MarvinTheParanoidAndroid
This will all end in tears, I just know it.
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- 24 de Feb, 2015
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, formerly known as simply the Bureau of Investigation, has it's roots in the Civil War, the Secret Service, the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, Napoleon Bonaparte & the political assassinations of two U.S. Presidents.
By the end of the Civil War in 1865, half of all U.S. dollars were fraudulent. This forgery threatened the stability of the U.S. economy and Lincoln had unwittingly planted the seeds of what would eventually become the FBI into its first precursor, the Secret Service, an organization he started for the sole purpose of investigating currency fraud. On the same day he founded the Secret Service, Lincoln, feeling neither depressed nor suicidal, was shot in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth at the Ford's Theatre.
After that, Presidents James Garfield & William McKinley would both be assassinated before Congress would consider creating a personal guard force for the U.S. President, on the basis that they were more afraid it would elevate the role of Presidency to a centralized power than they were of the President being assassinated.
This Dual-Federalist view that individual States should govern themselves would eventually be blown away in the wake of Roosevelt's ascent to presidency.
In 1896, the second precursor to the Bureau of Investigation was founded, the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, which was founded by the National Chief's of Police Union for the purposes of collecting perp photos and sharing them with other police departments nationwide. Merely sharing mug shots with other police departments proved ineffective, forcing them to adopt finger printing instead.
This is where the assassination of William McKinley was key.
Leon Czolgosz, alias "Fred Nobody," Polish-descended natural born American, Christian & former socialist, had joined an Anarchist group called the Sila Club & was a short-lived disciple of the Anarchist Emma Goldman. True-believer & socially awkward Leon was himself suspected of being a Fed spy by fellow Anarchists Abraham Isaak and Emil Schilling to such a degree they issued a warning to all their other Anarchist butt-buddies that socially awkward Fred Nobody is awkward.
Leon was of the usual socialist perspective, that the rich exploited the poor. He took inspiration from the assassination of King Umberto I by Gaetano Bresci and decided to murder William McKinley at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo NY in September 6th, 1901.
It should be noted that William McKinely did indeed have a security detail made up of 18 exposition guards, 7 soldiers from the 73rd Seacoast Artillery & 3 Secret Service agents. None of that mattered because McKinley blew off his security detail, viewing them as more cumbersome than necessary, and this lead to his own assassination when he went to shake hands with Leon Czolgosz, Leon slapped McKinely's hand away & drew a .32 caliber revolver covered by a handkerchief on the President, shooting him in the abdomen twice at point blank range.
Some people will try to sell you on the idea that Leon was mentally ill, but he was found to be of sound mind by the State of New York, & he acknowledged his crime on the electric chair, stating he regretted nothing about the assassination.
Turns out that Abraham Isaak & Emil Schilling were both right to be paranoid of Leon Czolgosz, since this little stint created the perception that Anarchism was a foreign ideology that needed to be snuffed out immediately. Theodore Roosevelt, now the President of the United States, stated that Anarchy was a crime against the whole human race, and this event spurred the creation of the 1903 Immigration act which sought to deport Anarchist immigrants from the country.
What could be called a parallel to the Red Scare, the Anarchy Scare as I like to call it, brought about demand for greater surveillance of the Anarchist movement. While the Departments of Justice and Labor had been keeping tabs on the Anarchist movement for years, Roosevelt, a former police commissioner, wanted his very own spying apparatus to further spy on them and created it by executive order in 1908.
Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was tasked by Roosevelt to create an autonomous federal level police force which would only report to the Attorney General. To supply this new agency with staff, Charles Bonaparte reached out to other organizations, key among them being the Secret Service along with cannibalizing the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, assimilating their information gathering techniques on criminals. Congress would forbid the use of Treasury employees by the Justice department, citing fears of creating a secret police. How prophetic. Bonaparte would formalize this new organization under the Department of Justice.
However there was a problem, the Secret Service didn't report to Charles Bonaparte, they reported to the Secret Service itself. Not only did the Secret Service not heed to Bonaparte's authority, Bonaparte also had to hire private detectives. This method of collecting spare agents from other Federal departments and independent investigators wasn't working. Then in 1908, Congress declared that Secret Service agents had to stay in their proper department, depriving Bonaparte's Force of any formal staff. So Bonaparte simply hired 9 agents from the Secret Service to become permanent members of Bonaparte's Force. He then hired 25 more agents elsewhere, giving him a starter pack of 34 agents to start Bonaparte's Force off proper.
It wouldn't be until 1909 under George Wickersham as Attorney General that this informal organization would finally be dubbed the Bureau of Investigation. The focus of the BOI was originally white collar & civil rights cases, which included antitrust, bank fraud, land fraud, copyright violations, forced labor, naturalization and the enforcement of the Mann Act, an anti-human trafficking law. Doesn't sound like it had anything to do with purging Anarchists but I digress.
By 1915, the BOI grew to 300 members due to WWI. The BOI were now also responsible for hunting down deserters and draft dodgers, ferreting out German spies and acts of sabotage under the Espionage Act passed in 1917, officially getting the BOI to follow it's original purpose of spying on United States citizens, only now Anarchism had nothing to do with it. Funny that.
The First Scandal
This is the part were you're probably expecting me to jump into J Edgar Hoover as a first example of an FBI scandal, but no. The first scandals begin with Bonaparte's Force.
See, congress were ardently opposed to the formation of this new group, two members of Congress had already been prosecuted for fraud by the Department of Justice using agents from other agencies in 1906, and they had rightly feared a Federal police force would be used as a secret police to punish political opposition. A police force under the Executive branch could be used to harass & persecute unfavorable members of Congress, a fear which was substantiated when opponent Senator Benjamin Tillman had his mail opened by Bureau agents in 1909, breaking the Fourth Amendment over their knee as perhaps their first act of violating the Bill of Rights... that we know of.
So let's review, Bonaparte's Force was formed by executive order by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908, the BOI starts opening mail of a Congressman in 1909. It took them a whole year before turning corrupt, I'm impressed by their restraint.
Prophecy fulfilled.
And we're not even done discussing their formation as an organization into the FBI.
The BOI was then renamed to the United States Bureau of Investigation in 1932, then it was Frankensteined together with the Bureau of Prohibition to make the Division of Investigation, then it was finally given its final name, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935, becoming an independent service of the Department of Justice.
So let's count up the various names this organization has had:
The Secret Police (informal, derogatory & true)
Bonaparte's Force (informal) (1908)
Bureau of Investigation (1909)
United States Bureau of Investigation (1932)
Division of Investigation (1933)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (1935)
So now that we're all done with the origins of the FBI, let's get into the scandals proper.
The Palmer Raids
In 1917, J Edgar Hoover would start out as the personal assistant to the Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer as the leader of a sub-division of the Bureau of Investigation called the General Intelligence Division with what would eventually become known as the Palmer Raids, a series of raids which occurred in 1919 to 1920. Edgar started the raids by compiling huge lists of people he suspected of being involved in the Red Scare. He would compile a huge faildox on 60,000 people he believed to be radical leaders and supporters of the Bolshevik movement in Russia, Socialists and Anarchists for the purposes of arresting and deporting them.
In the biggest game of catch and release, the FBI arrested, detained and released 10,000 people with only 556 deportations. While Alexander Mitchel Palmer would take on the most criticism for the Palmer Raids, J Edgar Hoover would walk away unscathed by this scandal and become the first official Director of the FBI in 1924.
It should be noted that the Palmer Raids were not without merit, as an immigrant Italian Anarchist terrorist group called the Galleanists sent two waves of mail bombs to politicians, law enforcement and businessmen, including Palmer himself at his residence in Washington DC. I, too, would want to flush the human trash out of the country if they bombed my house. Teddy Roosevelt was right.
This could be considered the first case of racial profiling in the history of the FBI since they arrested whoever they could at the time, including ethnic Russians that had nothing to do with Communism, random bystanders and natural born American citizens. It was to the point that arrests blew passed the number of arrest warrants they had.
Palmer had actually persuaded the Department of Labor to stop informing arrestees of their attorney rights upon arrest. Hoover would also duck the Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson to get the arrest warrants he wanted for members of Communists parties by going through more pliable members of the Department of Labor.
The FBI claimed to have reclaimed bombs from these raids but only showed off metal balls, which were never seen again after being displayed once. These raids only apprehended a total of 4 pistols.
Almost all newspapers sided with the FBI and Palmer on these raids, so much so the Washington Post stated "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty." Hmmm...
This heavy-handed act of arresting whole crowds of people without proper warrants and asking questions later caused Francis Fisher Kane, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of PA to resign from his position in protest. He wrote a letter to Palmer stating how heavy-handed his approach was.
A few weeks later, the Department of Labor changed its Acting Secretary of Labor to Louis Freeland Post, & Post canceled 2,000 warrants for being illegal. No longer could Palmer and his crony, John Edgar Hoover, run roughshod over the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Palmer called on the actual Secretary of Labor, William B. Wilson, to fire Post, but Wilson refused. The President himself listened in, giving no comment until the very end where he and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels both disapproved of Palmer's insane overreach of authority.
In further overreach, Palmer's supporters in Congress attempted to have the not-insane Louis Freeland Post impeached, and when that failed, censured. Palmer started losing steam & support when he made a failed prediction that there would be an Anarchist uprising on May Day 1920 & it didn't happen. Then in a House Rules Committee hearing on May 7th through 8th, Louis Post was forced to defend himself, in a hearing which he managed to sway even ardent supporters of Palmer, including (presumably supportive of Palmer) Democrat Representative Edward W. Pou that Louis Post was always in the right and doing his job.
Fun side note, the Palmer Raids were responsible for the founding of the now-useless & limp-wristed American Civil Liberties Union. Upon their founding in January 19th 1920, they would publish a dossier of all the illegal activities of Palmer and the FBI in a report titled "Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice," which listed illegal acts of entrapment (persuading a peaceful person to commit crime), incommunicado detention (detaining someone without giving them access to legal representation, family members or a doctor) and unlawful arrests.
The Rules Committee held a hearing over Palmer & his activities in June in which they denounced his activities, in which Palmer went off on a tirade in which he would accuse Louis Post of "tender solicitude for social revolution and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists...set at large among the people the very public enemies whom it was the desire and intention of the Congress to be rid of."
Finally, the Palmer Raids came to an effective close when in June 1920, George W Anderson, Massachusetts District Court Judge, discharged 17 arrestees & denounced the actions of the DoJ. He wrote: "a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes."
Thus ended the Palmer Raids, and with it Palmer's prospects of becoming a Democrat Presidential primary.
And with that, the tone of the FBI's trajectory had been set, as a glorified Stasi who worked at the behest of the Federal Government in spite of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
And while the Palmer Raids had caused the self-destruction of its namesake, his right hand man, and the main character of our OP, remained unscathed.
John Edgar Hoover.
Fifth director of the BOI, first director of the FBI & father of the politics police. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation had an avatar for itself, it was John Edgar Hoover; corrupt, hypocritical, secretive & abusive of power. If the FBI was merely bad before, Edgar would elevate it to the Secret Police that Congress had feared so much & elevate himself to an unaccountable shadow dictator of the United States. Edgar's reign of the FBI was such that the FBI earned a new moniker, the Politics Police (that makes seven.)
Hoover's lifelong tenure as director of the FBI was characterized by using the organization as his personal army to amass power for himself in total disregard of the Constitution. He blackmailed, wiretapped, slandered, robbed, forged documents, incited violence, collaborated with domestic terrorists and possibly had assassinations committed on his behalf. Oh, & he was a Freemason.
J Edgar Hoover was such a treacherous snake that multiple Presidents wanted to fire him from the Bureau, but refrained from doing so out of fear of his reprisal should they follow through with the urge to expunge him from the agency. It was such that Harry S Truman stated "We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him." So entrenched was J Edgar Hoover that the mandatory U.S. Government Service Retirement Age of 70 had been waived for his benefit in the wake of the JFK assassination just so he could continue wielding the FBI until his natural demise. It should also come as no surprise that he was a misogynistic (allegedly) troon.
Before Hoover had worked for any intelligence agency, he worked for the Library of Congress as a messenger for the orders department, a job position which he credits for his uncanny ability to build faildox profiles on people, which would serve to ultimately undermine the aforementioned Palmer Raids.
After leaving the Library of Congress, Hoover's career & subsequent power would experience a meteoric rise. After getting his Masters of Law degree in 1917, Hoover was hired onto the War Emergency Division of the Justice Department, where he would ascend up the ranks to the head of the Alien Enemy Bureau, where his powers were immediately expanded at the authorization of President Woodrow Wilson to arrest & jail foreign nationals alleged to be disloyal to the United States. He received yet more expanded powers under the Espionage Act of 1917.
In August 1919, Hoover would transfer to the BOI as the new head of the new General Intelligence Division / Radical Division, where the aforementioned Palmer Raids underwent. In 1921, Hoover rose to the rank of deputy head & in 1924, he ascended to replace the fourth director of the BOI, William J. Burns, who was dubbed "America's Sherlock Holmes."
As soon as Hoover got his hands on the wheel, he started doing all manner of things which were odd. He fired all the female staff & prohibited female hires in the future, he fired male staff on a whim, based solely on how they looked, & set up his own men for failure. Most notable of the people he wrongfully demoted Melvin Horace Purvis the 2nd. Purvis was good at his job & had success in breaking up gangs in the 1930s, receiving public acclaim for it. Purvis was the head of the Division of Investigation for the Birmingham, Oklahoma City and Cincinnati offices of the FBI. He uncovered a foul play plot in the United Airlines Trip 23 crash & led the manhunts on Babyface Nelson, John Dillinger & Pretty Boy Floyd, until he was replaced by his successor who would only succeed in getting shot in the face by Nelson. Purvis would take the hint & resign from the FBI in 1935.
One wonders how the FBI's trajectory would've gone had their first director been someone different like Melvin Purvis or Hoover's predecessor, William J. Burns. On the one hand, the FBI would most certainly have been less embracing of corruption, but on the other, the FBI might not have been as effective as they are under Purvis or Burns, since it was Hoover who advanced the FBI's investigative capabilities by being the director to give it a forensics division. But since Bonaparte's Force had always been corrupt & opened Congressmen's mail to spy on them, maybe it would never have made a difference who led the FBI.
Let us now discuss Hoover's second debacle, his failure to tackle the mob. The 1930s were the Wild West of crime, where individual bank robbers like Babyface Nelson & John Dillinger reached celebrity status through their exploits & the mafia reigned as their own unofficial police force on petty crime. Not only did they make a mockery of banks, they made a mockery of regular law enforcement, evading traps & regularly jailbreaking from their cells when they were captured. These robbers & mafioso operated across state lines and were well in the wheelhouse of Hoover's authority. Hoover (Purvis) became famous for taking down the robbers, but not the mafia.
Let's discuss Hoover's alleged troonery. Hoover is alleged to have started trooning out during his time in Highschool, where he joined the debate club to oppose women's suffrage. I personally believe the rumor that Hoover was a troon simply because of his misogyny, which is further supported by the fact he had all the women who were previously working in the FBI fired to make the FBI a male-only organization.
Then there's the fact that despite the mafia being a criminal enterprise well within his wheelhouse, especially in light of his fame for being a gang buster during the 1930s before he fired Melvin Pervus, John Edgar Hoover refused to prosecute them at all. Hoover absolutely refused to even acknowledge that the mob existed, until the mob summit meeting known as the Apalachin meeting occurred in 1957, which was so high profile that it held 100 mafiosos at the home of Joe Barbara in New York to discuss gambling, loan sharking and narcotics trafficking.
There are three prevailing theories as to why Hoover refused to investigate the Mafia up until this moment. The first theory is that mafioso Frank Costello got Hoover into gambling on race horses by providing him insider tips. The second being that mafiosos Meyer Lansky & Frank Costello had photos of him having gay sex with his Deputy, Clyde Tolson. The third is that Lansky and Costello had photos of Hoover wearing a dress. It should also be noted that Lansky & his mobsters are cited to have frequently visited the Del Charro Hotel in California which Hoover & Tolson had also frequently visited, which was owned by a friend of Hoover by the name of Clint Murchison Sr.
This is highly ironic since Hoover was a pornographic blackmailer himself, at one point having held the largest private collection of pornography of any American at the time, which he used both for his own self gratification & as blackmail material for politicians & celebrities. The blackmailer got blackmailed. Add on a third layer of irony over the fact that Hoover had actually fought against Communist use of blackmail against homosexual politicians and Federal employees during the Lavender Scare. I can't tell who's blackmailing who anymore.
I personally believe that between Hoover's misogyny & his reluctance to pursue the Mafia until he had no choice & faced pressure to do so both point to the allegations of Hoover being a troon being true. Hoover would institute the "Top Hoodlum Program" to go after all the head mafiosos at long last.
There is actually a fourth potential reason why Hoover refused to pay attention to the Mafia (it doesn't explain why he refused to acknowledge their existence, however) and it's that he was preoccupied with the Red Scare at the time, to the point he would exaggerate the threat potential of the people he surveilled. He was so overzealous that it's actually believed that his actions kept the American Communist party alive through the informants he kept.
Now we get into infamous wiretapping scandal of Hoover's career. Surprisingly, this was not an act of J. Edgar Hoover overstepping his boundaries, breaking the Fourth Amendment over his knee by his own volition, but by the authority of arguably the worst President the U.S. ever had, Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR had one point of oversight in the matter, however, and that Hoover was to report to the Attorney General Robert H. Jackson. Only problem is Jackson wanted no part in the wiretapping, as it left a bad taste in his mouth, so he left it up to the discretion of faildox Hoover to wiretap whoever he
When FDR authorized the FBI to investigate foreign espionage & domestic commies/fascists, Hoover would participate in the Venona project to intercept communications of Russian agents located in the UK, but would keep his findings hidden from the White House, only sharing the findings with the CIA, withholding potentially critical information from his superiors.
J. Edgar Hoover, a man ahead of his time, actually had plans of instituting his own personal clandestine One World Government in the form of a World-Wide Intelligence Service. Thankfully, the Truman administration shot it down. Sorry Hoover, no WEF for you.
COINTELPRO
Now we get into perhaps the most egregious atrocities the Hoover directorship ever made, COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. Between the years of 1956 to 1971, the FBI was a full blown Gestapo organization; long gone were the days of mere blackmail, wiretapping & bogus arrest warrants, COINTELPRO is where the FBI began committing assassinations, perjury, doctored or fabricated evidence, public defamation, harassing & intimidating witnesses, infiltrations of political parties, whisper networks, withholding evidence, robberies & false imprisonment. COINTELPRO had made the FBI into the very criminals they pretended to police.
See, Hoover was buttmad that SCOTUS kept stepping on the hose that fed his political policing, turns out the First and Fourth Amendments actually meant something. Therefore, he decided to start operating fully in secret without oversight. The clandestine operations of COINTELPRO were framed as one to prevent violence & ferret out foreign Communist influences, when in actuality it mostly targeted everybody else. The majority of the people and organizations they targeted were neither violent nor affiliated with Communist Russia at all. Their targeting was so hyperbolic that they internally labelled nonviolent organizations as "hate groups." Sound familiar, yet?
Attorney Brian Glick compiled a list of five core methods used by the FBI for their COINTELPRO operations.
The first was infiltration. The goal of this was to inject themselves into the organizations they wanted to ruin, and act like lunatics from the inside to scare off potential activists looking to join and to smear existing members as glowies themselves. This included encouraging other members to commit illegal activities or trying to incite violence at protests or meetings. Cue the Simpsons clip.
"How do you do, fellow activists?"
The second was psychological warfare. By printing publications in the names of targets and publishing fake news stories through the media about those targets, they could change the perspective of any organization to make it seem extremist to outsiders and ruin a group's reputation. This came in the fashion of forged correspondence & anonymous phone calls & letters. They would disseminate false information about events, event dates, meetings & they would target a person's social group such as parents, teachers, landlords, bosses, employees as a way of disrupting activist activities. They also used a method called "Bad-Jacketing" to frame members of an organization of either being FBI plants, law enforcement informants or embezzlers of the organization.
The third was legal harassment. The FBI would help local law enforcement commit perjury by giving fabricated information to local law enforcement to give them a pretext to harass activists & make them appear criminal to the general public, leading to false arrests & wrongful imprisonment.
The fourth was illegal force. The FBI would conspire with local law enforcement to break & enter a dissident's home to conduct a search (called a black bag job), commit vandalism on a dissident's property, assault a dissident & even assassinate people for the crime of wrong-think. The aim was to intimidate either the target directly, those close to the target or to make an example for other activists in order to silence or otherwise halt activist activities. Many of these operations took on the form of illegal police raids made on false pretenses, one of which was responsible for the death of Fred Hampton, spokesman for the Black Panther party.
The fifth was to undermine public opinion. One of the main goals of COINTELPRO was to prevent a bunch of these disparate organizations with shared interests uniting together by disseminating lies between them through whisper networks, fabricated correspondence & public disinformation campaigns, such as a documentary carefully crafted to make the Black Panthers appear aggressive. The FBI worked to prevent them from getting speaking platforms in the media & overall foster distrust for activist organizations, both for the public & each other. This including things like spreading murder plots of heads of organizations by other organizations,
COINTELPRO was used to target a myriad of groups & individuals, from its stated purpose of policing Communists and Socialists, it extended to feminists, war protestors, civil rights organizations, the American Indian Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, the National States Rights party, Weather Underground, environmentalists, the National Lawyers Guild, the Young Lords, nationalists, ect.
But none seem to feel the brunt of Hoover's wrath more than the black community, be they civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, black power groups like the Black Panthers, and just black communities in general. They went to such lengths as to start a named whisper network called the "Ghetto Informant Program," where they enlisted the aid of black informants who worked in public places such as store clerks & barbers to eavesdrop on conversations between patrons of their business & report the hearsay to the FBI.
So paranoid of black people were the FBI, they "feared" what they called the "Black Messiah," someone in the black community who would unite all the different black activist groups in the U.S. to violently overthrow the government. And they say only boomers are schizo. Martin Luther King was believed to potentially be their guy, except for the fact he was nonviolent.
But above all, the main target for Hoover's wrath were the Black Panthers. J. Edgar Hoover did not care about facts nor logic when it came to the Black Panthers (or anybody, frankly) and is quoted as saying the "purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the Black Panther Party and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." One FBI agent was reprimanded by Hoover for reporting "the Panthers were primarily engaged in feeding breakfast to children," to which Hoover replied by insinuating said agent's prospects were on the line for failing to support Hoover's narrative that the Panthers were "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means.
The cherry on top of this racist sundae is that Hoover collaborated with the domestic terrorist group Ku Klux Klan, by which I mean he had an informant by the name of Gary Thomas Rowe, who gave chase after civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo when they saw she had a black passenger in her car. They fired rounds into her vehicle, killing Liuzzo. In the aftermath of Liuzzo's death, Hoover would have her slandered as a drug addicted Communist whore that abandoned her children to copulate with black men, which Hoover personally communicated to President Johnson. The autopsy for Liuzzo showed she had no drugs in her system & she had not recently had sex prior to her death.
As for FBI informant & KKK member Rowe, he was implicated in a terrorist attack known as the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, to which Hoover had ended the Federal inquiry. Local police & FBI subordinates had independently identified the four terrorists involved, in response Hoover suppressed the evidence & stated the chances of a conviction were so remote that there was no point in pursuing a conviction, & instructed his agents not to share the information they uncovered with either Federal or State prosecutors. The case was closed without any convictions pursued & the documents pertaining to the bombing were sealed by orders of Hoover. The evidence was described as "so strong that even a white Alabama jury would convict."
So how did such a clandestine operation as COINTELPRO come to an end? Much like how the MK Ultra experiments were exposed, a group of people calling themselves the "Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI" broke into an FBI building in Media, Pennsylvania while the staff were out spying on Mohammad Ali. They retrieved all the COINTELPRO files & sent them to as many media outlets as they could. None would dare to publish the information, save for the Washington Post, against the wishes of the Attorney General. Only now that the genie was officially out of the bottle did the other media outlets capitulate to pressure & corroborate the evidence with their own publications.
With that, J. Edgar Hoover announced an end to COINTELPRO. Amid a deluge of lawsuits, the Church Committee would launch an investigation into the FBI & COINTELPRO. Their report reads:
While Hoover would remain untouched by his own crimes, he would die of a heart attack in 1972 in his home in Washington.
Hoover was an evil man who did evil things to innocent people, and he turned the FBI into the American KGB. While the FBI has officially ceased COINTELPRO operations, there are claims which are not without merit that the same methods continue to be used to this day. The FBI has since had a myriad of controversies that are too far & wide to possibly be covered in the OP.
#DisbandTheFBI
