Bill Clinton Signed Executive Order that allowed Attorney General to do searches without court approval
Clinton, February 9, 1995: "The Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order"
Jimmy Carter Signed Executive Order on May 23, 1979: "Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order."
WASH POST, July 15, 1994: Extend not only to searches of the homes of U.S. citizens but also -- in the delicate words of a Justice Department official -- to "places where you wouldn't find or would be unlikely to find information involving a U.S. citizen... would allow the government to use classified electronic surveillance techniques, such as infrared sensors to observe people inside their homes, without a court order."
Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick, the Clinton administration believes the president "has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes."
Secret searches and wiretaps of Aldrich Ames's office and home in June and October 1993, both without a federal warrant.
" I will do a Lexus search tomorrow and find that damn WP story."
There might be something here to help you pin it down......I've been sitting here reading and staring at so much small print till I can't see any longer...good luck on your search!
March 31, 1997
Policy Analysis no. 271
Dereliction of Duty: The Constitutional Record of President Clinton
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=1130&print=Y&full=1 Scroll down to # 51
The Clinton administration has repeatedly attempted to play down the significance of the warrant clause. In fact, President Clinton has asserted the power to conduct warrantless searches, warrantless drug testing of public school students, and warrantless wiretapping.
Warrantless "National Security" Searches
The Clinton administration claims that it can bypass the warrant clause for "national security" purposes. In July 1994 Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the president "has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes." [51] According to Gorelick, the president (or his attorney general) need only satisfy himself that an American is working in conjunction with a foreign power before a search can take place.
The warrant clause was designed to give the American people greater security than that afforded by the mere words of politicians. It requires the attorney general, or others, to make a showing of "probable cause" to a magistrate. The proponents of national security searches are hard-pressed to find any support for their position in the text or history of the Constitution. That is why they argue from the "inherent authority" of the Oval Office--a patently circular argument. The scope of such "authority" is of course unbounded in principle. Yet the Clinton Justice Department has said that the warrant clause is fully applicable to murder suspects but not to persons suspected of violating the export control regulations of the federal government. [52] If the Framers had wanted to insert a national security exception to the warrant clause, they would have done so. They did not.
The Clinton administration's national security exception to the warrant clause is nothing more, of course, than an unsupported assertion of power by executive branch officials. The Nixon administration relied on similar constitutional assertions in the 1970s to rationalize "black bag" break-ins to the quarters of its political opponents. [53] The Clinton White House--even after the Filegate scandal--assures Congress, the media, and the general public that it has no intention of abusing this power.
Attorney General Reno has already signed off on the warrantless search of an American home on the basis of the dubious "inherent authority" theory. [54] The actual number of clandestine "national security" searches conducted since 1993 is known only to the White House and senior Justice Department officials.
# 65
Warrantless Wiretapping
The Supreme Court has recognized that electronic surveillance, such as wiretapping and eavesdropping, impinges on the privacy rights of individuals and organizations and is therefore subject to the Fourth Amendment's warrant clause. [65] President Clinton, however, has asked Congress to pass legislation that would give the Federal Bureau of Investigation the power to use "roving wiretaps" without a court order. [66] The president also fought for sweeping legislation that is forcing the telephone industry to make its network more easily accessible to law enforcement wiretaps. Those initiatives have led ACLU officials to describe the Clinton White House as "the most wiretap-friendly administration in history." [67]
It is unclear why the president made warrantless roving wiretaps a priority matter since judges routinely approve wiretap applications by federal prosecutors. According to a 1995 report by the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, it had been years since a federal district court turned down a prosecutor's request for a wiretap order. [68] President Clinton is apparently seeking to free his administration from any potential judicial interference with its wiretapping plans. There is a problem, of course, with the power that the president desires: it is precisely the sort of unchecked power that the Fourth Amendment's warrant clause was designed to curb. As the Supreme Court noted in Katz v. United States (1967), the judicial procedure of antecedent justification before a neutral magistrate is a "constitutional precondition," not only to the search of a home, but also to eavesdropping on private conversations within the home. [69]
President Clinton also lobbied for and signed the Orwellian Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which is forcing every telephone company in America to retrofit its phone lines and networks so that they will be more accessible to police wiretaps. [70] The cost of that makeover is expected to be several billion dollars. Any communications carrier that fails to meet the technology standards of the attorney general can be fined up to $10,000 per day. The passage of that law prompted Attorney General Reno to marvel at her newly acquired power: "I don't think J. Edgar Hoover would contemplate what we can do today." [71] That is unfortunately true. In the past, law enforcement had to rely on the goodwill and voluntary cooperation of the American people for investigative assistance. That tradition is giving way to a regime of coercive mandates. [72]
# 114
President Clinton and the Legislature
President Clinton claims the Constitution gives him the unilateral power to attack other countries whenever he deems that course of action appropriate. Over the last four years, he has authorized missile attacks against Iraq, ordered air strikes in Bosnia, and threatened to invade Haiti. In each instance the president claimed that it was unnecessary to seek any constitutional authorization from Congress.
The Framers of the Constitution gave the war power careful consideration. Although in the European countries of the 18th century the war power was commonly vested in monarchs, the Framers made a deliberate decision to leave the war-making power with the national legislature, not the president. [114] Article I of the Constitution states that "Congress shall have the power . . . to declare war." The president was to exercise his article II responsibilities as commander in chief within the framework established by the Constitution. The American executive would direct the military operations that the people's representatives in Congress had authorized.
When President Clinton threatened to invade Haiti, 10 prominent legal scholars sent him a letter to remind him of the constitutional boundaries of his office:
The President may not order the United States Armed Forces to make war without first meaningfully consulting with Congress and receiving its affirmative authorization. . . . In our view, those principles, as well as your oath of office, require you to follow President Bush's example in the Persian Gulf War: to seek and obtain Congress's express prior approval before launching a military invasion of Haiti. [115]
President Clinton ignored that letter and came perilously close to commanding U.S. forces to attack the Haitian military. [116]
Haiti was not an isolated incident. The Clinton administration has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use military force without congressional authorization. In September 1996, for example, President Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on Iraq. [117] The president characterized that attack as a "retaliatory strike" because Iraqi forces were engaged in murderous activity in an "exclusion zone" that President Bush had created, on his own authority, in 1991. (Recall that Congress only authorized U.S. military forces to expel the Iraqi military from Kuwait; President Bush created exclusion zones on Iraqi territory for the Kurdish people after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm.)
President Clinton's rationale for his Iraqi missile attack is extremely distressing because it perfectly illustrates the dangerous propensities that the Founders apprehended at the Constitutional Convention. The Framers wanted the legislative branch to have the war power because of the ambitious tendencies of the executive branch. As James Madison noted, "The executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it." [118] James Wilson, though an advocate of a strong presidency, approvingly observed that the new constitutional system "will not hurry us into war" since the war-making power "will not be vested in the power of a single man." [119]
Today, the United States military is obviously involved in an open-ended "police action" in the Middle East--and the fateful decision to engage in full-scale war rests with a single person in the American government: Bill Clinton. That is precisely the type of situation that the Constitution was designed to prevent.
[13]. Quoted in Nat Hentoff, "Watch What You Say," Washington Post, February 4, 1996.
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[51]. Quoted in R. Jeffrey Smith, "Administration Backing No-Warrant Spy Searches," Washington Post, July 15, 1994,p. A19.
[52]. See Kate Martin, Testimony on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union on Warrantless National Security Physical Searches before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, July 14, 1994, p. 17.
[53]. See Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 439-85.
[54]. See Benjamin Wittes, "Aldrich Ames' Legal Legacy: Surveillance Court Gets New Powers," Legal Times, November 7, 1994, p. 1.
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[66]. See John F. Harris and John E. Yang, "Anti-Terror Bills Pushed by Clinton," Washington Post, July 30, 1996, p. A1.
[67]. ACLU official Laura Murphy quoted in Marcia Coyle, "Clinton, Dole Rate Low on Civil Liberties," National Law Journal, October 28, 1996, p. A1. See also Nadine Strossen, "No Safer, But a Little Less Free," Washington Post, September 2, 1996.
[68]. See Jim McGee, "Wiretapping Rises Sharply under Clin-ton," Washington Post, July 7, 1996, p. A1.
[69]. Katz at 359.
[70]. See Sabra Chartrand, "Clinton Gets a Wiretapping Bill That Covers New Technologies," New York Times, October 9, 1994, p. 27. For a good critique of that measure, see Barry Steinhardt, "New Legislation Authorizes Wholesale Invasion of Privacy," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 5, 1996,p. 11B.
[71]. Quoted in McGee. See also John Markoff, "F.B.I. Wants Advanced System to Vastly Increase Wiretapping," New York Times, November 2, 1996, p. A1.
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115]. Quoted in Stuart Taylor, "A Betrayal of the Constitution," Legal Times, September 19, 1994, p. 25. For a fuller discussion of the war power under the U.S. Constitution, see Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
[116]. See Thomas Friedman, "Clinton Vows to Fight Congress on His Power to Use the Military," New York Times, October 19, 1993, p. A1.
[117]. See Steven Lee Myers, "U.S. Attacks Military Targets in Iraq," New York Times, September 3, 1996, p. A1.
[118]. Quoted in Taylor, "A Betrayal of the Constitution."
[119]. Wilson quotes are found in Doug Bandow, "Another Crisis of Presidential War-Making," Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1994; and Anthony Lewis, "'Not in a Single Man,'" New York Times, September 12, 1994.
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[152]. The Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995, H.R. 896,§ 101(c), introduced February 10, 1995, by Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Congressional Record 141, no. 27 (1995), H1611. See also Kenneth J. Cooper, "Anti-Terrorism Bill Gets Hung Up: House GOP Conservatives Object to Expansion of Federal Powers," Washington Post, August 6, 1995, p. A4.