The FBI's boss won't fess up for its sins -- even to Congress
Today's FBI is far more dangerous to the entire citizenry than it was when bad-old J. Edgar Hoover was running it and the Big Media don't care.
The FBI is a really swell all-American organization.
It might be fair to say that under evil J. Edgar Hoover it was actually not as dangerous to Americans' freedom as today's far larger FBI is.
Power-hungry J. Edgar's FBI applied the FBI's spying, infiltrating, instigating and entrapping activities to a narrow slice of the population -- Communists and other lefties, the KKK, the Black Panthers, 'treasonous' black newspaper editors during WWII.
(Here’s a review in the New Yorker magazine about the latest Hoover book, “G-Man,” that refers to some of Hoover’s greatest hits. Below are a column and a book review I wrote about the FBI and/or Hoover in the 1990s that show that nothing is new or different about Hoover or the FBI.
(Here’s a magazine column I wrote for the Trib about the FBI’s failure to see the 9/11 disaster coming. And to show how the FBI has always been a disreputable institution, here, from 2002, is a Q&A I did with with FBI expert Ronald Kessler about his book “The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI.”)
And Hoover collected all kinds of sexual dirt on politicians of both parties so he could essentially blackmail them. Remember, he also ordered up or okayed the wire-taping of MLK, JFK and god-knows who else.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s J. Edgar enjoyed near unanimous praise in the mainstream media and in the popular culture as an American hero -- a crime-fighter, a commie-catcher, a moral paragon.
In fact, all the while, he was our own slightly less ruthless Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. (I think J.E. spared the Mafia for some reason, but I can't remember the shameful details.)
Don’t look now, but today's FBI is bigger, more pervasive, more dangerous, more politicized and more protected by politicians (imagine how much rich dirt it must have in its massive files on the current folks running Washington).
It's also far better armed with high-tech surveillance equipment than we'll ever know.
Lefties and liberals and anyone genuinely interested in keeping the Constitution operating as it was designed to used to hate the FBI -- but that was in the good old pre-Trump days.
Now the left thinks the FBI is doing great work, especially when they learn that the FBI had its standard half-dozen creepy informants (i.e.,, instigators) inside the clubhouses of the Proud Boys and other minuscule groups of right-wing losers.
The journalists of the mainstream news media -- those pretend questioners of authority -- aren't interested in exposing the Stasi-like doings of the FBI as long as the FBI is violating the civil liberties of the people whose politics they don't like.
Of course, getting the FBI's top cops to admit — even to Congressional committees — that they are doing anything wrong or slimy is impossible, whether it's about what they did wrong way back in the 1990s at Waco or on Jan. 6, 2021, during “The Great Insurrection” that supposedly almost toppled our democracy.
The other day Senator Rand Paul asked the FBI's current spawn of J. Edgar Hoover, Christopher Wray, about illegal data harvesting by the agency. Rand was specifically asking about the FBI "obtaining anonymous social media data and then using technical methods to pierce the anonymous nature of the data."
This is the exchange that ensued:
Wray: Anonymous social media data?
Paul: So you purchase data. People purchase data all the time, and we sort of tolerate it for advertising and things, because it's anonymous data. Are you purchasing what is said to be anonymous data through the marketplace and then piercing the anonymous nature to attach individual names to that data?
Wray: Right. When you asked about anonymous data, I was thinking more in terms of --
Paul: No, I'm talking about data that is out there, and are you purchasing data and then piercing the anonymous nature of that data?
Wray: So the manner in which we use, we usually use the term commercial data, is probably longer than I could explain here. But again, let me have a --
Paul: So you will not answer the question of whether or not you're attaching names to anonymous data?
Wray: I think it's a more complicated answer than I can give here.
Paul: So so far we're 0 for 2 with getting you to answer this, but you're pledging you will actually answer the question. Because you have to realize the frustration: we'll write you a letter and your team of lawyers will write back a 15-page letter that says nothing, and you won't answer the question. These are very specific. This is whether you're obeying the law or whether we can have confidence. I want to have confidence in the FBI.
Wray: We are obeying the law.
Paul: Well, you're saying that, but you won't tell us the answer.
Wray: I said, that's not what I --
Paul: No, you aren't telling me the answer. Are you collecting data not compelled by a warrant? That would not be in compliance with the law. But you won't answer that you're not collecting that data.
Wray: I said two things. One, we're following the law, and second, that we would have somebody follow up with you with more detailed specifics.
Paul: Those are two specific questions. Are you getting data from them that's not compelled? And then are you piercing the anonymous nature of that technically.
There was also this exchange between Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) and Director Wray:
Higgins: Did the FBI have confidential human sources embedded within the January 6th protesters and on January 6th of 2021?
Wray: Well, Congressman, as I'm sure you can appreciate, I have to be very careful about what I can say about when --
Higgins: Even now? Because that's what you told us two years ago.
Wray: May I finish? About when we do and do not and where we have and have not used confidential human sources. But to the extent that there's a suggestion, for example, that the FBI's confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated January 6th, that's categorically false.
Higgins: Did you have confidential human sources dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol on January the 6th, prior to the doors being open?
Wray: Again, I have to be very careful.
Higgins: It should be a no. Can you not tell the American people no, we did not have confidential human sources dressed as Trump supporters positioned inside the Capitol?
Wray: You should not read anything into my decision not to share information about confidential human sources.
You might have missed the Higgins-Wray exchange in the pages of your paper of record, the New York Times, but that's mainly because they didn't report on it.
******
Of course there’s nothing new about the failings and evil doings of the FBI. Here’s a column I wrote in 1997 for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, followed by a review of Anthony Summers tabloidy 1997 bio of Hoover, ‘Official and Confidential.’
Everyone is picking on the FBI
by Bill Steigerwald
Once upon a time, when we were young and naive about government police power, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was America's coolest, most revered law enforcement agency.
Smart, uncorruptible, dogged and brave, America's premier investigatory agency could do no wrong.
Lately, of course, the FBI las sunk to a dangerous national joke, and it has little to do with the jokes alleging that J. Edgar Hoover liked to slip into evening dresses and high heels on weekends.
The FBI's recent descent to snicker status is a result of its recent prime-time screw-ups — the Tragedy at Waco, the Shootout at Ruby Ridge and the Idiocy at Atlanta's Olympic Park.
With even its vaunted crime-lab work shown to be LAPD-sloppy at times, it's beginning to seem like the last time the FBI did something right was in the "Silence of the Lambs."
The FBI's failings — mainly sending over the files of a bunch of Republicans to the Clinton White House — have become so obvious, one of its ideological soulmates, the conservative Reader's Digest, is this month asking the once unthinkable: Can the FBI be trusted?
But Reader's Digest's complaint, written by Brock Brower, is primarily a quick-hit job on the political and administrative missteps of director Louis Freeh. A more thorough assault, aimed at the very institution itself, has been launched from the left field stands by The Nation.
In a special report by David Burnham, the Nation calls the FBI America's most powerful, most secretive and most dangerous agency.
Relying heavily on heretofore unexamined information from Justice Department data banks, Burn-ham takes a hard look at how well the FBI is performing its crime-fighting mission and what threat it poses to our civil liberties.
To put it mildly, Burnham doesn't like what he sees:
"The FBI today is a sloppy, unresponsive, badly managed, uncooperative and out-of-touch agency that is aggressively trying to expand its control over the American people."
His critique, though colored by the Nation's ultra-liberal politics, is credible and disturbing.
Based on conviction rates, he says the FBI often does a lousy job of providing prosecutors with good evidence. And he says it spends too much time busting drug dealers and solving high-profile but easily solved bank robberies and too little on the most serious threat to America "the endemic problem of corporate and white-collar crime."
Whether freedom-maximizing Americans should lament the FBI's relative ineptitude in achieving convictions is arguable.
But in detailing the FBI's unwavering devotion to wiretaps and other dirty tricks, Burnham makes a good case that Hoover's child needs to be more closely baby-sat by Congress.
As he puts it, the FBI "is not performing in a manner compatible with the principles or practices of representative democracy."
Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers. Putnam. 528 pages.
By Bill Steigerwald
Thanks to Anthony Summers' amazing expose, 21 years after his death as a national hero, J. Edgar Hoover has become a national joke.
Jay Leno and David Letterman have made great late-nightly fun of the FBI director for his hobby of dressing up in flouncy evening gowns after spending a hard day at the office capturing gangsters or Nazi spies.
The transvestite jokes were spawned by a bizarre story about America's No. 1 G-Man being seen wearing lipstick and high heels and being introduced as "Mary" at a homosexual sex party.
The woman who went to that party described the scene with a straight face recently on a shocking PBS "Frontline" program that was largely based on Summers' exhaustive investigation into Hoover's secret private and public life.
The scene is also described in grotesque detail in a juicy excerpt of "Official and Confidential" in the current Vanity Fair.
But unless you think it's side-splittingly funny that the director of the FBI always wore perfume or would only eat ice cream from a round container, there are few laughs in Summers' highly readable, disturbing bombshell.
For almost 50 years, presidents and national media passed Hoover off to a trusting and naive citizenry as a national icon. He was praised as a principled patriot who battled America's domestic and foreign enemies with his efficient, incorruptible, all-American police force. Only a few cranky leftists dared to criticize Hoover's abuses, and they were written off as Commies or their un-American dupes.
But Summers presents a mass of credible evidence that, in fact, troublemakers like Benjamin Spock had it right about Hoover all along.
It seems that it was the FBI director himself who was actually Public Enemy No. 1 and, from Summers' account, a depressing number of our two-faced political heroes in Washington knew all about it.
Summers is a serious ex-BBC journalist who has spectacularly unmasked an evil American weirdo. An author of books on Marilyn Monroe ("Goddess") and the Kennedy assassination ("Conspiracy"), he spent five years researching Hoover's life.
The 850 people he interviewed include relatives, FBI agents, politicians, psychiatrists and JFK's previously mute personal secretary. He also acquired hundreds of documents through the Freedom of Information Act.
For 438 pages, from Hoover's babyhood to his death at 77 in 1972, Summers spins an unbelievably believable tale.
The extent of Hoover's paranoia, hypocrisy and personal and public sleaziness is frightening even if only 10 percent of what Summers reports is true.
Here, according to Summers, are some of the highlights:
Hoover lived like an Oriental potentate at taxpayers' expense with his lifemate and right-hand man Clyde Tolson.
He took expensive gifts and was treated to no-lose investments from right-wing oil millionaires.
He gambled regularly at race tracks with crime bosses who secretly fixed races so he'd win.
He ignored an important early warning about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
He subverted the findings of the Warren Commission.
For nearly half a century he operated the FBI like a private secret police force, helping his political friends and punishing his enemies. He used it to illegally wiretap thousands of people, from Eleanor Roosevelt and incoming congressmen to Pearl Buck, Martin Luther King and Kennedy long before and after he became president.
He had the FBI bug the 1964 Republican convention for Lyndon Johnson, whom he also entertained by feeding a steady diet of FBI dossiers on his political enemies.
According to Summers, Hoover successfully blackmailed every president from Roosevelt to Nixon, particularly if they were thinking of replacing him.
Every president was afraid of him. In public they called him a national treasure, gave him awards and rehired him. In private, they feared him, and spoke the truth.
Truman called Hoover an evil menace. Johnson called him "a queer bastard." His arch-enemy, Robert Kennedy, called him a "psycho."
What his ideological pal Nixon called him when he heard Hoover was finally dead is unprintable yet Nixon gave Hoover a state funeral fit for a beloved ex-president.
Summers' most incredible allegation is that Hoover, who was a longtime pal of Johnson's, blackmailed John Kennedy into choosing LBJ as his vice president in 1960.
Summers says Hoover's leverage was lots of politically ruinious evidence that the womanizing Kennedy wasn't the good Roman Catholic family man he pretended to be.
The decision to pick LBJ was made privately in a hotel room by only Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and both swore each other to secrecy.
However, JFK's private secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, went in and out of that room during the meeting, and, after 30 years of silence, she has told Summers she believes Hoover blackmailed her boss.
Ironically, Summers' book presents evidence that Hoover himself was being blackmailed. In 1937 the mob obtained compromising pictures of Hoover and Tolson and very effectively used them to keep Hoover off their backs.
From 1937 on, while organized crime grew stronger and richer, Hoover kept insisting it didn't exist, despite steady evidence to the contrary.
Summers says Hoover tried to stop U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver's committee investigation of organized crime in the early 1950s because he didn't want to have to use the FBI against the mob.
Summers says Hoover only reluctantly went along with U.S. Attorney General Kennedy's assault on organized crime in the early 1960s. And as soon as JFK's assassination made Bobby Kennedy a lame duck, Summers shows that the FBI's pressure on the Mafia slacked off.
Right-wingers will see a leftward tilt in Summers' breezy attitude about the danger of the Communist threat. And though he may stretch his evidence too thin at times, or over-credit Hoover's power to micro-manipulate so many events or so easily alter history, Summers is no tabloid sensationalist.
Considering the explosive nature of his charges, he's reasonably evenhanded throughout and rarely betrays his biases. There are no saints and few heroes in his book, and Summers knows exactly why what he reveals is so disturbing.
It has nothing to do with the tales of "Mary" Hoover, or an unelected bureaucrat's power to control presidents and Congress, or even the fact that he fooled America for so long.
What's most disturbing is this, as Summers says in his conclusion: "The survival of a J. Edgar Hoover for so many years, in such an atmosphere of phony adulation, could have occurred only in a society led by men who condoned his secret abuses and public hypocrisies, while maintaining otherwise. Edgar had many accomplices — Democrats and Republicans alike — who went along with his excesses because it suited their political purposes."
That's the first time I have ever seen a congressional hearing where Rand Paul made a positive contribution. Hoover didn't investigate the Mafia much because ... that would have been far harder than running down a few carjackings to drive up the stats he liked to brag about. I disagree that today's FBI is more dangerous, mainly because nobody even questioned Hoover then; he was seen as a demigod. But a great column.