(Updated) Cheney and Rumsfeld Ordered Break-In of Reporter Sy Hersh’s Home

Atty. Gen Levi [Hersh mentions him below the fold] was, of course, the man behind the Levi Guidelines, instituted to rein in the government after the excesses of COINTELPRO. The same Levi Guidelines Ashcroft has since duplicitly trashed with PATRIOT I & II.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to start off with, is it true that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld attempted to break into your home?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, no, not literally, of course, but it is true that they asked the FBI to in 1975, when I was a reporter in Washington for The New York Times. I had written a story about, oh, some secret stuff involving the Navy and spying on Russia and intercepts. … more below:

HERSH CONTINUES: It was pretty sensitive stuff. It was given to me by people inside the bureaucracy who thought it was stupid, counterproductive and wasteful and dangerous, so there was a reason to write it. I mean, it wasn’t as if I was just exposing something — it had been the source of enormous dismay inside that we continued to do these provocative operations. This was at the end of the Vietnam War.

And so, they got upset. Cheney and — they were both — one was Chief of Staff, one was his deputy. Maybe Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense then.

And what happened is that during the 2000 campaign when Cheney was nominated, a bunch of reporters from Newsweek went to the Ford Library in Michigan, Gerald Ford — I don’t — Grand Rapids, I think it was.

There’s a library there, and they discovered they had declassified some documents, sort of a 25-year time period, and out popped this file on me. And those guys at Newsweek were very excited about it. They even shared it with me. They sent me a copy. It was about 50 pages of worrying about what to do, and at one point they did ask the — Rumsfeld — Cheney was writing notes.

Rumsfeld was involved and others were, too, in the White House, the White House Counsel, etc., and people from the Pentagon, and they asked the FBI to do — to go into my house as — one of the options was go into my house.

There were a series of options. One was do nothing. One was to ask The New York Times to try to do something about me, you know, to shut me down, but the most dramatic one was to go into my house.

And they sent it over – and then Ed Levi, who was also a participant in these discussions, he was then the Attorney General.

And as I said last night here, oh, if we had an Attorney General like that again, former Dean at the University of Chicago Law School, and eminent jurist.

He wrote them a smashing memo saying, are you guys — excuse me, guys, the White House cannot order the FBI to go into someone’s house. You have to — we have to begin a criminal investigation.

It has to be determined by appropriate judicial figures, people in the Justice Department. The Department of Justice has to decide there’s a case there. Then as part of the investigation, we can authorize it, you cannot.

And so they were sort of rebuked. And it was in writing. And Newsweek never did the story. And so —

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Do I know why anybody doesn’t do anything? I don’t know why. And it never really became a story. It was sort of — you know, this came up because somebody asked me about it last night. I decided not to talk — write about it and talk about it. …

AMY GOODMAN: And what would they have found if they broke into your house?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A dog. A cat. As if — as if somebody would keep memos and, you know, — I don’t keep anything around, period. I just don’t do it.