“FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court” by Alex Charns

FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court

Alex Charns
Bull City Law Publishing (2024)
ISBN:  979-8877302297
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (09/2026)

The corruption of the United States Supreme Court did not begin with luxury vacations, undisclosed gifts, or billionaires buying access to conservative justices. In FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court, attorney and civil libertarian Alex Charns documents an earlier scandal involving J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and liberal Justice Abe Fortas. Drawing upon thousands of pages of FBI records, Charns reveals how Hoover cultivated informants inside the Court, concealed evidence of illegal surveillance, and acquired potentially devastating sexual allegations against a sitting justice.

In 1967, Hoover received a report from an FBI informant described as an “active and aggressive homosexual.” According to the source, a young man named George claimed that he had “balled” with Fortas several times before Fortas joined the Court. George may have been a minor when the alleged encounters occurred. Rather than refer the accusation to the attorney general for investigation, Hoover ordered his lieutenant Cartha DeLoach to visit Fortas privately. DeLoach assured the justice that the Bureau would take no action and was informing him only for his “personal protection and knowledge.” True or false, the allegation gave Hoover extraordinary leverage over Fortas.

That leverage mattered because the FBI was facing a crisis over its illegal bugging of Washington lobbyist Fred Black. Agents had drilled through a hotel wall and installed a microphone that recorded conversations between Black and his attorney. When Black’s tax-evasion conviction reached the Supreme Court, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach insisted that the surveillance be disclosed. Hoover fought to minimize the admission, shift responsibility to former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and protect himself from public disgrace.

For this campaign, Hoover found an invaluable ally in Fortas. Although Fortas formally recused himself from the Black case, he continued participating in conference discussions, received confidential Court materials, and met secretly with DeLoach. He reported the justices’ deliberations, accepted FBI memoranda, promised to approach Johnson, and attempted to redirect blame toward Kennedy and the Justice Department. Fortas even warned DeLoach in advance that Black’s conviction would be vacated and the case returned to the lower court. As Charns argues, this was not merely poor judgment but an astonishing betrayal of judicial independence.

The hypocrisy is especially striking because Fortas sometimes produced genuinely progressive decisions. He defended the rights of gay people, opposed censorship, joined the majority protecting privacy in Katz v. United States, and wrote in Tinker v. Des Moines that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Yet the same justice acted as a presidential adviser, an FBI informant, and a covert participant in cases from which he had supposedly withdrawn. The book demonstrates how easily admirable legal principles can coexist with appalling personal conduct.

Fortas’s nomination for chief justice failed in 1968 amid conservative attacks on his rulings and outside income. The following year, revelations that financier Louis Wolfson had paid him $20,000 forced him to resign in disgrace. Neither Congress nor the public knew about his dealings with Hoover or the sexual allegation hidden in the director’s secret files.

The final section recounts Charns’ remarkable struggle to obtain those records. Beginning in 1983, the FBI repeatedly claimed that it possessed no responsive Supreme Court files even while its employees had located thousands of relevant pages. Charns and attorney Paul Green fought the Bureau through three Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. In 1996, they deduced that a censored entry in Hoover’s “Official and Confidential” index concealed the eleven-character label “FORTAS, ABE.” The FBI finally surrendered the folder. In 2024, the National Archives produced a less-redacted copy in under a week—something the Bureau had obstructed for decades.

The book would benefit from firmer editing: some material is repetitive, the citations occasionally disrupt the narrative, and Charns sometimes presses his conclusions—particularly the claim of blackmail—beyond what the surviving evidence can definitively establish. These reservations do little to diminish the book’s importance. At its core, this is a disturbing account of institutional power protecting itself and of the extraordinary persistence required to expose official misconduct. Charns preserves a scandal the FBI successfully buried for decades, demonstrates the fragility of government transparency when agencies face no meaningful penalties for concealment, and reminds us that judicial corruption belongs to no single party or ideology.