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Published on Friday, June 18, 2004 by FindLaw
Sam Dash's Warning About Government Intruders
The Story Of The Rise And Fall Of Fourth Amendment Protections
by John Dean
On May 29, 2004, Sam Dash, who had served as Chief Counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, departed this mortal coil. (Ironically, former Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox passed away later the same day.)
Throughout his career as a practicing attorney, prosecutor and law professor, Sam Dash found himself challenging those who abused their powers. When I talked with him shortly before he was hospitalized with the heart problem that would take his life, he was planning to do so again.
"This guy Ashcroft is a very dangerous attorney general," he told me during our last telephone conversation. We were talking about the book he had just finished, The Intruders: Unreasonable Searches and Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft, which has now been published.
I just finished reading Sam's final work, and it is a warning not to be ignored. But before examining his challenge of Ashcroft's abuses of power, a few words about Sam are appropriate. He was man I knew and admired long before Watergate, where his work left a model for legislative investigations.
Sam was not a partisan, but rather a consummate professional. He never looked for gratuitous combat, yet when so engaged, he never shied from saying what needed to be said. He took his work seriously, and as his career evolved, he became one of the nation's leading legal ethicists.
Most knew him as Professor Dash, for he spent the better part of his professional career sharing his knowledge of criminal law and criminal justice with countless students at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Challenging Those Who Abused Their Power
As Chief Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, Dash found it necessary to take to task some of the most powerful men in government for abusing their authority. Sam was deeply troubled, for good reasons, about the Nixon White House's illegal wiretaps and unfounded break-ins to obtain information without a search warrant.
When former Attorney General John Mitchell and former Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman appeared before the committee, Dash repeatedly pressed them on their abuses of power. And his new book shows that the only thing he agreed with these men about was the fact that they had eroded the rights of Americans under the Fourth Amendment.
Many years after Watergate, Dash again found himself publicly confronting the misuses of power as a part of the Independent Counsel's investigation of President Clinton. Dash had been hired by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to serve as his ethics adviser. But he resigned from that post in protest over Starr's improper use of his office to advocate President Clinton's impeachment.
When Starr appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify, Dash -- who had largely written the law creating independent counsels -- believed Starr had violated the law. "You have violated your obligations under the independent counsel statute and have unlawfully intruded on the power of impeachment, which the Constitution gives solely to the House," Dash wrote to Starr in resigning.
Not surprisingly, Starr disagreed. But Dash's resignation showed that politics dominated the Starr inquiry.
In our last conversation, Sam told me of his plans to tell Americans that Attorney General John Ashcroft was ignoring the lessons of history in fighting terrorism. He had been working on a book about history of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures -- a body of law he had studied throughout his professional career.
He said he had just about finished his book when 9/11 occurred. "I was dumbfounded by the way the Bush Administration pushed aside the Constitution to launch their war on terrorism," he said. "These guys didn't need
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