President Johnson's wiretap of ally S. Vietnam shows candidate Nixon broke the law
and likely committed treason.
To anyone who wonders why we would ever have good reason to wiretap an "ally," this is another example. South Vietnam refused to participate in peace negotiations with Johnson because the Nixon camp had met with them and told them to hold out till Nixon got elected.
http://mtstandard.com/news/opinion/columnists/theory-on-reason-for-watergate/article_7747a03e-229b-11e4-babf-001a4bcf887a.html
On July 3, 1968, a Nixon campaign aide, Dick Allen, sent a memo proposing a meeting with Nixon and Anna Chennault, a Chinese-American active in Republican politics. She would bring to the meeting South Vietnam’s ambassador to Washington. The memo said the meeting must be “top secret.” Nixon wrote on the memo: “Should be but I don’t see how — with the S.S. [Secret Service].” On July 12, however, she and the ambassador did meet secretly in New York with Nixon who, she later said, designated her his “sole representative” to the Saigon government.
The National Security Agency (NSA) was reading diplomatic cables sent from South Vietnam’s Washington embassy to Saigon, where the CIA had a listening device in the office of South Vietnam’s president. The FBI was wiretapping South Vietnam’s embassy and monitoring Chennault’s movements in Washington, including her visit to that embassy on Oct. 30.
On Nov. 2 at 8:34 p.m., a teleprinter at Johnson’s ranch delivered an FBI report on the embassy wiretap: Chennault had told South Vietnam’s ambassador “she had received a message from her boss (not further identified). ... She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are gonna win.’” The Logan Act of 1799 makes it a crime for a private U.S. citizen, which Nixon then was, to interfere with U.S. government diplomatic negotiations.
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