Posted on 12/04/2024 8:27:45 PM PST by SeekAndFind
On Saturday night, Donald Trump announced he intends to appoint Kash Patel as director of the FBI.
The news sparked an immediate frenzy from establishment figures across media and politics.
Legal and national security “experts” were deployed to the Sunday morning news shows to characterize the move as evidence that Trump intends to politicize the FBI and use it as a weapon against his many political opponents.
The political establishment’s concerns about what a Trump FBI could do mirror a lot of what we’ve heard from the right in recent years as they found themselves in the Bureau’s crosshairs.
But almost all of these complaints and warnings have operated under the assumption that—with maybe the exception of a few bad episodes in the 1960s—the FBI has long been an essential crime-fighting force that has only recently become—or threatens to become—corrupted by politics.
In truth, the FBI has always been used as a weapon against political movements and rivals of the established political class. That’s the reason it was created.
At the end of the 1800s, left-wing anarchists were attacking heads of state all across Europe. In a few short years, the king of Italy, the prime minister of Spain, the empress of Austria, and the president of France were all assassinated by anarchists. While no communist or anarchist movement had yet to take over a country, the tenacity of these activists and revolutionaries was seriously concerning those in power in the United States.
Then, in 1901, President William McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist while attending a meet-and-greet in Buffalo, New York, which brought his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, into office. It was President Roosevelt who tapped his Attorney General Charles Bonaparte—the grandnephew of Napoleon—to create the FBI.
The AG was required by law to get congressional approval before creating this new “investigative” service of special agents within the Department of Justice. In the spring of 1908, Bonaparte officially requested the money and authority to create the FBI. Congress came back with an emphatic no.
Members of the House saw through the innocuous language of the request and figured out exactly what the president and AG were doing—creating a secret police force that was answerable only to them.
House Democrats like Joseph Swagar and John J. Fitzgerald and Republicans like Walter I. Smith and George Waldo all loudly condemned the proposal, saying it called for a “system of espionage” comparable to the Tsar’s secret police in Russia that stood in stark contrast to the very principles at the heart of the American system. Congress explicitly forbade the AG from creating this new Bureau.
So what did Bonaparte do? He waited for Congress to break for the summer and then went ahead and created the FBI anyway.
Congress was only notified about the new federal police force half a year later when Bonaparte included a quick throw-away line at the end of his annual report: “It became necessary for the department to organize a small force of special agents of its own.”
So, the FBI was not created in response to out-of-control crime; its creation was a crime.
Immediately, the new Bureau was unleashed on anyone and everyone who was perceived as a threat to those in power. That started with left-wing anarchists but quickly expanded to include many antiwar activists as President Wilson pulled the country into World War I.
From the outset, the FBI operated primarily as a domestic intelligence agency—recruiting spies within groups they were targeting and breaking into their offices and homes, intercepting mail, and tapping the phones of anyone they considered a threat.
As the years wore on—like most other executive agencies—the Bureau evolved away from serving the direct interests of whoever happened to sit in the Oval Office to instead serve its own interest and the interest of the broader entrenched, permanent power structure in Washington.
In the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, the FBI conducted covert operations aimed at inciting violence between domestic groups, breaking up political organizations it disapproved of, and, perhaps most famously, collecting blackmail on Martin Luther King Jr. that they then tried to use to drive him to commit suicide.
Although today’s FBI acknowledges and publicly disavows these past activities, they are still carrying out egregious operations that always seem to benefit the political class. The Bureau has taken up a kind of sting operation where, over and over again, agents find isolated, gullible, often mentally-handicapped young men, pretend to be political radicals or higher-ups in a terrorist organization, and then convince the young men to plan and carry out a terrorist attack with FBI-funds and resources. Agents then step in at the end and act like they heroically stopped a real plot.
The FBI did this relentlessly with young Muslim men after 9/11. The arrests helped prolong the perception that the global war on terror and extreme measures like the Patriot Act were necessary.
In recent years, the FBI has conducted a number of similar schemes with right-wing groups—advancing the establishment’s narrative that Donald Trump is radicalizing “uneducated” middle Americans and turning them into violent insurrectionists.
And then there are, of course, all the ways the FBI directly tried to undermine and hinder Trump’s first term. Right-wingers are correctly deriding the establishment for panicking about Trump’s FBI doing to them what they have tried to do to him. But many—on both sides—go wrong when they present the Bureau as only recently, or imminently, being corrupted into serving the interests of those in power. That’s been its role since the beginning.
More Marxists slams at Hoover, who dor his faults, was a dedicated Anti- Marxists and tried to warn America about Marxiat infiltration And he was completely right about the phony Michael King , Jr.
If the FBI can be created by a President then it can be destroyed by a President.
Hoover wrote a book published in 1958 called “Masters of Deceit” What the communist bosses are doing now to bring America to it’s knees.
A review by the New York Times: “ Indispensable the most authoritative book ever written on communism in America.
Philadelphia Enquirer: “Every thinking, patriotic American should give heed.”
The dimrats especially under obama, have followed this book to undermine our country, our society and our culture.
1975: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/08/archives/presidents-and-the-fbi.html
Hollywood, the msm most of the time, and the FBI themselves sell a different version usually, but they have ALWAYS been slime balls.
From their inception they were used as an axe by politicians, i.e. FDR.
There are simply some times where this becomes obvious and especially if on the receiving side of their persecution, then it becomes an issue.
The FBI could get cut by 50% and still do their job. In fact, if they didn’t have all that fat, they would be forced to prioritize real threats.
Think Covid. 75% of them went home for 6 or more months. Did earth fall out of orbit? Did the sun stop rising the next day? What changed? Nothing.
And hopefully after we tear it down, we’ll replace it with something light years better.
Bkmrk
Congress continues to fund it.
Because the danger that it would be corrupted again is all too real.
When J. Edgar Hoover died, his top deputy was Clyde Tolson who then had all the records destroyed they kept on everyone for blackmail. Neither married nor had children and Clyde is buried near Hoover.
Wiki entry: When Hoover died in 1972, Tolson inherited his estate of US$551,000 ($4 million today), moved into his house,[14] and accepted the U.S. flag draped on Hoover’s coffin.
A big no confidence in any damned thing FBI.
I always hear of how wonderful the agents are.
Well contrary to the crappola I see nothing but abuse of power.
The FBI is no more corrupt (this is a form of corruption) than the EPA, FTC, IRS...
The cause / root of the problem is that all your agency and department heads are hand picked by the President and these people run the show within the agency or department. They will twist things to serve their master.
One to two levels under them you have hand picked folks by these appointed individuals in what is known as the Senior Executive Schedule (SES). These bureaucrats know from which way the wind is blowing and they say and do what they think is expected of them in order to get ahead and get their bonus (many SES’s get a juicy annual bonus if they comply).
So you end up with a bunch or political hacks in all your government at the top and about 2 levels down from there.
If you want government to be more apolitical, or neutral if they have to get involved, objective on the issues, you need to address how the agency heads are selected and how the senior executive schedule folks are promoted into their positions. As it stands, all of the leadership is politically minded.
Hoover had information on everyone in power and knew how and when to use it some say he was the seed for the the swamp.
The article says nothing about how the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover rolled up all of the Axis spy rings in the US during WWII and caught many Soviet spies as well.
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