Charns Continues Pursuit of Truth in “FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court”
Alex Charns is the definitive example of a lifelong learner.
The criminal defense attorney from Durham traces this unending quest for knowledge to his formative years in Michigan, where he grew up near Detroit. He left his home state and ultimately completed a degree in social work at Cal Berkeley in 1978, late to the dance for the 1960s anti-war protests but nonetheless influenced by the lingering spirit of the Free Speech Movement as well as the Civil Rights Movement.
Charns’ next stop was the University of North Carolina School at Chapel Hill, where he first crossed paths with Dave Garrow, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Dr. Martin Luther King was supported by records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Garrow was serving as an assistant history professor at the time and Charns was pursuing his juris doctor, which he received from UNC School of Law in 1982.
“He had just come out with his book about the FBI and Martin Luther King,” Charns recalls. “He was the first one to uncover some of the atrocious behavior the FBI had conducted in terms of blackmail and the ‘poison pen’ letter. They were threatening to expose King with all of this bugging and wiretaps they were going to give to his wife; it seemed to be a demand that he commit suicide.
“It was such horrendous behavior against one of our national heroes, and I thought, ‘If they were doing this to him, what were they doing to the liberal Warren Court?’”
Thus began, more than 40 years ago, Charns’ pursuit of FBI files pertaining to members of the U.S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren. His efforts have resulted in several articles and two books: “Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers and the Supreme Court,” published by the University of Illinois Press in 1992, and “FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court,” published under Charns’ personal label, Bull City Law Publishing, in 2024.
Alex Charns displays his latest book, “FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court.”
“I thought I’d ask for the file on the Supreme Court,” Charns said in regard to his initial research, which began in his first year out of law school. “I’ll ask for the blackmail files, for the wiretapping files, the bugging files, the informant files. And the response from the FBI was, ‘No, we don’t have any of that.’ I ended up, and it was probably Dave Garrow who suggested this, asking for each file on each deceased justice and law clerk. And one of the justices that I asked for the file on was Abe Fortas.
“Dave taught me to always ask for the main file and the cross-reference, which the FBI called ‘see references.’ This was because, he said, sometimes they will hide things and tell you that they don’t have time to look for the cross-reference. At one point, I was the leading Freedom of Information Act requester in the country! There were so many requests out, and I didn’t believe they didn’t have a file on the Supreme Court.”
Charns struck gold when he requested his own file, which contained more than a thousand pages because of his voluminous Freedom of Information requests.
“In my file I found a search slip,” Charns said, “which is kind of their recipe for how they searched, and in it I found a file called ‘Left-wing Law Clerks’ in a 3,000-page file called ‘Supreme Court.’ They actually gave me a fee waiver because it was in the public interest to release it, and because I said I was going to publish my findings.
“But at that point I wasn’t sure I could trust them. As President Reagan used to say, ‘Trust, but verify.’ That is why I ended up filing three lawsuits against them.”
It also helps explain why Charns didn’t stop after his first book. In addition to practicing law, raising a family, writing additional books, and playing and coaching hockey, he continued to collect information chronicling this disturbing yet intriguing chapter of American history.
It is a story short on heroes, from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to Chief Justice Earl Warren to President Lyndon Johnson to Justice Abe Fortas. The plot hinges on the FBI’s unconstitutional surveillance of the justices and the unethical exchange of favors and information that invaded the innermost sanctum of the justices – their conference room – and blurred the boundaries of separation of powers.
Hoover and Warren provided the logical starting point, for their relationship dated back to the 1930s, when Hoover was assembling his empire and Warren was serving as a district attorney in California, where he later became attorney general and governor. Warren’s star was on the rise and his establishment of the Anti-Racket Council of Alameda County occasionally brought him to Washington, D.C., where an FBI car and chauffeur were conveniently at his disposal.
The emergence of Fortas as a central character in this story also preceded his service on the Supreme Court (1965-69). His longstanding relationship with President Johnson landed him on the court and ultimately led to his nomination, which was later withdrawn, to succeed Warren as chief justice. Fortas, as Charns points out, had successfully argued Gideon v. Wainwright before the Supreme Court and was confirmed the same day Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as the nation’s first Black solicitor general.
Fortas also committed what Charns describes as “the most egregious violation of judicial ethics and betrayal of trust in Supreme Court history?”
“The reason I did the new book is because it turns out I didn’t have everything,” Charns said. “The blockbuster of having a justice being an FBI informant, having a justice sexually blackmailed by the FBI, would have made a good addition to that book or any book, and it kind of changes the history.”
With insight provided by attorney Paul Green, grandson of the famous N.C. playwright, and the late Dr. Athan Theoharis of Marquette University, a leading FBI researcher who assisted with the first book, Charns was able to connect the dots leading to files that were hidden from the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence (the Church Committee).
The files included a memo from the Washington Field Office of the FBI regarding “possible homosexual activities on the part of Justice Abe Fortas” and a recommendation that the information be forwarded to the Attorney General.
“That would have been the process with the programs they had in place at the time,” Charns said, “regarding homosexuals in government, and they would root out people who were gay. But Hoover writes at the bottom of the memo, ‘No,’ you go to Fortas. So they go to Fortas and show them what they have, and he denies it.
“And they said, ‘your secret’s safe with us.’ And it stayed safe for all those years – no one saw it. I just don’t understand how they didn’t turn that over to the Church Committee.”
“FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court” is neither an epilogue nor an appendix to “Cloak and Gavel.” It’s a refresh with a new lead, published print-on-demand to allow for any additional revelations.
“I needed to tell the story of Fortas being an informant,” Charns concluded. “What I did is a shortened version of ‘Cloak and Gavel.’ I updated it and told the story in a more conversational tone with maybe a hundred footnotes instead of 500 or 600 the way I did it before.
“And then at the end I updated the story to tell how I came up with this.”
Such is the joy of lifelong learning.
Russell Rawlings is director of external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association.