January 30, 2018
Consider the FBI. Founded by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte in 1908 to provide a newly industrialized and expansive United States with a cadre of coordinated federal law enforcement officers, throughout its history, the FBI has been a conservative institution with a view of national security that privileged our country’s hierarchical status quo and perceived threats in any organized voices that challenged that status quo.
Thus, early in its history, in addition to pursuing gangsters and bootleggers like Al Capone and “Babyface” Nelson, the FBI pursued anarchists, communists and labor unions like the International Workers of the World (Source: “A Brief History. The Nation Calls 1908-1923,” www.FBI.gov). The FBI was notorious for its surveillance of Civil Rights and Black Power organizations, infamously sending Martin Luther King a letter in 1964 urging him to commit suicide (Source: Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65). It launched COINTELPRO, which infiltrated everything from Black student organizations to the Black Panther Party with a goal to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize,” the movements and their leaders (Source: “Cointelpro Revisited- Spying & Disruption,” citing FBI internal memo from J. Edgar Hoover dated 8/25/67).
Although the FBI’s focus in recent years has shifted to terrorism, it has been criticized for an over-emphasis on ISIS inspired terrorism to the exclusion of white supremacist terrorists, even though white supremacists represent a far more deadly threat domestically (Source: “The Numbers Don’t Lie: White Far-Right Terrorists Pose a Clear Danger to Us All,” by Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept 5/31/17).
It is in that context that we must view the forced resignation of FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe. Yesterday, McCabe, a career FBI man, abruptly announced that he was resigning as Deputy Director, effective immediately. McCabe, who is 49, announced his retirement in December after enduring repeated withering attacks from President Trump and his toadies on Fox News and in Congress. Trump questioned McCabe’s impartiality in the Russian investigation because his wife ran for office as a Democrat and accepted campaign contributions from a PAC run by former Virginia governor and Clinton ally, Terry McAuliffe. McCabe disclosed his wife’s candidacy at the time and consulted ethics experts within the Bureau, but those pesky facts did nothing to assuage Trump’s ire or change his perception that McCabe was biased against him (Source: “Deputy at F.B.I., Chided by Trump, Leaves Abruptly,” by Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, The New York Times, 1/30/18).
Pause for a moment and consider how alarming it is that a man who, by all accounts was himself a lifelong Republican, was drummed out of the Number Two spot at the FBI by reason of his marriage to a Democrat. An ideological witch hunt this extreme makes Senator Joseph McCarthy look moderate by comparison.
Sadly, McCabe’s resignation signals to Trump and his allies that intimidation and pressure work. We are right to fear that this is only the beginning of a campaign by Trump and treasonous dimwits like Devin Nunes to purge the FBI of any shred of independence and convert it into Trump’s sprawling secret police force. We must demand that Speaker Paul Ryan remove Nunes from the House Intelligence Committee and that the Senate pass legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If this administration is willing to treat an organization as conservative as the FBI like an enemy of the state, what do you think they’ll do to the rest of us?
#CallCongress
#Resist
#Bluewave2018