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I think Comey was trying to do what Hoover is often accused of doing with respect to blackmail. Whether Hoover himself actually did this is debatable. Many myths about Hoover proliferated after his death. Rumors about Hoover acting improperly with respect to the King surveillance were spread by William C. Sullivan, who was the agent actually in charge of the King surveillance and had a vested interest in the matter when it came up for Congressional review after Watergate. Ray Wannall's The Real J. Edgar Hoover provides an important corrective to the record on this, documenting both King's Communist ties and Sullivan's role in shaping the historical record.

The Kennedys also had an interest in shaping the historical record on the matter, since the King surveillance was authorized by Robert F. Kennedy. This threatened to become a political embarrassment to Robert and Ted Kennedy in the 1968 and 1972 campaigns and during the Watergate investigation, when Nixon used his knowledge of this as leverage to resist his critics.

As far as King's Communist ties, this reflects a long-term CPUSA effort to infiltrate the civil rights movement, which actually predates the formation of CPUSA and can be traced to German intelligence manipulation of the American Socialist and civil rights movements during the First World War, when Germany was the center of the international Socialist movement (the Second International, the successor of Karl Marx's First International). The Soviets tapped into the original German Socialist network in the post-WWI era, forming their own faction of the civil rights movement and putting up the first black Vice Presidential candidate, James W. Ford, in 1932. Eleanor Roosevelt lent her support to CP civil rights front groups such as the Highlander Folk School. The post-WWII civil rights movement gave renewed impetus to the CP's efforts to manipulate the civil rights cause. Rosa Parks's boycott started after she had attended Highlander training; Parks had previously attended CP meetings with her husband, though reportedly was not a CP member. The boycott gave a national platform to King, who also received training at Highlander. The New York CP quickly got involved with King's movement at this point and infiltrated his circles, with Levison being an example of this. Another Highlander figure associated with King, James Dombrowski of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational Fund, forged links between the American civil rights movement and Fidel Castro's network in the U.S. in the early 1960s. At this time, Hoover advised Attorney General Robert Kennedy that King was associating with known Communists. Kennedy and President Kennedy advised King to cease these associations, but King ignored them with contempt, and the Kennedys were afraid to call him on it due to his influence with black voters. At the time of his death, King had been developing ties to the Vietnam antiwar movement through connections such as Riverside Church, a center of CP influence in Harlem.

Meanwhile, the Soviets, China, Cuba, and North Vietnam had begun cultivating ties to more violent factions of the American civil rights movement such as the Black Panthers. My research indicates that King's assassination was intended to push the civil rights movement further in this direction and to agitate armed clashes between the Black Panthers and KKK-type groups. Offshoots of the KKK that wanted to start a race war are known to have put out a contract on King with this intent. Curiously enough, elements of the neo-Nazi movement in the U.S. had formed an alliance with the Soviets at this time, seeing the Soviet policy towards Jews as in line with their goals, and seeing the U.S. government as a bigger short-term enemy to the Fourth Reich. To sum up a much longer story. . .