Like current White House, with its record number of prosecutions under the 1913 Espionage Act, the Nixon White House could also behave obsessively about leaks. In May 1969, when the New York Times revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia (not that it was secret to the Cambodians), Nixon ordered more than a dozen FBI wiretaps, but didn't find the leaker. So the White house created its own secret team, called the Plumbers Unit, to stop leaks by wiretapping, burglarizing, and any means necessary.
Thanks to Congress
and 9/11, Obama Doesn't Need to Break the Law
But just because the President may not need to break the law, that doesn't mean his administration hasn't broken the law anyway.
The first wave of post-Watergate legislation in the early 1970s did much to make government more accountable and transparent, at least in principle. But the second wave of post-Watergate legislation has had a counter-revolutionary effect, expanding the powers of government and curtailing the freedoms of citizens, most notably in the fear-driven and wildly misnamed USA PATRIOT Act, but in many less sweeping but equally freedom-inhibiting bills as well.
Most characteristic of the relationship of Americans and the law over the past three decades is the response to the Bush Administration illegally wiretapping Americans -- about which the Congress did nothing but make the activities legal and give the phone companies retroactive immunity from prosecution. This is what is generally referred to in popular demagoguery as "the rule of law."
By Now American
Discourse is Deep into Orwellian Obfuscation and Deceit
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," President Obama blandly and irrelevantly assured the American people after the NSA sweep of all our meta-data was revealed. The assurance was irrelevant because the issue was the administration's secret interpretation of the law governing the secret workings of a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.
According to Obama, in an interview with Charlie Rose, the secret decisions of the secret court operating on the basis of a secret legal opinion all add up to a system that is "transparent." Also, it's not eating your lunch.
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