Dismissal of the charges against Ellsberg

The dismissal of the charges against Daniel Ellsberg on May 11 followed the discovery that the government had withheld wiretap information relevant to his defense. Judge Matthew Byrne dismissed every charge, finding that government misconduct had irreparably compromised the prosecution. The ruling arose from a search for evidence about surveillance of Ellsberg, but disclosures in the days around it exposed a wider program of wiretapping news-leak targets.

Two investigations converge

The Ellsberg prosecution and Watergate had already become entangled through the people and operations around the White House. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy had supervised the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office; in the newsroom, the resulting investigations were often called Watergate East and Watergate West. The distinction between them was becoming harder to maintain as evidence about White House leak investigations surfaced alongside the Watergate reporting.

In early May, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein prepared a story that two New York Times reporters’ telephones had been wiretapped during the investigation of the Pentagon Papers leak. Deep Throat had given Woodward the reporters’ names months earlier, but the reporters could not find a second source and did not publish them. They did establish that Ellsberg himself might have been overheard, a possibility consistent with his having leaked the papers to Neil Sheehan. The decision to withhold names while reporting the possibility of a tap reflected the difference between a lead and a claim they could substantiate.

The search for the missing wiretap evidence

At Ellsberg’s trial, the prosecution maintained that no wiretaps involving him existed. Judge Byrne nevertheless asked the government to search its records again. The newly appointed acting FBI director, William D. Ruckelshaus, found that the relevant logs were missing. His aides told him that Ellsberg had been overheard at least once—not on Sheehan’s telephone, but on the home phone of Morton Halperin, a former member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.

Ruckelshaus announced that Halperin’s telephone 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 failed to disclose all of its wiretap information to Ellsberg’s defense attorneys, depriving them of material relevant to the prosecution’s claim that no tap involving Ellsberg had occurred.

The dismissal and its immediate significance

Several days after Ruckelshaus’s disclosure, on May 11, Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg. The ruling was a direct consequence of misconduct that had compromised the fairness of the prosecution; it was not a finding about Ellsberg’s responsibility for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The court’s action halted the case after the government’s handling of surveillance evidence had made a fair prosecution untenable.

The dismissal also changed the meaning of the wiretap disclosures. What had begun as a question about whether Ellsberg had been overheard became evidence that the government had concealed information from his defense. The case’s collapse therefore turned a dispute over the existence of a particular tap into a judicial consequence for the government’s failure to disclose its surveillance records.

The broader surveillance operation

On May 14, after the dismissal, Ruckelshaus announced that 17 wiretaps had been ordered between 1969 and 1971 as part of the administration’s search for news leaks. The missing logs 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 phones had been tapped, leaving open the question of who had authorized the surveillance.

Woodward then called a senior FBI official, who told him that some authorizations had reached the Bureau from Henry Kissinger, orally or by letter. These later disclosures enlarged the picture beyond the evidence directly preceding Byrne’s ruling: the Ellsberg dismissal followed the revelation of a concealed tap affecting his defense, while the recovered logs and information about authorizations exposed a broader White House leak-investigation program. Together, the events connected the prosecution’s failure to a pattern of surveillance whose records had been hidden inside the White House.