Now began then

Lawbreaker Americans immortalize at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue

J. (John) Edgar Hoover

100 years Hoover’s 
to 
Today’s FBI

1

919

 J. Edgar Hoover steps into the top spot of the Red-Scare dawning post World War I “Radical Division” of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division—mission: “monitor and disrupt the work of domestic radicals”

No doubt the meaning of “radical” was left to the imagination of 24-year-old J. Edgar

Hoover’s first assignment “Palmer Raids”

Predecessor to the Immigration Act of 1924, targeting Southern European and Eastern Europe immigrants (on political, ethnic and racial grounds), the Palmer Raids (named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) targeted mainly Italian immigrants, with particular focus on Italian anarchists and immigrant leftist labor activists, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants with suspected “radical” “leftist” ties.

[The Red Scare describes a fear (more like paranoia) of and reaction against communist “radicals” in the U.S. in the years immediately following World War I and the Russian Revolution.”]

In the period of Woodrow Wilson, Mitchel Palmer, J Edgar Hoover’s Palmer Raids came multi-city “race riots” and April and June 1919 bombings one of them a mail bomb sent to the residence of Attorney General Palmer. 

Further Lawlessness

K

orean War era – 1950s

Hoover hands President Harry Truman “a plan to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain 12,000 Americans suspected of “disloyalty.”

COINTELPRO era 1950s

Hoover legalizes lawlessness and gets away with it

He establishes a series of covert “dirty tricks” (at times illegal) projects “aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations”— “first used to disrupt the Communist Party USA, where Hoover ordered observation and pursuit of targets that ranged from suspected citizen spies to larger celebrity figures such as Charlie Chaplin that he saw as spreading Communist Party propaganda”

C

OINTELPRO methods

• Infiltration
• Burglaries
• Illegal wiretaps
• Planting forged documents
• Spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations
• Inciting violence and arranging murders

C

ivil Rights Movement era 1960s

• Sunday, September 15, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama: four members of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter plant at least 15 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the steps of the “16th Street Baptist Church” killing four young girls in an explosion so intense that one of the bodies was decapitated and mutilated to the extent that it could be recognized only by clothing and a ring; another body had “a piece of mortar embedded in the skull”.  More than 20 people suffered injuries in the blast. 
• J. Edgar Hoover personally intervened “to prevent federal prosecutions against the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the terrorist bombing attack against the 16th Street Baptist Church.” 
• Same year Hoover “formally blocks “any impending federal prosecutions against the suspects, and refuses to disclose any evidence his agents had obtained with state or federal prosecutors”
• 1968: “without filing charges against any of their named suspects, the FBI formally closes investigation into the bombing—Hoover orders files sealed1964: Under Hoover’ leadership, FBI sends “an anonymous blackmail letter to [Dr. Martin Luther] King” Jr. “urging him to commit suicide”

• 1965: Ku Klux Klansmen (one of them “an acknowledged FBI informant”) murder civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo after chasing her car and firing shots into the vehicle

• When the incident came to light, Hoover’s FBI — official records confirming that J. Edgar Hoover personally communicated the insinuations to President Lyndon Johnson — “spread rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement.”

H

oover’s hold on inordinate power

Collection of massive files of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians

Hoover’s Temperament

The temperament and actions Hoover were said to be “unpredictable”

Like a current leader Hoover was known for inexplicable firings and often relocations to “career-ending assignments and locations” because he was personally “displeased” with an agent or the agent “looked stupid” to him.

FBI News 

100 years after 

J. Edgar Hoover’s Red Scare Palmer Raids

2

019

December 9, 2019:

“According to the Justice Department Inspector General’s report into the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign, the information contained in the now-infamous ‘Steele Dossier’ was used to inform the Obama administration’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia’s ‘Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,’ published several weeks before President Donald Trump assumed office.”

Former FBI director James Comey told the Inspector General’s office that summary of the dossier [of salacious anti-Trump gossip] was included in the assessment… because [CIA Director John] Brennan and a cohort of intelligence personnel felt it ‘important enough and consistent enough’ to warrant entry.

December 9, 2019

After the U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General releases a report and press coverage on the “origins of the FBI’s 2016 counterintelligence probe” targeting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, the President responds:

“It’s a disgrace

It’s incredible

Far worse than I would have ever thought possible

It’s an embarrassment to our country,”

It’s dishonest.

It’s everything a lot of people thought it would be, except far worse.”

December 10, 2019

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations” [investigations into four people involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign: George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Carter Page]

T

he United States’ Federal Bureau Investigation has a long, sorted, lawless, bloody—and well-known — history that was seeded long before Donald John Trump decided to become a candidate for the U.S. Presidency.

I am sure the president and members of all branches of the U.S. Government are fully aware of the FBI’s history.

If public officials for their own reasons can recite America’s two-century old founders and founding documents, surely they can look up at that building at 925 Pennsylvania Avenue and recall more recent history, the pattern of lawlessness seeded in the FBI a century ago.

Surely contemporary public officials and their scholarly partners can recall that when it has suited their perceived private, partisan or propagandist interests, they have, in the intervening years, enthusiastically endorsed, acquiesced to, and/or pretended to ignore the FBI’s lawlessness.

Sources

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover#COINTELPRO_and_the_1950s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover#Concealed_espionage_discoveries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Liuzzo

RT “Former CIA director Brennan lied to Congress about Steele Dossier, IG report reveals”

December 9, 2019 https://www.rt.com/usa/475443-brennan-lied-to-congress/

RT “FBI surveillance ‘an embarrassment to our country’, Trump says, after Justice Department report released” December 9, 2019 https://www.rt.com/usa/475438-trump-ig-report-disgrace/

Press TV “FBI not motivated by political bias in Trump probe: Watchdog report” December 10, 2019 https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/12/10/613268/FBI-showed-no-bias-in-2016-election:-Watchdog-report2019

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