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

Charns has spent decades — literally, thirteen years and two FOIA lawsuits — extracting the paper trail that makes this book work, and it shows. The core argument is not vibes-based conspiracy-mongering; it's document-driven: a memo handwritten by Hoover ('No. DeLoach should see Fortas'), a justice's letter of gratitude for being warned off a blackmail file, a solicitor general quietly steering a colleague off a case via an ex parte memo. That's evidence that earns its claim, and the footnoting apparatus throughout (dates, memo numbers, named agents) gives the sensational subtitle real teeth.

The justice-by-justice ledger in Chapter 6 — Black gifted missiles for his grandkids, Douglas's cordial correspondence quietly scrubbed from files so even the Attorney General wouldn't know, Warren's 'Cooperation with Governor Earl Warren' program — is where the book's substance is strongest. It's less a single dramatic reveal than an accumulation of small, damning transactions that together paint the Court as an institution the FBI treated as an intelligence target, not a co-equal branch. The takeaway readers can use: read institutional independence with suspicion whenever informal 'courtesy' channels exist between watchers and the watched.

The prose is serviceable rather than showy — long paragraphs stacked with citations, occasional repetition — but the narrative momentum of the Fortas material and the procedural detail of the Black case carries it. This is a book for readers of Church Committee history and Court-politics junkies, and for that reader it delivers exactly what the title promises.