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In recent years, presidents of both parties have refused to allow Congress in its oversight responsibility to question certain assistants or see certain documents that are not technically national secrets. The questionable legal principle, executive privilege, supposedly assures that the President can get honest confidential advice without the advice giver feeing intimidated that the advice will become public. However, Presidents have also used this principle to cover-up scandals, wrong doing, and incompetence. Since the President simply asserts the “privilege” there is no way of checking in any particular case to determine if it is an abuse or not.
In 1974 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was investigating the wiretapping of American citizens. An FBI witness, Bernard Wells, testified that the wiretaps had demonstrated no disloyalty but they had identified some "loose talk:"
She had started this newspapers after the premises of her last paper had been ransacked by rowdies insulted by the fact that she wrote of things that were considered private. In one instance a prominent slave owner who had business in town brought a slave servant who gave birth to a child in St. Cloud. The owner sent the mother and child to his Southern home and Swisshelm wrote an editorial and claimed he was a felon who kidnapped a child in Minnesota and transported her into slavery in the South.
