Tag Archives: J. Edgar Hoover

This Isn’t A New Strategy

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The deep state has been around for a while. I just finished reading The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe by Donald H. Wolfe. I was genuinely shocked by some of the behavior of J. Edgar Hoover, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and a lot of other people. J. Edgar Hoover consistently broke laws in his surveillance of American citizens and was never held accountable. The activities of some of our leading political figures of the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s were routinely kept hidden from the public with the cooperation of the media. There really isn’t anything new under the sun.

As shocking as the indictment of President Trump is, that is a political trick that has been done before in a presidential campaign.

On Monday, The Federalist reminded us:

But in evaluating whether Bragg’s charges against Trump are politically motivated, it’s worth remembering that Trump is the second major GOP presidential candidate in less than a decade that has been indicted by a local Democratic district attorney. And in that case, involving former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the prosecution was redolent of corruption and naked attempts to harm Perry’s national political ambitions.

In 2014, Perry was indicted on two felony charges. The first charge was abuse of official capacity, and the second was coercion of a public servant. Perry’s crime was using the veto power granted to him in the Texas Constitution.

What happened was this: Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democrat, was convicted of drunk driving and incarcerated. Working from the Travis County DA’s office, Lehmberg managed the state public integrity unit, a legal office responsible for rooting out public corruption. After she refused to resign her position following a fair bit of criticism over the fact that a person in charge of rooting out public corruption should not be known for being convicted of a crime, Perry threatened to veto the public integrity unit’s $7.5 million budget and eventually did veto the budget.

So the Travis County DA’s office, the very same office where Lehmberg worked, convened a grand jury and indicted Perry. It wasn’t difficult; aside from the old saying that prosecutors could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, Travis County is where “the People’s Republic of Austin” is located. It’s a notoriously liberal enclave where it is easy to find a jury politically hostile to Perry, who was an otherwise popular three-term GOP governor.

The outcome was predictable:

As for the charges against Perry, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals eventually dismissed the charges against Perry in a 6-2 ruling. The abuse of official capacity charge was dismissed on the grounds that it violated the separation of powers in the state constitution. It was always the case that Perry had wide latitude and authority to issue a veto in this instance. “The governor’s power to exercise a veto may not be circumscribed by the Legislature, by the courts, or by district attorneys,” noted the ruling by Judge Sharon Keller of the Court of Criminal Appeals.

The second charge, coercion of a public official, was dismissed on the grounds that it was a violation of the First Amendment to say the governor could not threaten to lawfully wield power on the grounds he was intimidating other public officials.

Unless they are stopped, the Democrat party will continue with using the court system to interfere in elections.

Reining In The FBI

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This is a post by a guest author, R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D.

Authoritarian governments that limit people’s freedom all have police forces that ensure the compliance of their citizens and keep them in power.  The Romans had the Pretorian Guard, the Nazi’s the Gestapo, and the Soviet Union the KGB.  Alarmingly, it is increasingly apparent that the FBI has morphed into an enforcement arm of the Democrat party/Biden administration.   The Founding Fathers, wisely, did not authorized a federal law enforcement agency in the Constitution.   Let’s examine how we got in this situation and what we can do to reverse it.

        The FBI was originally established in 1908 as a small group (30) of special “investigators” to assist the Department of Justice in prosecuting federal crimes that involved crossing state lines.  As all government agencies do, the bureau not only grew in size but greatly expanded their authority and redefined their role over the years.   By the early 1920’s they began gathering and keeping information on private citizens who were not actually charged with crimes other than their political ideology was unacceptable to the government.   The FBI’s most renowned director J. Edgar Hoover, began keeping information that eventually reached over 450,000 files on people suspected of communist leanings.  A good proportion of these people were deported if they were not citizens.  Few were ever actually charged or given the opportunity to defend themselves in court.  In the 1950s the FBI began gathering similar files on homosexuals in the government and later even non-government employees.  In the 1960s the focus was on civil rights sympathizers and leaders such as the Reverend  M.L.King.   Politicians feared what might be in the FBI files on them.  In the course of gathering this illicit information, the FBI frequently used illegal wire-tapping and abused their subpoena and search authority.   Recently, they issued a subpoena to the newspaper USA Today requiring them to turn over a list of all people who logged in to read a specific article on their website.   

There are many other recent example of the weaponization of the FBI especially as related to President Donald Trump and his associates including the impeachment hoaxes, charging General Flynn, and most recently the totally unjustified and unprecedented  raid on Mar-a Lago.    One of the worst instances was when the FBI in order to protect the identity of one of their informers, allowed false witness testimony at a trial that resulted in four men receiving life sentences.  Two served over 30 years and two died in prison.  A court eventually awarded the victims/families over $100 million in damages.  Still trust the FBI?

So what do we do about it?   Here are my recommendations: (1) Repeal the Patriot Act that greatly expanded the authority of the FBI; (2) Terminate the law enforcement authority of the FBI.  All subpoenas, warrants, searches should be handled by the local Sheriff’s departments.   Sheriffs are the only elected law enforcement officials and therefore accountable directly for their actions to the people. (3)  An elected state official or panel should be given the authority to monitor all FBI activities in their state and report to the state legislature.  (4) It should no longer be a crime to “lie” to the FBI.  This has been abused to entrap people and is a violation of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. 

There may be other effective actions, but this would be a good start.

How To Navigate The Media Spin

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The Epoch Times posted an article yesterday about the report of the Justice Department Inspector General. The report found that the FBI failed to document facts correctly in 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications that were reviewed. A rational person would take that as an indication that all was not well at the FBI and that Americans were being unlawfully surveilled. However, the mainstream media did not necessarily see it that way.

Eli Lake posted the following comments at Bloomberg News:

In the twisted politics of the Trump Era, some of bureau’s defenders might actually view this report as good news: It shows that the investigation of the Trump campaign was not necessarily politically motivated. The bureau made the same kinds of mistakes with suspects who were not connected to the Trump campaign.

That’s hardly reassuring — and the malpractice that the report uncovers is a much larger problem than the FBI and its defenders may wish to admit. So far, the response to Horowitz’s December report has been a series of administrative reforms, such as a requirement that FBI field offices preserve their “Woods files” and a mandate for new FISA training for FBI lawyers and agents. That’s all well and good. But one need not go back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover to see that the bureau has been careless in its monitoring of U.S. citizens.

The Woods procedures were issued in 2001 after Congress obtained a memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism division detailing surveillance abuse in the late 1990s. One target’s cell phone remained tapped after he gave it up and the number was reassigned to a different person. Another FBI field office videotaped a meeting, despite a clear prohibition on that technique in its FISA warrant. In 2003, an interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded that the 2001 memo showed “the FBI was experiencing more systemic problems related to the implementation of FISA orders” than a problem with the surveillance law itself.

Very little has changed in the intervening 17 years. That’s why it’s foolish to expect new and better procedures will work this time. A better approach would be an aggressive policy to prosecute FBI agents and lawyers who submit falsehoods to the surveillance court. The best way to prevent future violations is to severely punish those who commit them in the present.

Scott Johnson posted an article today at Power Line Blog that included the following quote (follow the link to the article for the audio of the answer to the question):

The New York Times is illustrative of “the twisted politics of the Trump era.” Daniel Chaitin covers the Times angle in his Examiner article “‘Biased and out of control’: Devin Nunes rips New York Times reporting on FISA memo.” Chaitin reports on Rep. Devin Nunes’s interview with Larry O’Connor:

Radio host Larry O’Connor read a passage from the [Times’s] report [on the Horowitz memo] to Nunes during the Examining Politics podcast on Tuesday. It said DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report “helps the FBI politically because it undercuts the narrative among President Trump and his supporters that the bureau cut corners to surveil the adviser, Carter Page, as part of a politically motivated conspiracy.”

“So, the good news for the FBI is that they trampled on people’s rights all over the place, not just people who worked with Donald Trump’s campaign,” O’Connor said. “Is that the takeaway we should have here congressman?”

I agree with Eli Lake–severe punishment for those guilty of illegal spying on American citizens is the only way to prevent future abuse by the FBI.

 

Prepare The Popcorn

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Washington is nothing if not leaky. The leaks are starting to come out about the Inspector General’s report. The report will be scrutinized and edited before any (or all) of it is released to the public in September, so we really don’t know what we will be allowed to see. It seems to me that if (if?) there is corruption in our government that the American people are entitled to know about it, but that’s just naivete`.

Ed Morrissey posted an article at Hot Air today giving his take on the subject.

The article reports:

If RealClearInvestigations’ sources accurately describe Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ upcoming report, it’s no wonder Donald Trump fired James Comey. According to two sources reportedly briefed on the upcoming Horowitz report, the former FBI director repeatedly lied about not targeting Trump in his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Comey also had what amounted to a spy in the White House, raising the specter of J. Edgar Hoover all over again:

Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.

Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.

In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.

Who authorized placing spies inside the White House? Wouldn’t that come under the definition of treason–spying on the American government? If the spies were reporting back to James Comey, who was James Comey reporting back to?

Stay tuned.

J. Edgar Brennan

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For those of you too young to remember some of the antics of J. Edgar Hoover as Director of the FBI. Some of the actions of the FBI and intelligence community under President Obama are reminiscent of those actions.

The website biography includes the following about J. Edgar Hoover:

During the Cold War, Hoover intensified his personal anti-Communist, anti-subversive stance and increased the FBI’s surveillance activities. Frustrated over limitations placed on the Justice Department’s investigative capabilities, he created the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. The group conducted a series of covert, and oftentimes illegal, investigations designed to discredit or disrupt radical political organizations. Initially, Hoover ordered background checks on government employees to prevent foreign agents from infiltrating the government. Later, COINTELPRO went after any organization Hoover considered subversive, including the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

Hoover also used COINTELPRO’s operations to conduct his own personal vendettas against political adversaries in the name of national security. Labeling Martin Luther King “the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation,” Hoover ordered around-the-clock surveillance on King, hoping to find evidence of Communist influence or sexual deviance. Using illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches, Hoover gathered a large file of what he considered damning evidence against King. 

In 1971, COINTELPRO’s tactics were revealed to the public, showing that the agency’s methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planted evidence and false rumors leaked on suspected groups and individuals. Despite the harsh criticism Hoover and the Bureau received, he remained its director until his death on May 2, 1972, at the age of 77.

Does any of this sound familiar?

In December 2014, The Atlantic posted an article titled, “A Brief History of the CIA’s Unpunished Spying on the Senate.” Under that title is written, “President Obama’s choice to lead the intelligence agency has undermined core checks and balances with impunity.” Those are not encouraging words.

Below are some excerpts from The Atlantic article:

Late last week, that internal “accountability board” announced the results of its review. If you’ve followed the impunity with which the CIA has broken U.S. laws throughout its history, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that no one is going to be “dealt with very harshly” after all. “A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode,” The New York Times reports. “The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan.”

…Brennan and the CIA have behaved indefensibly. But substantial blame belongs to the overseers who’ve permitted them to do so with impunity, including figures in the Obama administration right up to the president and Senate intelligence committee members who, for all their bluster, have yet to react to CIA misbehavior in a way that actually disincentivizes similar malfeasance in the future. President Obama should fire John Brennan, as has previously been suggested by Senator Mark Udall, Trevor Timm, Dan Froomkin, and Andrew Sullivan. And the Senate intelligence committee should act toward the CIA like their predecessors on the Church Committee. Instead, the CIA is asked to investigate its own malfeasance and issue reports suggesting what, if anything, should be done.

The article includes a quote from The New York Times:

Mr. Brennan has enraged senators by refusing to answer questions posed by the Intelligence Committee about who at the C.I.A. authorized the computer intrusion. Doing so, he said, could compromise the accountability board’s investigation.

“What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, said in an interview last week. “They haven’t answered those basic questions.”

The article concludes:

Senator Levin, you’re a member of a coequal branch. You’ve flagged outrageous behavior among those you’re charged with overseeing. What are you going to do about it?

Obviously nothing was done about it. John Brennan remained the head of the CIA until January 2017. He was not retained as the CIA Director when President Trump took power.

We are at a crossroads. This article indicates that the misuse of government spy agencies has been going on for a long time. The people responsible have never been held accountable. We have a choice–we can hold the people responsible for the misuse of spy agencies accountable or we can see the illegal spying on political enemies continue. What has been done to President Trump and some of the people around him could be done to any American if the people responsible are not held accountable. Was it really necessary to roust an unarmed senior citizen and his deaf wife out of bed with a S.W.A.T. team in the middle of the night when he was charged with lying? Unfortunately this could be the future of America.

One Of The Main Alligators In The Swamp

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Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about Rod Rosenstein and his position in the swamp that is Washington, D.C.

The article reports:

Mr. Rosenstein, one of the most powerful men in the Department of Justice, threatened to investigate members of Congress and their staff if Congress continued to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to oversee the increasingly rogue federal department.

Move over J. Edgar Hoover. Rod Rosenstein has officially taken your place as the most power-drunk, nefarious, crooked blight on justice to ever preside in the Department of “justice.”

The popularity of Congress may be in the toilet, but self-dealing rogue prosecutors with unlimited power to punish political opponents and put people in jail are so far down the toilet they are fertilizing daisies in Denmark.

In a statement to Fox News, a DOJ official denied that Mr. Rosenstein threatened Congress in a bizarre statement — that confirmed Mr. Rosenstein did precisely that.

The Deputy Attorney General was making the point — after being threatened with contempt — that as an American citizen charged with the offense of contempt of Congress, he would have the right to defend himself, including requesting production of relevant emails and text messages and calling them as witnesses to demonstrate that their allegations are false,” the official said.

After admitting Mr. Rosenstein threatened Congress for overseeing his department, the DOJ official went on to reiterate that the threat remains.

Congress is assigned the job of overseeing the Department of Justice. Mr. Rosenstein’s thuggery is totally unacceptable.

The article points out the difference between Rod Rosenstein and Eric Holder, neither of which were particularly interested in following the U.S. Constitution:

Ex-Attorney General Eric Holder was an ideological crusader and political thug, hell-bent on maximizing the power of the president for whom he worked. Mr. Holder was never elected anything, but he was working for a guy who did get elected. Twice.

Mr. Rosenstein is a thousand times worse and so much more dangerous. He never got elected anything — and he is blatantly giving the middle finger to anyone elected by the people to oversee him and his increasingly lawless department.

Mr. Rosenstein believes he is — literally — above the law. He is answerable to no one. Legal accountability is beneath him. The public be damned.

Firing Mr. Rosenstein would be a step toward draining the swamp. Hopefully that step will be taken in the near future.

The Problem With The FISA Warrants On Members Of The Trump Campaign

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Breitbart today posted a partial transcript of a discussion between FOX News host Martha MacCallum and Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) that occurred last night. The discussion was related to items discussed in a congressional hearing that was held yesterday.

Here is the that transcript:

MACCALLUM: Here now, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert. Good to see you this evening, sir. Thank you very much for being here.

GOHMERT: Glad to see you. Those are the scene, by the after my colleague across the aisle said that he admitted her nary word about Russian influence. I went ahead and said, I’m glad he brought it up basically because we need to talk about the Russian collusion in try to get uranium and the killing of that story. So, we brought up the Russian collusion with the Clinton State Department. So, anyway —

MACCALLUM: While I’m a student, that is usual in these environments. There were two different agendas that were in deeply at work today in the hearing room. But I’m —

GOHMERT: Well, Martha, we really wanted to get to the truth.

MACCALLUM: Well, want to know why you asked for those specific names. Do you believe that the people that you named in that hearing today need to be removed from the investigation or from the FBI? Why did you pick their names?

GOHMERT: Well, this is the only place I have to ask the FBI director if he knows of anything like that. There are indications that there will be other issues dropped in the future, and I wanted to know his position. So, all I can say is stay tuned.

MACCALLUM: So, you have reason to believe that the individuals that you named in there today may be added to the list of Peter Strzok and Bruce Ohr? They maybe removed?

GOHMERT: Martha, you know, before I was a judge and a chief justice, I tried lawsuits and this is the opening stage of where you gather information, and that’s the way I took it. I wanted to know what McCabe knew before we take any other steps. So, I’ll be glad to talk to you when we have other information.

MACCALLUM: Well, we’ll look forward to that. You know, the underlying umbrella question here, though, is whether or not the FBI and the DOJ were involved in perpetuating the initial — the initiation, I should say of this dossier. And that’s the big question about why Bruce Ohr was meeting with Christopher Steele and was also meeting with Fusion GPS Glenn Simpson?

GOHMERT: Oh, it’s outrageous. And we still need to know, and I know Ron Desantis did a great job, you know, in pointing out, we need to know, if you took a politically contrived and paid for dossier that ended up being totally false, and you use that as a basis to go to the foreign intelligence surveillance court and get a warrant to survey all members of the opposition presidential election team. If that’s the case, then the FBI has been co-opted and corrupted beyond perhaps even the sorriest days of the FBI’s time when J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping Martin Luther King.

MACCALLUM: Congressman Louie Gohmert, thank you very much, sir. Good to see you tonight.

GOHMERT: Thank you, Martha, more to come.

The misuse of FISA to spy on an opposing political campaign is exactly what the opponents of the Patriot Act feared. The FBI and Justice Department were so totally politicized under the Obama Administration that the entire upper leadership may need to be fired. That is unfortunate, but it shows the danger our republic would have been in if Hillary Clinton had been elected–the politicization of these departments would have continued unchecked, and we would essentially be living in a country where holding political views not in agreement with those in power would be criminalized.

Some Historical Perspective On This Unlawful Combatant Thing

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The information below is taken from the FBI website detailing famous cases and criminals:

Shortly after midnight on the morning of June 13, 1942, four men landed on a beach near Amagansett, Long Island, New York from a German submarine, clad in German uniforms and bringing ashore enough explosives, primers, and incendiaries to support an expected two-year career in the sabotage of American defense-related production. On June 17, 1942, a similar group landed on Ponte Vedra Beach, near Jacksonville, Florida, equipped for a similar career in industrial disruption.

The purpose of the invasions was to strike a major blow for Germany by bringing the violence of war to our home ground through destruction of America’s ability to manufacture vital equipment and supplies and transport them to the battlegrounds of Europe; to strike fear into the American civilian population; and to diminish the resolve of the United States to overcome our enemies.

By June 27, 1942, all eight saboteurs had been arrested without having accomplished one act of destruction. Tried before a military commission, they were found guilty. One was sentenced to life imprisonment, another to 30vyears, and six received the death penalty, which was carried out within a few days.

Two of these men were American citizens–Ernest Peter Burger had become a naturalized American in 1933 and Herbert Hans Haupt had entered the United States as a child, gaining citizenship when his father was naturalized in 1930.

The FBI website reports:

All eight were found guilty and sentenced to death. Attorney General Biddle and J. Edgar Hoover appealed to President Roosevelt to commute the sentences of Dasch and Burger. Dasch then received a 30-year sentence, and Burger received a life sentence, both to be served in a federal penitentiary. The remaining six were executed at the District of Columbia Jail on August 8, 1942.

Why is the person who bombed the Boston Marathon being treated differently than these men?

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