[104-10337-10001.pdf — page 159]
decision indirectly supports S.J. Res. 282's "clear and convincing" standard. For, my original 1980 request and receipt in 1983 of the heavily redacted Hoover file had become known to *U.S. News and World Report* which devoted its "1984" issue of December 1983 to summarizing the contents of the released Hoover file. The resulting publicity heightened public and media interest in the heavily redacted Hoover file. By 1989, if not 1985, FBI officials were no longer willing to risk FOIA litigation challenging their claimed interpretation of the FOIA's exemptive provisions.My second example bears indirectly on how the FBI would process a FOIA request for still-unreleased wiretap records first diclosed by the House Assassination Committee. The House report had disclosed that FBI wiretap intercepts recorded critical comments of organized crime leaders, notably Carlos Marcello, regarding the Kennedys. Did the Mafia put a "contract" out on John Kennedy? Did FBI officials purposefully withhold this information from the Justice Department and the Secret Service in 1963 and then from the Warren Commission in 1964? The answers to these questions would require the release of the wiretap transcripts as well as other FBI memos recording how the FBI dealt with these transcripts. My experience involving how the FSI has processed my requests for other FBI wiretaps suggests that any FOIA-released Kennedy documents will be redacted as to preclude answers to these questions. In describing one of my FBI wiretap requests, let me also outline for the Committee the considerably broader "records universe" sought by scholars and which distinguish our approach from those of journalists, congressional staff, and lawyers.This case of FBI wiretapping involved Henry Grunewald, a Washington, D.C.-based investigator with close ties to New York insurance executive Henry Marsh, isolationist Republican congressmen, former New Dealer Thomas Corcoran, and washington bureaucrats. FBI officials were keenly interested in Grunewald's activities, confirmed by the inclusion in Hoover's office file of two folders containing the transcripts of two FBI wiretaps of Grunewald in 1941 and 1945. As in the case of the Fortas document, these two folders had originally been withheld in entirety on sources and methods and personal privacy grounds. The released 1941 wiretap transcript particularly interested me as I had learned from documents contained in former FBI Assistant Director D. Milton Ladd's still extant office file that Grunewald, as other conservative critics of the Roosevelt Administration, became the subject of FBI "espionage" investigative interest during the early 1940s. The Ladd file, however, did not resolve whether this 1941 wiretap had been known or authorized by the Attorney General or the White House. Accordingly, I filed a further FOIA request for the FBI's headquarters files on Grunewald. The released, redacted records confirmed the Roosevelt Administration's interest in Grunewald's activities in 1940 but (see Appendix B) either because of redactions or the Justice and Treasury Departments failure to have processed as yet documents which they originated the