Politics

The Year A President, His FBI And His CIA Spied On The Republican Challenger

Christopher Bedford Former Editor in Chief, The Daily Caller News Foundation
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President Barack Obama is not the first man accused of spying on his party’s political opponents in an election year.

Dr. Lee Edwards sat down with The Daily Caller to detail the months he and his colleagues on Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for president spent under FBI and CIA surveillance ordered by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

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Goldwater, who’s Senate seat would later go to Sen. John McCain, was pressured by supporters to run a campaign for president he understood was doomed by President John F. Kennedy’s assassination the year before. Knowing national grief and a politically vicious opponent meant disaster on Election Day, Goldwater used the campaign to launch the conservative takeover of the national Republican Party that would be finally realized 16 years later with the election of President Ronald Reagan.

Edwards, then in his early 30s and serving as communications director for the Goldwater campaign, recalls the slow, creeping realization they were being watched and listened to by the free world’s most powerful intelligence services. (RELATED: Lee Edwards, ‘The Voice Of The Silent Majority’ For A Half Century, Has Lived Conservative History Like None Other)

“Misuse of the FBI,” Edwards warns 55 years later, “has been going on for far, far too long.”

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