watergate perjurer) Richard Kleindienst requesting (and the FBI agreeing) that agents “discreetly determine” whether two individuals likely to testify from Rehnquist’s home state of Arizona “had any criminal records or criminal background.” A few days later a second memo (see next page) reports the FBI’s “investigation disclosed opposition to Rehnquist by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”
The Justice Department interfered with the FBI’s background investigation in 1986. In this instance, though, the FBI at least marginally resisted efforts to add to its workload. On Pages 3 through 6, you’ll find three memoranda reporting on phone calls to the bureau from then-Assistant Attorney General John Bolton (until recently, President Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations) and then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Carvin demanding last-minute interviews of specific witnesses. On Page 6, an unidentified (and spelling-challenged) FBI agent, referring to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond, says, “He’s probably concerned about the partisian [sic] appearances of the FBI interviewing Democratic Party witnesses only, we don’t want to forget the charges of miss use [sic] of the FBI from the Nixon Era.”
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