Daniel Sheehan on Government Secrets, Whistleblowers, and the Cost of Truth

Famous cases that you were involved with over the years, and one that comes to mind is the Karen Silkwood case. Ah, yes. What it was, is her car was intentionally rammed. The car was blocking her from getting back on the road. They were trying to get her to stop, and she hit this concrete culvert, hits the front of the car, and flips it upside down into the culvert, and crushes the ceiling of the car in, and drives the steering wheel right up into her, and crushes her, and kills her. And they couldn't find her body for 48 hours. It turns up, it ends up in the morgue in the Oklahoma City Hospital with a Jane Doe tag on her toe. They come to find her, and all of her internal organs have all been removed. All of her brain, and all of her lungs, and internal tissue has all been removed. Today on Bay Area Innovators, we continue our conversation with Danny Sheehan, a renowned constitutional attorney whose work has been instrumental in uncovering the truth behind landmark cases like the Pentagon Papers and the Karen Silkwood investigation. The latter not only spotlighted the courage of whistleblowers, but also exposed the hidden dangers of the nuclear industry and government corruption in more ways than one. The story was also made into a major movie production, starring Leroy Street, Kurt Russell, and Cher. In this episode, Daniel shares his first-hand experience from those historic battles and reflects on their enduring impact on government transparency and the protection of those who dare to speak out. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Danny, welcome back. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Steve. Well, thank you for being on Bay Area Innovators. Last time, we talked about UFOs and your involvement with Luis Elizondo. This week, I'd like to talk to you about some of your famous cases that you were involved with over the years. One that comes to mind is the Karen Silkwood case. This is about plutonium being smuggled and given to other countries. Please give us a sense. You were the chief attorney. I was. Tell us what happened there. Well, Karen Silkwood was a young high school graduate. She went to junior college to study chemistry. I'm sorry, and there's a movie about this, too. Oh, yes. On Meryl Street. Mike Nichols directed it. An Academy Award. Mike Nichols was nominated for three Academy Awards. Kurt Russell was in it. Cher was in it. It was a very, very major movie. We were consulted all through it to prepare the movie because we're the ones that did the case. What happened is this young worker at the Kermagee Nuclear Reprocessing Plant. It wasn't a nuclear power plant. It was a unique facility where they were going to plan to bring the waste materials from the 103 private nuclear power plants around the country because they have this horrible problem about disposing of the waste materials. They were trying to figure out how to solve that. What they were talking about wanting to do is bring these big chunks of the waste material that descends to the bottom of the core to remove it and put it in, encapsulate it so that the radioactivity is contained, and then ship it to this facility in Oklahoma. What they would do is, under careful shielding and everything, they would grind it all up into a fine powder, and then they would put it in centrifuges, and they would spin it. The plutonium is the heaviest element in the powder, and it would fly out through centrifugal force. Then they would gather it all up, and then they would press it into these pellets. They were 98% pure, bomb-grade plutonium. They were going to take these pellets, and they would put them in these big six-foot-high pencil-thin cylinders, stainless steel, and drop them in and fill them up. Then they would ship these to the Hanford Fast Flux Test Facility out in Washington State. They were going to use those to be fuel for the Fast Flux Test Facility, another nuclear power plant, another nuclear testing plant. So, they would be used as the fuel? As the fuel itself. It was the key to allow them to continue to develop private nuclear power, because it was the central place for figuring out what to do about the waste material. Those could be used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons? That was the problem with them. They had an FBI person there assigned at the plant to secure all those special nuclear materials. Karen Silkwood worked at the plant, and she would do an analysis on some of the materials. She started determining in her own mind that they were being really sloppy there at the plant. They weren't advising the people about the dangers of the nuclear materials. They would actually have some of the workers there, they were so ignorant about the dangers of this, they would take a little pellet of this, and they'd bring it home and give it to their kids, and they'd bring it to the school and pass it around for show-and-tell time, which is a deadly radioactive substance, and they're handing it around. They would have a spill from one of the lockboxes, they would spill some of the liquid material that they were using it to wash the material with, that would be highly radioactive, and they would pour it in barrels and then put it on the back of a regular truck and take it away. If the barrel leaked into the bed of the truck, they would just take the truck down to the local car wash, and they would run it through the car wash, and all this radioactive stuff would go into the sewage system of the town. If they had a leak into the river that went by, it would kill all the fish, and so they would order secretly to go out in the nighttime to scoop up all the fish and get rid of them so nobody would see that they were killing the fish. She wanted to organize a union at the plant so that she could bring in union people to insist that they train the people, that they give them educational materials, they protect them better against the radiation, and so she was trying to organize a chapter of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union at the plant. And so what she would do is she would, during the coffee break in the morning at the plant, she'd be going around interviewing people and getting them to sign up to support having a union. And then she'd do it at lunchtime, and so the owners of the plant, who turned out to be Kerr McGee, that Senator Robert S. Kerr was the two-time former governor of the state of Oklahoma. He was the United States Senator from Oklahoma, and he was the chair of the Armed Services Committee, a very powerful group of military people. And so the fact is, he had utilized his authority in the Congress to get the funding to build this facility right in his own home congressional district, you know? And so it was in Tornado Alley, where tornadoes come right through there every springtime. It was a terribly dangerous thing that they were doing. So she ended up, what they did is they said, she's bothering the people during the lunchtime, so that they took her and put her on the midnight shift. So she was then assigned to be there from midnight until 8 o'clock in the morning, which she was supposed to do her work, and there was virtually nobody there, right? And so what happened is after a couple weeks of this, and she realized that nobody was really there in the plant, she started going around into the offices and looking through the files, trying to find information proving how careless they were. And she ended up finding what they call the MUF documents, M-U-F, missing and unaccounted for, missing and unaccounted for plutonium. And she discovered that they were missing 48 pounds of 98% pure bomb-grade plutonium. And so she called the headquarters in Washington, D.C. of the Oil Chemical Atomic Workers and talked to Stephen Wodkin and said, Stephen, you know, that they've got like 48 pounds of this stuff that's missing. It must be all over the plant, contaminating people, and he was going, wait, he said, no, you must mean 48 ounces. No, no, it says right here, 48 pounds. And so he said, I'm going to send a New York Times reporter out, David Burnham, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, I'm going to have him fly out to meet with you. You get copies of all of those official documents from inside the files and give those to him, right? And so she said, good, I'll do that. Well, totally unbeknownst to her, the management of the Kerr-McGee facility, because she'd been trying to organize this union, had placed her under surveillance. And they had broken into her home and they put electronic listening devices in her home and wiretapped her telephone. And so when she gets on the telephone and she's talking to the oil chemical atomic workers people about having a New York Times guy come out, they all knew that this was happening. And so what happened is two days before the New York Times guy was supposed to come out and meet with her, all of a sudden she comes to the plant, well, she's actually in the plant, and all the alarms start going off and she's contaminated. And so they bring her in and they take off all of her clothes and scrub her down with these wire brushes to take off the top layer of her skin and then put these chemicals on her and stuff and send her home. And she goes back home and she... So she really was contaminated. Oh yeah. She was contaminated. And then she goes back home and she comes back the next morning and as she's entering the plant, all the alarms go off. So she's still contaminated. Well, it turns out they'd already cleaned her up completely so she was not contaminated. So they realized it was in her house. And what had happened is someone had, when they broke into her house to place the electronic listening devices and wiretap her telephone, they had put, what was it, 15,000 disintegrations per minute of radioactive plutonium on the food in her refrigerator so that she would take it in internally. And what they were trying to do is give her what they call a full body burden. If she had a certain level of internal absorption of radioactivity, she has to be dismissed from the plant. She can't continue to work there because they were saying, if you have any more, you're going to die. Yes. And so what they were trying to do is inflict upon her a full body burden. To get rid of her basically. When she came back to the plant and they realized that she was contaminated again, they take her into custody and they scrape her all down again. They send a team to her house and they discover the radioactive material in her house and they tear the entire internal stuff from her apartment, actually, and put it in big 50-gallon drums and bury it. And they send her to the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory to get tested, to do tests in her nostrils and see if they could get tests inside her organs to figure out how much contamination she had. And what they were doing is they were doing that to keep her from meeting with the New York Times guy. But she, at the hospital, started getting really irritated because she knew she had this meeting with the New York Times guy. And so she leaves the hospital at Los Alamos and sneaks out and gets on a plane and comes back to Oklahoma. And so she's there. The day that he's arriving, she goes to have a meeting with other oil chemical atomic workers organizers. And she has these documents. And she had all the documents with her and she showed them to them and showed them the documents that she has. She goes out and gets in her car after the meeting and starts driving to the Holiday Inn where they're going to meet her and she never shows up. And so they end up starting to look for her and try to find her. And somebody calls and said they've seen her car being towed into town in Cimarron, Oklahoma. They said, that's Karen Silqua's car, all crunched up. And they were bringing it to Ted Sebring's Ford dealership. And it turns out that's the dealership that handles all of the cars and trucks for the Kerr-McGee Corporation. And they were commandeering her car. And so the New York Times reporter and Steve Wadka from the Oil Chemical Atomic Workers were there. They were the ones waiting at the motel for her. So what they do is they immediately get on the phone and they call the national headquarters and they send in an out-of-state automobile accident reconstruction firm to come rushing into the scene of where her death took place. And he comes in like the very next morning, comes in and photographs the entire site and takes measurements on the tire treads, skids, and all that stuff. And then they found the car because they knew it was taken to Ted Sebring's Ford dealership. So they go there and they demand the car to be returned and they inspect the car and they find the rear fender has been rammed into twice and would force her off the road. And they reconstructed the accident and they discovered that what it was is her car was intentionally rammed, run off the road, and she started traveling along on the grassy side of the road and the car was blocking her from getting back on the road. They were trying to get her to stop and she hit this concrete culvert that goes under the road. They have this abutment and it hits the front of the car and flips upside down into the culvert and crushes the ceiling of the car in and drives the steering wheel right up into her and crushes her and kills her. So all of a sudden, it turns out that Martin, he was one of the emergency auto wrecker people on duty for the highway patrol in case of an accident. He hears the report come in, a big 18-wheeler came by and saw her lights shining up into the sky and they called over to the radio to report it to the highway patrol. He heard it and starts racing to the scene. He thinks she may still be alive in the car, right? So he's racing there and he gets a call from the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol radio dispatcher ordering him not to go to the crash scene. He just ignores it and keeps on going. He gets close to the thing and they call him a second time and order him to stand down, to don't go to the crash scene or else they're going to revoke his license, right? So all of a sudden, her body disappears. The car disappears. Nobody knew where it went. It was supposed to go to the impound at the highway patrol for a fatal crash, right? An unmarked ambulance comes, a black ambulance, and takes her body away and they couldn't find her body for 48 hours. It turns out it ends up in the morgue in the Oklahoma City Hospital with a Jane Doe tag on her toe. But they finally identified her. They come to find her and all of her internal organs have all been removed. Her brain and all of her lungs and internal tissue has all been removed. But nobody would tell them what happened. So you're involved in this case. So we get contacted right away. I get contacted at Jesuit National Headquarters. Some people that I knew knew about cases that I had done and they said, this young woman has been trying to organize a labor union out in Oklahoma, has been killed, obviously. We need you to help investigate this. And so I came on. We investigated the whole thing and found out what had happened and filed a major lawsuit against them. Won a $10.5 million judgment against the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation. Shut down the facility. We bankrupted them. They ended up closing down the whole operation. But they walked away. Nobody would prosecute them. The FBI kept on saying, oh, she must have fallen asleep at the wheel. But both sides of the steering wheel were completely bent in like that, which never happens if a person is asleep at the wheel because they've got to be awake and hold on to it when they crash. So we had all kinds of evidence showing what happened. And we started presenting the evidence at trial. We won a $10.5 million judgment. Not only it was the biggest civil judgment in history, in history of the federal court system at that time. And we got an order declaring unconstitutional the setting of a cap on how much could be won in a lawsuit against a private nuclear corporation in order to stimulate the private development of nuclear power. Congress had passed a thing called the Smith-Anderson Act. I think it was. Anyway, to put a $10 million cap on the amount of liability for any given release of radio activity into the neighborhood. And so we sued them for $11 million so that we could blow the cap off that. We won $10.5 million. And so it shut down the whole private nuclear industry to build any new facilities because they couldn't get any insurance because there was no cap on the legal liability for them. And it stopped the construction of all private nuclear power plants in the United States. But there was more to it, right? Yeah. The actual, the missing plutonium. That's what we discovered as we dug in deeper and deeper to it. We'd figured out who killed her and we figured out what was in the documents. And then what we discovered is I got our chief investigator, when I'd been in F. Lee Bailey's office, I was in the number one criminal defense law firm in the world. And we had a whole 40-man private investigation firm that worked for us, right? And so I knew the guys that were there. So I had access to some of these guys when I was at Jesuit headquarters. And so we started investigating what was really going on. And we discovered that what had happened is that she had stumbled onto this missing plutonium. And we knew that part. But when we asked our sources about this, they said Israel, Iran, South Africa, and Brazil. And we said, what about them? They said, that's it. That's all we're going to be able to tell you right now. So we began to investigate and found out what it was is that this plutonium was being brought to Israel primarily. They had the charter oil company. It was a private company. They would take the stuff and they'd bring it down to Mexico and go across the border into Mexico in this little nowhere town. And then they would put it on this charter oil ship and they would take it out to sea. And an Israeli Mossad boat would meet with them and take it and bring it to Israel. And they had to share it with Iran. Of course, that was under the shah. At that time. I was going to ask. Why would they give it to them? They were all on the same side, you know, as were the South African Afrikaner regime and the Brazilian fascist regime that they had there. And what the United Central Intelligence Agency was doing, they were the ones coordinating the Israeli desk. I got in with Theodore Shackley, his name was. And he had choreographed this whole plan to get the plutonium to the Israeli government so they'd have nuclear weapons. Is this the first time they built, the first time they actually had nuclear weapons? No, they had it before. We don't know. We only know what we know and what we don't know, we don't know. That's what enables us to figure out what we do know. And that what we do know is that was what they were doing and that they were going around the nuclear nonproliferation agreement. The United States had been one of the instigators of having the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that people would be required, the Soviet Union and China and India and others who had nuclear materials were signed this. And here it was, the United States, CIA were the ones violating it and going around to deliver the plutonium to Israel. And so we caught them doing it and we brought the information to John Dingell, who was the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and the Environment. That's an amazing case. And again, there's a movie about it. I think I watched part of the movie and I kind of remember some of the scenes of the car getting off the road and hitting the car. That's right. That's the final scene in the movie. This Meryl Streep, who was the actress playing Karen Silkwood, is staring into her rearview mirror watching these headlights come careening down on her. And you hear this grinding crash of them being rammed into the car. And that's the end scene of the movie. And so we're the ones that briefed them all on what had happened to her up until that point. And we were hoping that they would have the second movie, which would be what happened afterwards. The whole investigation that we conducted to find out what really happened. There was this incredible mystery around her whole death and the disappearance of all her documents and what it is that happened. And we had been advocating at Jesuit headquarters and advocating safe energy to develop a safe energy sources. If, in fact, the nuclear power plants are not safe, they're being operated in a way that's unsafe. If they can't really figure out a way to dispose of the waste materials, we have to find safe and disposable waste for any of our energy. So we're great fans of looking for alternative energy sources, which is one of the things that Ancillary causes us to be so interested in the UFO issue. Because the UFO craft are clearly using some sort of source of energy that is completely different from petroleum or nuclear. In fact, they've done the scientific analysis. These craft that come from 80,000 feet down to the sea level in 80,000 feet in seven tenths of one second and then stop completely dead generating 6,000 Gs of force. They would tear apart any vehicle and turn into soup anybody inside the craft. And then they plunge into the ocean with no splash and then travel at over 200 miles an hour under the water. And they've done the analysis of it in the amount of energy that was going to be required to do that one maneuver. Yes. In seven tenths of one second generates more and require more energy than all of the energy that is generated by all 103 private nuclear power plants in a full year. Wow. That's the importance of this alternative energy source that they use. And that's why the people in Silicon Valley are so interested in the technology. What is this alternative source of energy? How can it be developed? How can it be made available for people? How do we transition our entire economy over into another alternative source of energy? So it's extraordinarily important. So there's a strange linkage between the Karen Silkwood case and our shutting down that particular facility. And people think that somehow we're opposed to alternative sources of energy. We're not. Which you're not. You just wanted to reveal what happened. We just wanted to find out what happened to her. And they just kept getting in our way. That was an amazing case. Now I want to move on to another case. You had so many of these things that we can be here all day. But I want to talk about another one, the Pentagon Papers. All right. Please tell us about that. Here's what it was. Obviously, back in Vietnam, in 1889, the age of imperialism was going on. And a French warship actually came into the harbor. It later became Saigon. But it came into the harbor. And the people on board got off and went into the town. And something happened that a fight broke out between them and the townspeople. And they retreated and got back on the ship and fired on the town with the cannons on the French warship. And then they seized the town. And so the French government ended up telling them to keep it. And so that's how the French ended up in Indochina, trying to play as a player in the age of imperialism. When the United States was taking over Mexico earlier in 1840. 1898 took over Cuba. 1903, they sent a military expeditionary force into Nicaragua, overthrowing the governments in South America. There was an entire period where a lot of the major nation states, Portugal and England, were engaged in this competition to try to get access to the raw materials in different parts of the world. And so the French had done that. And they seized this particular place. And it went on from 1889 all the way up until the 1950s. Well, actually 1941, they were still there when the Japanese invaded. And the Japanese invaded Indochina and drove the French out of Indochina at the end of the war, at the end of World War II. So the bottom line is that when the Japanese were forced out of Indochina, the French wanted to go back in. Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, when he was still alive, didn't want them to. He wanted to have it become an independent nation from the French. But the bottom line is they prevailed upon him to let the French stay there. And what happened is Ho Chi Minh, they began to organize the people, the indigenous people of Vietnam, and attacked the French to drive them out of there. And ended up in 1954, General Giap surrounded the French at Dien Bien Phu and just poured mortars onto them until they surrendered. And they agreed to leave. And so there was a treaty in 1954, Geneva Treaty between Vietnam and the French, ordering them to leave and setting up a parallel. I think it was the 48th parallel, 45th parallel, in that all the French forces were ordered to withdraw to behind that line and then they could leave on ships. But under no circumstances could that be considered a political boundary of any sort. It says it right in the 1954 convention, right? But what happened is the Eisenhower regime, President Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, who was his vice president, they said, oh, no, we don't want to leave there. So we'll send in the United States to send them in. And what they did is they created a completely artificial country of South Vietnam. Now, I studied all of this under Henry Kissinger in foreign policy in the Harvard College. So I knew all about this stuff, right? And what happened is the United States started sending in foreign advisors, we called them. They were all CIA people. And the Joint Special Operations Command of the Pentagon, special forces, send them in. And the whole thing developed into the United States coming in to try to take the place of the French to be able to maintain a Western foothold in the peninsula for strategic military purposes. But the bottom line is that the entire history of that was concealed from the American people. In the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command, they combined in one of these propaganda campaigns of trying to say that, oh, there was this completely independent country called South Vietnam, and these horrible people in the North are coming to invade them, and that we're here to go to try to protect democracy and liberty and everything else. Well, it turns out that that particular government was totally corrupt, that neodymium in the people. And so it wasn't a successful effort to kind of stand up an actual democratic country that could oppose the communism. It couldn't do it. It was just incompetent. And so the problem is that the American people were lied to through this propaganda campaign. And what happened is I ended up being at this big number one corporate litigation law firm, and that I ended up getting the call from the New York Times that they had been put into possession of 47 volumes of a top secret study that was done by the Rand Corporation in Malibu, California, on behalf of the Defense Department, explaining the entire history of how this had possibly come to pass. How did we get into this terrible situation of everybody in Vietnam hating us and trying to drive our military people out of there? And all of our American people thought that we were all coming there to help them. What's gone wrong with this whole thing? And so they have these 47 volumes of it, right? And Daniel Ellsberg, who was one of the major scholars there at the Rand Corporation, when he realized that they had a detailed record here of the United States intelligence agency, primarily the Central Intelligence Agency, lying to the American people and planting people inside the news media and everything else to promote and promulgate these false stories, he felt compelled to do something about it. And so he contacted Neil Sheehan, no relation, and gave him the 47 volumes. He copied them all. And so I was there at the office and got the call because I had initiated the case that went to the United States Supreme Court to establish the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources. And they realized that they were going to have to protect their news source, Dan Ellsberg, that nobody knew who the source was. And so they contacted us at the Cahill firm and called me on the phone. And I met with James Goodell, who was the general counsel for the New York Times and the executive vice president. I came to the office. I had the meeting with him, along with Floyd Abrams, one of our senior associates, and Gene Scheinman. You gave him all these documents? Yeah, well, no, no, no. They had the documents. They were the New York Times. They came to us to see what to do about it because their law firm, Lord Day and Lord, threatened to turn them into the FBI if they didn't give the documents back. And the New York Times was kind of shocked at that. It didn't seem like a very journalistic thing to do. So then they called me. And so I got a hold of Floyd, and we ended up having the meeting with Jim Goodell. And Jim Goodell, in the meeting, asked us what to do about this. And I said, print them. You know, print them. In the paper. Yeah, that's what I said. In the New York Times, Floyd Abrams, who became the partner in the law firm, said, no, no, wait a second. Wait a second. Dan Sheehan is just from Harvard Law School. He's just his first year at the law firm. You know, that's not our official advice. But it was what he wanted to hear. So Jim Goodell kind of shuffles his chair over to me, and he says, oh, really? He said, you know, if we print them. And I said, look, the only decision you need to make is the size of the font. I said, on the front page of the New York Times about this. That's what I said to him. He said, well, what do you think they'll do? What do you think will happen? What do you think the Nixon administration will do? And I said, well, John Mitchell, who's the attorney general, is such a meathead. You know, I mean, you know, he's a bond lawyer. You know, he doesn't know. He thinks the Constitution is a ship that sits in the harbor in Boston. I said, he doesn't know anything. I said, so what he'll probably do is threaten you. He'll threaten you as the legal counsel. He'll threaten, you know, Punch Sulzberger as the owner of the paper. You know, he'll threaten Neil Sheehan. You know, he said, well, what do you think they'll threaten him? What do you think he'll threaten to do to him? And I said, well, if we're lucky, espionage. He said, lucky, espionage? I said, yes. I said, because the law that prohibits revealing national security information is completely vague and unconstitutionally vague. I mean, what does that mean, national security information? You know, and there's a case, U.S. v. Gorin, I said. There's a case in point, United States Supreme Court case that said that the concept of national security is so inherently vague that it'd be unconstitutional to prosecute someone for a specific act unless you could prove that they revealed classified information with the specific actual intention of damaging the United States to the benefit of some other country. And if you can't do that, you can't prosecute them. So I said, you know, U.S. v. Gorin is going to protect us on this. And so that's why we decided to go forward to publish them. So they ended up being published. Yeah, we started publishing them on the 13th of June of 1971. And we published them for two days. We were working on things to get the third day out. They were in the process of releasing it on the third day. And I get a call from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And he gives me a call and he says, Mr. Sheehan, this is Whitley North Seymour. He says, this is Whitley North Seymour. And I said, Whitley North Seymour. Am I supposed to know who you are? I'm the United States Attorney. You knew who he was. I knew exactly who he was. He says, I'm the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. I said, oh, right, right. I said, that Whitley North Seymour. And he says, look, I'm calling you because I'm asking you to advise your client, the New York Times, to cease and desist from publishing these papers that they're classified. I said, well, I'm sure that's what you want. I said, so you need to convey that request to them. I said, no, I don't. No, I don't. I said, I'm not going to say such a thing because I'll instruct them not to abide by it. He said, you can't do that. I said, sure, I can. I said, you're not in a position to tell me what I can do. And he said, well, if you won't get them to voluntarily agree, then I'm going to be compelled to go to the federal district court here in the Southern District of New York. And I'm scheduling a meeting with Judge Murray Gerfine tomorrow at one o'clock. And I just wanted to exercise the courtesy to contact you to let you know that we're going to be going, asking for an injunction. And I said, oh, you need a prior restraint, a prior restraint on the free speech of the New York Times. No, he says, I'm not here to quibble with you about semantics. I said, well, that's what it is. That's a prior restraint. I said, good luck on that. And he said, well, I just wanted to let you know in case you wanted to be there. And I said, well, you know, I mean, we're awfully busy over here. I said, you know, we've got, you know, as you might imagine, you know, we're getting the next issue out. So what happened? So we ended up going over the next day. We go over to Judge Murray Gerfine. He's in chambers, right? He's in chambers. And we know Seymour is there and I'm there. And Floyd Abrams, he was a senior associate at the time, and our senior partner is there. And they also brought Alex Bickle along. Alex Bickle was the professor of constitutional law at Yale. Law school. He'd been Floyd Abrams' con law professor, constitutional law professor. And he happened to be in the office because we were working on the case in the Supreme Court of the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources, which I had started at the Harvard Civil Rights Law Review, right? And so he was there. So he came in with us. And so we come into the chambers and I'm sitting there and I said, and I'm just a first year associate, right? So I said, we all, and we sat there kind of silently for a little while. I said, okay, I'll wait a second here. I said, no, it's their motion. They're apparently going to be getting, trying to get a prior restraint against the New York Times. So I said, and so the judge said, he said, okay, Mr. Seymour, what's your position? He said, well, your honor, he said there's information in these 47 volumes that if it were revealed to the public would irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. I said, like what? And he said, I can't tell you what. You don't have the adequate security clearances. And I said, oh, really? So you already have it back in it. So I said, you're coming in here and trying to get an injunction against the New York Times and you refuse to tell us what is in the paper so that you think is going to irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. And then so Judge Gertwein says, well, Mr. Seymour, he said that I assume that you can tell me what it is. If you're coming to me asking me to issue an injunction against the New York Times, you ought to at least tell me. And Seymour said, no, your honor, I'm sorry, we can't tell you either because you don't have the adequate security clearances either. And so I said, great, great. So we're done. We're all done. You know, you're the one that wanted to get, you've got the burden here. You won't even tell us what. And so then Judge Gertwein says to Floyd Ames, Mr. Abrams, he said, I would just like to ask you as a courtesy to the court, I'm assuming that you've got a copy of these 47 volumes. And I said, excuse me, your honor. I said, you can assume whatever you'd like. I said, but we're not acknowledging that we're in possession of the documents at all. And the judge looked at me, he said, I'm talking to Mr. Abrams. And he said, Mr. Abrams, I'm asking you as a courtesy, because myself and my clerks, even though we have no security clearances, he said that, you know, we're going to have to go through the papers to see if there's anything in there that we think would irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. And I said, no way. I said, no. I said, you know, we're even arguing that we have the documents, you know, that we're not going to give them to you because you don't have any authority to do this either. I mean, the executive branch doesn't have any right to undertake the action to stop us and the court doesn't either. And I said, you know, why? Because the first amendment. It says, you know, no law shall be passed by Congress to interfere with the exercise of freedom of the press. And that means that the federal government is founded, constituted, if you will, without any authority to stop the freedom of the press. So there's no authority here to do this. And Floyd said, OK, Your Honor, we'll give you a copy of them. And he did. I was completely flabbergasted that he agreed to do it. But he did. So we went back to the office and they put together a copy for him. They delivered it to him. And two days later, he calls us back to the chambers and says, I've reviewed the stuff left untutored by Mr. Seymour. He said, we were unable to find anything that we believe myself and my law clerks would irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. It might make you unhappy. It might embarrass you a lot. But we couldn't find anything that would irreparably damage the national security of the United States. And so I'm lifting the injunction. You know? And so he ran right upstairs. Seymour ran right upstairs to go to the Court of Appeals, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which was there, and went in and talked to the judge. And the judge said, I think that we're not going to have a three-judge panel review this. You know, the ruling on the district court of refusing to give you the injunction. We're going to go right straight to the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals. And they did. They convened the full 13 judges of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. And two days later, we were in front of them. We argued the case there. We won the case there again. And then it went right straight to the United States Supreme Court. We went from dead stop for 13 days all the way to the United States Supreme Court. And went down to Washington and argued the case. They had to go get the judges. The justices were on summer vacation because it started on June 13th. And by this time, we were like June 25th or so. And they had to go get Douglas. Justice Douglas was out in Washington state climbing some mountains somewhere. And they had to go get him. So I was part of that history. So what was the result in the Supreme Court? We won. What they said, it was 5-4. The four justices saying that this is a First Amendment right. And the other one judge, I think it was Potter Stewart, said, it isn't clear that we really need to assert that this is a complete full First Amendment right. Because once you file this lawsuit, once this lawsuit came in, the Federal Justice Department has issued an order to all of its U.S. attorneys that they're not to issue subpoenas to journalists. And that they have to go through a whole set of standards before they can possibly subpoena a journalist. And the states have done this too. So I think it's moot that we don't need to really declare that. But the bottom line is it was the case that generated the right of the journalist to protect their confidential news sources. And so we effectively won it. Everybody still to this day believes that we won the case, declaring it to be a First Amendment right. But it was 5-4 with Potter Stewart holding off on his decision about that. That's an amazing case. And how well you recall everything that happens, that's equally amazing. It's easy when you've been there. Now, of course, what happens now, though, even though I agree with that case, it's probably a very important case and I agree with it, but the use of sources now that are not being verified happens so much in the media now that it's almost gone the other way. Well, but if certain cases are established, if a person thinks that they've been libeled or slandered or something like that, you can amount a case. And if, in fact, the court goes through a process of saying that, you know, that this is an extraordinarily important case, usually it's having to do with life and death, you know, or major damage that somebody is going to suffer. But in most cases, they don't force them to reveal the source of something. Again, Danny, thank you so much. Appreciate your time. We'll talk next week. Terrific. Thanks, Stephen, I appreciate it. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.