Judge Grants Immortality to Presidential Privilege

U.S. District Judge David Levi this week contradicted the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that presidential privilege erodes over time, by accepting CIA and Bush administration claims that presidential privilege still applies to two intelligence briefs given to President Johnson in 1965 and 1968, according to a memorandum of opinion and order dated 11 July in the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by University of California Davis professor Larry Berman against the CIA.
Levi also accepted CIA claims that the two documents are actually an intelligence "method" that the Director of Central Intelligence has authority to keep secret, despite the evidence in the case that the actual methods used by the CIA in the 1960s have been largely declassified. These include more than 800,000 spy satellite photographs taken by the CORONA and KH-5,6,7 and 9 systems, extensive data on signals intercepts including the Gulf of Tonkin (1964) intercepts of North Vietnamese traffic, and thousands of pages of source material produced by CIA agents in the Soviet Union (such as Penkovsky) or operating against Cuba (such as Luis Posada).