Professor Wins Key Battle in Bid to See FBI’s Lennon Files

A UC Irvine history professor who authored a biography on John Lennon won a key victory Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court in his fight to view secret FBI files on the late musician.

The court rejected an appeal aimed at killing Jonathan Weiner’s 1983 lawsuit seeking the release of 69 pages of documents that the bureau collected on the rock star during the Richard M. Nixon Administration.

The decision, with only Justice Byron R. White dissenting, upholds a 1991 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the FBI failed to support its claim that the documents were exempt from the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The FBI had said the documents should not be made public on the grounds of national security, the need to protect federal informants and intelligence methods, and possible harm to relations with foreign governments.

Weiner said he believes that if the files are released they will expose more about FBI misconduct than anything about Lennon, the former Beatle who was murdered in December, 1980.

The case now returns to U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, giving the FBI a last chance to argue why it should not release the files.

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Mark Rosenbaum, who represented Weiner, said he believes that the files will be released. “The message here is that (the FBI was) trying to take the restrictions of the Freedom of Information Act way beyond what Congress intended,” he said.

“The FBI has maintained for nine years that these files contain national security material,” Weiner said. “I’m confident that nothing that Lennon did back in 1972 threatened the national security of the United States.”

The FBI started files on Lennon in 1971 and ended a year later after Nixon was reelected to his second term, Weiner said.

Nixon was trying to get Lennon deported, claiming that he should never have been allowed into the United States because of a misdemeanor marijuana charge in England in 1968, Weiner said. Lennon claimed that the move was politically motivated because he was protesting against the Vietnam War, Weiner said, adding that the files that have been released support that view.