Reporting from Washington—
Acting Solicitor Gen.
Neal Katyal, in an extraordinary admission of misconduct, took to task one of his predecessors for hiding evidence and deceiving the Supreme Court in two of the major cases in its history: the
World War II rulings that upheld the detention of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans.
Katyal said Tuesday that Charles Fahy, an appointee of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, deliberately hid from the court a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence that concluded the Japanese Americans on the West Coast did not pose a military threat. The report indicated there was no evidence Japanese Americans were disloyal, were acting as spies or were signaling enemy submarines, as some at the time had suggested.