The dismissal of Daniel Ellsberg’s case on May 11, 1973, turned a dispute over undisclosed wiretaps into a decisive collapse of the prosecution. Evidence that the government had secretly intercepted a telephone conversation involving Ellsberg—and had failed to disclose the information to his lawyers—led Judge Matthew Byrne to conclude that government misconduct had irreparably damaged the case.

The wiretap question

The prosecution had insisted that no wiretaps involving Ellsberg existed. In early May, however, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that two New York Times reporters’ telephones had been tapped during the investigation of the Pentagon Papers leak. They had heard from Deep Throat that the reporters were Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, but could not find a second source to confirm those names and left them out. Their reporting did establish the possibility that Ellsberg himself had been overheard, a consequential lead because he had leaked the papers to Sheehan.

The newspaper’s reporting linked two investigations that the newsroom had come to call Watergate East and Watergate West: the Watergate case and the Ellsberg prosecution in Los Angeles. Judge Byrne, confronted with the possibility of a tap involving Ellsberg while the government maintained there had been none, asked the government to search its records again.

The concealed interception

William D. Ruckelshaus, the new acting director of the FBI, found evidence of a tap. The logs themselves were missing, but aides told him that Ellsberg had been overheard at least once. The interception had not occurred on Sheehan’s telephone; it was on the home telephone of Morton Halperin, a former member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.

Ruckelshaus announced that Halperin’s phone had been tapped for 21 months. This was the first confirmation that the administration had used wiretaps to investigate news leaks. It also established that the government had illegally failed to provide Ellsberg’s defense attorneys with all its wiretap information. The issue was therefore not merely whether surveillance had taken place, but whether the prosecution had proceeded while relevant government-held information remained undisclosed to the defense.

Dismissal and its immediate basis

Several days after Ruckelshaus’s disclosure, on May 11, Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg. He stated that government misconduct had incurably infected the prosecution. The ruling ended the case against Ellsberg and made the administration’s treatment of wiretap evidence central to the result: the government’s failure to disclose information had become a reason the prosecution could not continue.

The wider leak investigation

The disclosures continued after the dismissal. On May 14, Ruckelshaus announced that 17 wiretaps had been ordered between 1969 and 1971 as part of the administration’s search for news leaks. The logs, previously missing, had been found in John Ehrlichman’s safe in his White House office. Ruckelshaus did not identify the 13 government officials and four reporters whose telephones had been tapped, leaving open the question of who had authorized the surveillance. Woodward later received information from a senior FBI official that some authorizations had come from Kissinger, orally or by letter.

The Ellsberg case thus ended within a larger disclosure of secret surveillance: an interception relevant to the defense exposed the government’s failure to share evidence, while the recovered logs and subsequent reporting pointed toward a broader national-security wiretapping program. The dismissal was the immediate legal consequence; the later revelations widened the question from misconduct in one prosecution to the origins and reach of the administration’s leak investigations.