Post by the Scribe on Mar 30, 2020 23:12:51 GMT
Why We Should All Fear the Rot Inside the FBI
What James Comey did was bad enough, but now he’s clearly at the mercy of a right-wing faction of his own agents. Who can stop them?
JOY-ANN REID
11.04.16 9:01 PM ET
When a black church burned in Greenville, Mississippi, leaving charred walls and roof and the words “vote Trump” scrawled on the side of the building, local authorities called in the FBI. Its offices in Jackson, the state capitol, and Washington D.C. were put on the case.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been doing that kind of work for decades. It was the FBI, under pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, that sent scores of agents to Philadelphia, Mississippi in June of 1964 to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, who had themselves been investigating the firebombing of a black church that was to serve as a “freedom school,” in preparation for registering black Mississippians to vote. When the three men were found dead—lynched and discarded in an earthen dam—it was FBI agents who made the discovery, acting on an informant’s tip.
The FBI has had its dark days, too. It was the federal law enforcement agency, under director J. Edgar Hoover, that tried to harass Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. literally to death; and that infiltrated, sabotaged and set up members of the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, and more; from COINTELPRO to infiltrating and spying on groups opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most recent target of massive surveillance by the FBI: protest movements organized under the broad banner of Black Lives Matter, which collectively are aimed at reforming policing, to reduce often fatal violence against unarmed black civilians.
Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn’t be counted on to deliver, and recoiled in fear at their exercise of raw federal power. That uneasy trust; the combination of need and dread, is the lot that FBI agents live with day to day.
The events of the past two weeks have made it all but impossible to have much faith in the FBI now. The agency has, through the actions of a minority cell of unknown size, been severely tainted, potentially dragging down the reputations of even the finest agents in its ranks.
After all, how can we trust the nation’s foremost federal law enforcement agency now that it has become clear that a faction of its agents used a conspiracy theory-hawking political book to launch a partisan probe into a presidential candidate?
That unprecedented prospect: that federal law enforcement could take it upon themselves to try and swing a national election using allegations gleaned from a partisan hatchet job financially linked to the target’s political opponent, is Third World stuff. It makes the already creepy chants of “lock her up!” at Trump rallies reminiscent of a spiraling coup d’etat in a banana republic, because clearly, some in the FBI want to make those chants come true. And it makes Rudy Giuliani’s assertion, two days before Comey’s vague oppo dump, that the campaign had “a couple of things up our sleeve to turn [the race] around,” an ominous tell indeed.
more
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/05/why-we-should-all-fear-the-rot-inside-the-fbi.html
What James Comey did was bad enough, but now he’s clearly at the mercy of a right-wing faction of his own agents. Who can stop them?
JOY-ANN REID
11.04.16 9:01 PM ET
When a black church burned in Greenville, Mississippi, leaving charred walls and roof and the words “vote Trump” scrawled on the side of the building, local authorities called in the FBI. Its offices in Jackson, the state capitol, and Washington D.C. were put on the case.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been doing that kind of work for decades. It was the FBI, under pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, that sent scores of agents to Philadelphia, Mississippi in June of 1964 to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, who had themselves been investigating the firebombing of a black church that was to serve as a “freedom school,” in preparation for registering black Mississippians to vote. When the three men were found dead—lynched and discarded in an earthen dam—it was FBI agents who made the discovery, acting on an informant’s tip.
The FBI has had its dark days, too. It was the federal law enforcement agency, under director J. Edgar Hoover, that tried to harass Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. literally to death; and that infiltrated, sabotaged and set up members of the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, and more; from COINTELPRO to infiltrating and spying on groups opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most recent target of massive surveillance by the FBI: protest movements organized under the broad banner of Black Lives Matter, which collectively are aimed at reforming policing, to reduce often fatal violence against unarmed black civilians.
Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn’t be counted on to deliver, and recoiled in fear at their exercise of raw federal power. That uneasy trust; the combination of need and dread, is the lot that FBI agents live with day to day.
The events of the past two weeks have made it all but impossible to have much faith in the FBI now. The agency has, through the actions of a minority cell of unknown size, been severely tainted, potentially dragging down the reputations of even the finest agents in its ranks.
After all, how can we trust the nation’s foremost federal law enforcement agency now that it has become clear that a faction of its agents used a conspiracy theory-hawking political book to launch a partisan probe into a presidential candidate?
That unprecedented prospect: that federal law enforcement could take it upon themselves to try and swing a national election using allegations gleaned from a partisan hatchet job financially linked to the target’s political opponent, is Third World stuff. It makes the already creepy chants of “lock her up!” at Trump rallies reminiscent of a spiraling coup d’etat in a banana republic, because clearly, some in the FBI want to make those chants come true. And it makes Rudy Giuliani’s assertion, two days before Comey’s vague oppo dump, that the campaign had “a couple of things up our sleeve to turn [the race] around,” an ominous tell indeed.
more
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/05/why-we-should-all-fear-the-rot-inside-the-fbi.html