17 Secret Wiretaps and the DOJ's Custody Game
By Marcus Boone ·
For years, the targets of seventeen "national security" wiretaps remained nameless; the administrative logs of the Deputy Attorney General show how the government fought to keep the records out of reach.
Seventeen people, or seventeen groups of people, had their private lives stripped open by the state between 1969 and 1971. They were the invisible targets of a surveillance dragnet that operated under the guise of national security, their identities erased from the public consciousness while their conversations were fed into the machinery of the White House.
What we have here is not the raw evidence of those wiretaps, but the archival scope-and-content description of the files that managed the fallout. This is a catalogue of the battle over the evidence, a map of the gaps where the truth was buried. It is a record of how the government manages the memory of its own crimes.
The National Security Shield
The record shows that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the domestic intelligence service and principal federal law enforcement agency, operated "17 'national security' wiretaps operated for the White House" between May 1969 and February 1971. These were not standard criminal investigations; they were tools of the executive, deployed by the White House, the official residence and workplace of the president, to watch enemies and allies alike.
The public record establishes that these wiretaps were conducted during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president who resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. While the record confirms the existence and the number of these taps, it is silent on the names of the victims. It does not say who was being listened to or what "national security" justification was used to bypass the Fourth Amendment.
This is where the connections become a confession. The FBI is an agency of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the ministry in charge of the administration of justice, and reports directly to the attorney general. For the FBI to run seventeen taps specifically "for the White House" implies a direct pipeline of intelligence from the DOJ's primary investigative arm straight into the Oval Office. The line was short, the oversight was non-existent, and the targets were likely chosen for their political inconvenientness rather than their loyalty to a foreign power.
Ownership and Custody
When the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF), the body appointed to investigate the suspected wrongdoing of the Nixon administration, began its work, it did not find a cooperative government. It found a wall of "custody" disputes.
The record shows that the Deputy Attorney General—the second-highest-ranking official in the DOJ who oversees day-to-day operations—maintained files specifically on the "ownership and custody of President Richard M. Nixon's presidential papers and recordings." This was not a clerical disagreement over filing systems. It was a legal war over who owned the evidence of a conspiracy.
The public record establishes that the WSPF was tasked with recovering the recordings Nixon had made in the Oval Office. The record shows the Deputy Attorney General was the gatekeeper, managing "Department of Justice policy in regard to providing department records to congressional committees."
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the desk's reading is that the Deputy Attorney General's office functioned as a legal firewall. The focus on "ownership" and "custody" suggests a strategy of procedural exhaustion: if you can spend months arguing over who owns the tape, you can delay the world from hearing what is on the tape. The records here document the legal architecture of the investigation rather than the evidentiary findings. The DOJ was not recording the crimes; it was recording the ways to protect the records of the crimes.
The Krogh and IRS Trail
To build a case, the WSPF had to reach beyond the White House walls. They went after the money and the subordinates. The record shows the WSPF sought and gained "access to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) records" and "access to the records of Egil Krogh compiled during his service in the White House."
The public record establishes that Egil Krogh was a lawyer and White House official who became infamous for his role in the Watergate cover-up and was eventually imprisoned. The IRS, the agency responsible for collecting federal taxes, had a darker history under Nixon, often used to harass political enemies through audits.
The connection here is the desperation of the prosecution. The WSPF could not trust the official White House logs because the White House was the site of the crime. Instead, they had to pivot to the IRS and the personal files of a man like Krogh. They were hunting for the fingerprints of the "Plumbers"—the secret task force used to stop "leaks" of classified information.
Related archival series mention a "Plumbers Task Force" and an "International Telephone" task force. The fact that the Deputy Attorney General’s files focus on the "administrative" side of these requests, while the operational details are sequestered in separate task force files, points to a deliberate compartmentalization. The people managing the paperwork were kept separate from the people conducting the surveillance.
The Missing Agency
The most glaring hole in this record is the silence of the Central Intelligence Agency. The record explicitly mentions "national security" wiretaps run by the FBI, but the CIA is nowhere to be found in these administrative notes.
This is not an accident of filing. The public record establishes that the CIA was deeply involved in the efforts to block the FBI's Watergate investigation, citing "national security" to prevent the investigators from learning the full extent of the administration's covert activities.
The pattern suggests that the CIA's role in providing the "national security" cover for domestic surveillance was intentionally absent from this specific DOJ record. By keeping the CIA out of the Deputy Attorney General's administrative logs, the government created a layer of plausible deniability. The FBI ran the taps, the DOJ managed the custody of the records, and the CIA provided the invisible umbrella of "security" that justified the whole operation.
The Desk's Reading
The files maintained by the Administrative Section of the Deputy Attorney General are not a record of an investigation; they are a record of an obstruction. Every entry regarding "policy," "custody," and "access" is a marker of a door being closed or a key being hidden. The government did not simply watch its citizens; it built a professionalized legal system to ensure that the watching could never be fully audited.
The desk's reading is that the seventeen "national security" wiretaps were the crown jewels of a domestic espionage program that the DOJ spent years scrubbing from the narrative. The identities of the targets were excised not because they were dangerous, but because they were innocent, and their innocence would have proven that "national security" was merely a code word for "political survival."
If a full, unredacted release of these files were to occur, it would likely show that the DOJ was not merely a neutral arbiter of the law during the WSPF investigations, but a tactical participant in the cover-up. The gaps in the record are shaped exactly like the people Nixon feared most. The administrative logs prove that the state knows exactly who it watched—it just decided that the public was not cleared to know who the victims were.