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This, you may recall, is the same agency that tried to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself. It’s the same agency that compiled a list of 12,000 Americans, and, upon the outbreak of the Korean War, urged President Truman to jail them without trial. It’s the same agency whose response to the KKK’s murder of civil-rights worker Viola Liuzzo — a murder that may have been abetted by an undercover FBI agent — was to spread rumors that Liuzzo was a heroin-addicted communist and a deadbeat mom.

https://archive.ph/P8v3s#selection-495.0-495.32

By CHARLES C. W. COOKE

The bureau is a violent, expansionist, self-aggrandizing, and careless outfit that sits awkwardly within the American constitutional order.

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In the New York Times this week, Bret Stephens complained that, in unholy conjunction with the Department of Justice, the FBI had disgraced itself yet again with its public smear of Representative Matt Gaetz. “I don’t like Gaetz’s politics or persona any more than you do,” Stephens told a characteristically bewildered Gail Collins. “But what we seem to have here is a high-profile politician being convicted in the court of public opinion of some of the most heinous behavior imaginable—trafficking a minor for sex—until the Justice Department realizes two years late that its case has fallen apart.”

Which . . . well, yeah. That’s what the FBI is for. Last week, a whistleblower named Kyle Seraphin told the Washington Times that the FBI had adopted “an entirely ridiculous internal process for determining every single national priority.” One must ask: “ridiculous” from whose perspective? Relative to the FBI’s stated mission, its behavior does indeed look “ridiculous.” Relative to its historical conduct, its behavior seems pretty standard. What the FBI did to Matt Gaetz is precisely what it did to Donald Trump. And what it did to Donald Trump is what it’s been doing since it was founded: namely, spying on, or attempting to discredit, anyone who irritates the powers that be.

This, you may recall, is the same agency that tried to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself. It’s the same agency that compiled a list of 12,000 Americans, and, upon the outbreak of the Korean War, urged President Truman to jail them without trial. It’s the same agency whose response to the KKK’s murder of civil-rights worker Viola Liuzzo — a murder that may have been abetted by an undercover FBI agent — was to spread rumors that Liuzzo was a heroin-addicted communist and a deadbeat mom. It’s the same agency that kept a file on John Denver — the author of such subversive works as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — because he was opposed to the Vietnam War. When, in 1974, Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman was tasked with reviewing J. Edgar Hoover’s secret papers, he was horrified by what he found. Hoover, Silberman wrote, had allowed his FBI to “be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes” and engaged in “subtle blackmail to ensure his and the bureau’s power.” Matt Gaetz is merely the latest in a long line of victims.

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