Fifty Years Later, Remembering the Activities of the "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI"

Published: March 15, 2021, 5:21 p.m.

Fifty years ago, in March of 1971, a group of activists calling itself the "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI" broke into a small FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole more than 1,000 classified documents. They then anonymously mailed the documents to several U.S. newspapers, thereby exposing numerous illegal FBI operations vis a vis domestic surveillance. On this edition of ST, we revisit our 2014 conversation with Betty Medsger, a former Washington Post journalist who wrote a book