Alex Charns’s FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court is a compact work of investigative legal history built from FBI memoranda, court records, archival materials, and the author’s decades of Freedom of Information Act litigation. Its central subject is the relationship among FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Justice Abe Fortas, President Lyndon Johnson, and FBI official Cartha DeLoach. Charns argues that Hoover’s Bureau collected damaging sexual allegations about Fortas while also benefiting from the justice’s willingness to share confidential information and influence deliberations involving illegal electronic surveillance. The book presents this relationship as part of a broader campaign to monitor, cultivate, and manipulate the Supreme Court.

The book’s strongest chapters reconstruct the Fred Black litigation, in which the FBI’s warrantless bugging captured conversations between Black and his attorney. Charns traces how DeLoach privately briefed Fortas, how Fortas discussed the Court’s internal deliberations, and how he helped shape arguments that could redirect blame from Hoover toward Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department. The account gains force from specific records. Hoover’s instructions and Fortas’s reported conversations create a disturbing picture of executive influence reaching into judicial decision-making. Charns’s judgment is severe, but it’s grounded in a clearly stated ethical principle: confidential Court deliberations and pending cases shouldn’t become instruments of political or institutional self-protection.

Charns writes with the urgency of an advocate and the precision of a practicing lawyer. His prose is most effective when documentary evidence carries the narrative, as when Fortas tells DeLoach that “Kennedy would be completely destroyed” if responsibility for the bugging became public. The book’s rhetorical flourishes and repeated moral conclusions make the argument feel more prosecutorial than analytical. Still, the author regularly distinguishes allegation from proof, particularly when discussing the sexual claim against Fortas, and acknowledges the ethical difficulty of publishing information about people whose privacy the FBI had already violated. That self-examination gives the closing section an important measure of restraint.

The final chapters broaden the book from a historical exposé into a study of government secrecy and archival accountability. Charns recounts how the FBI denied the existence of relevant records, resisted adequate searches, and released crucial documents only after years of litigation. His description of FOIA as an elaborate information game is humorous, but it also clarifies the practical obstacles facing researchers who challenge secretive institutions. The result is a focused and unsettling book about judicial ethics, surveillance power, institutional loyalty, and the persistence required to recover suppressed history. Its lasting contribution lies in connecting misconduct inside the Supreme Court with the bureaucratic systems that kept the evidence hidden for decades.

Pages: 118 | ASIN: B0CTD15W6D