Reply #6: In the case of Washington, of course...

[punpirate]

... the allegation is absurd. (Perhaps Gonzales threw that out to impress the Senators, who knows?) In Lincoln's case, the nearest telegraph office was in the nearby War Department (there was no telegraph in the WH), and Lincoln spent much time there reading the decoded messages of Confederate generals. I suppose that one could say that those generals were technically US citizens, but, in practical terms, they were the enemy with which the Union was at war.

To my knowledge, there's nothing in the literature to suggest that Lincoln went out of his way to spy on US citizens in time of war. Since Lincoln himself interviewed decoders in the War Department for information about what the Confederates were doing, sweeping up every telegram that passed through the wires would have overwhelmed that effort to determine what was happening on the war front.

On edit, I should add that Wilson did a lot of things we would consider unconstitutional today, with the cooperation of Congress. When domestic support for the war still fell short of the expected level after war was declared by Congress in April, 1917, Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it illegal to interfere with the recruitment or drafting of soldiers or to do anything adversely affecting military morale. This act helped to generate a certain amount of patriotic war hysteria which was further amplified when Wilson approved the Sedition Act of 1918, making it unlawful to obstruct the sale of war bonds or to use disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language to describe the government, the Constitution, the flag, and the military uniform.

It was also Wilson who employed Mitchell Palmer and his young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, to create the plans for the post-WWI purges of foreigners as a means of convincing the public that union activity was a great threat to the United States. It was also Wilson who arbitrarily shelled and invaded the Mexican city of Veracruz to convince investors that the oilfields near there were safe for investment. Just because Wilson did these things--often in concert with a war-fevered Congress--doesn't mean they were intrinsically Constitutional or right, in retrospect.