Why the FBI Has Always Been a Political Tool of Suppression
TheDailyBell.com
May 13, 2017
There is a dangerous myth that permeates the political arena that government agencies and bureaucrats can somehow be non-political and independent.
How absurd. On the one hand, there are obvious political appointments, like Eric Holder as Attorney General under Obama, or Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State under Trump. Each was clearly chosen to advance the interests of the President, Holder for his radical leftist views and Tillerson for his business ties.
And then there are scarily independent agencies like the CIA and NSA who pretty much do whatever they want, regardless of who heads the Department.
But the FBI is a sketchy mix of independence and politics, and it always has been. From its inception, the first FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made the agency a hotbed of political suppression, arresting anarchists and communists sometimes without warrants, and deporting thousands of immigrants based on minimal evidence of subversion.
But that’s not how the mainstream media is selling it. Will Trump Be The First to Politicize the FBI? asks Politico Magazine. Their concern is that Trump might appoint someone to the position with a political background, rather than a law enforcement background.
From its founding over a century ago until Tuesday afternoon, when James Comey was summarily fired as director, the FBI has been led exclusively by nonpartisan career law enforcement professionals with no background in elected politics.
The bureau, in fact, has been perhaps the last bastion of nonpolitical leadership in Washington—an agency whose powers are so extensive and potentially damaging to American citizens that it has been kept clear of direct political influence.
Of course, this statement is ridiculous, you cannot separate a government agency from politics. They are conflating not having been elected with being nonpartisan or apolitical
If anything the “independence” of the agency is a political wildcard. It wasn’t for political purposes that the FBI sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. encouraging him to kill himself?
But really Politico inadvertently touches on the main problem with the FBI: it was created to target Americans domestically. The FBI was given broad powers that were not just “potentially damaging to American citizens,” that is exactly who they targeted.
Hoover compiled a list of disloyal Americans after WWII and had a plan, which was never put into practice, to suspend habeas corpus and detain thousands of Americans for not being loyal enough to the United States government. For being a “nonpolitical” leader, he certainly did a lot to suppress political opposition to those in power.
But Hoover was just doing the only thing he knew. That is how he started in government, during WWI.
President Woodrow Wilson created the political monster, appointing Hoover to the War Emergency Board during WWI and tasking him with arresting foreigners without trial who seemed disloyal to the United States. The raids took place without search warrants, and even though Hoover was the man behind the “Palmer Raids” he escaped the political backlash and was even appointed to clean up the Bureau which would become the Federal Burea of Investigation.
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