On Saturday night, Donald Trump announced he intends to appoint Cash Patel as director of the FBI.
The purity experts were deployed to the Sunday morning news shows to characterize the move as
evidence that Trump intends to politicize the FBI and use it as a weapon against as many political
opponents. The political establishment's concerns about what a Trump FBI could do
mirror a lot of what we've heard from the right in recent years as they found themselves
in the Bureau's crosshairs. But almost all of these complaints and warnings have operated under
the assumption that with maybe the exception of a few bad episodes in the 1960s, the FBI has long
been an essential crime fighting force that has only recently become, or threatens to become,
corrupted by politics. In truth, the FBI has always been used as a weapon against
political movements and rivals of the established political class. That's the reason it was
created. At the end of the 1800s, left-wing anarchists were attacking heads of state all across Europe.
In a few short years, the King of Italy, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress of Austria,
and the President of France were all assassinated by anarchists. While no communist or anarchist
movement had yet to take over a country, the tenacity of these activists and revolutionaries
was seriously concerning those in power in the United States. Then, in 1901, President William
McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist while attending a meet and greet in Buffalo, New York,
which brought his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, into office. It was President Roosevelt who tapped
his attorney general, Charles Bonaparte, the grand-nephew of Napoleon, to create the FBI. The
AG was required by law to get congressional approval before creating this new investigative
service of special agents within the Department of Justice. In the spring of 1908, Bonaparte
officially requested the money and authority to create the FBI. Congress came back with an
emphatic no. Members of the House saw through the innocuous language of the request and figured
out exactly what the president and AG were doing, creating a secret police force that was
answerable only to them. House Democrats like Joseph Swagger and John J. Fitzgerald
and Republicans like Walter I. Smith and George Waldo all loudly condemned the proposal,
saying it called for a system of espionage comparable to the Tsar's secret police in Russia
that stood in stark contrast to the very principles at the heart of the American system.
Congress explicitly forbade the AG from creating this new bureau. So what did Bonaparte do? He
waited for Congress to break for the summer and then went ahead and created the FBI anyway.
Congress was only notified about the new federal police force half a year later
when Bonaparte included a quick throwaway line at the end of his annual report,
saying, quote, it became necessary for the department to organize a small force of special
agents of its own. So the FBI was not created in response to out-of-control crime. Its creation
was a crime. Immediately the bureau was unleashed on anyone and everyone who was perceived as a
threat to those in power. That started with left-wing anarchists, but quickly expanded to
include many anti-war activists as President Wilson pulled the country into World War One.
From the outset, the FBI operated primarily as a domestic intelligence agency, recruiting spies
within groups they were targeting and breaking into homes and offices, intercepting mail,
and tapping the phones of anyone they considered a threat. As the years wore on, like most other
executive agencies, the bureau evolved away from serving the direct interests of whoever
happened to sit in the Oval Office to instead serve its own interest and the interest of the
broader, entrenched, permanent power structure in Washington. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the FBI
conducted covert operations aimed at inciting violence between domestic groups, breaking up
political organizations it disapproved of, and perhaps most famously, collecting blackmail on
Martin Luther King Jr. that they then tried to use to drive him to commit suicide. Although
today's FBI acknowledges and publicly disavows these past activities, they are still
carrying out egregious operations that always seem to benefit the political class.
The bureau has taken up a kind of sting operation where, over and over again,
agents find isolated, gullible, often mentally handicapped young men, pretend to be political
radicals or higher-ups in a terrorist organization, and then convince the young men to plan and
carry out a terrorist attack with FBI funds and resources. Agents then step in at the end
and act like they heroically stopped a real plot. The FBI did this relentlessly with
young Muslim men after 9-11. The arrests helped prolong the perception that the global war and
terror and extreme measures like the Patriot Act were necessary. In recent years, the FBI has
conducted a number of similar schemes with right-wing groups, advancing the establishment's
narrative that Donald Trump is radicalizing uneducated middle Americans and turning them
into violent insurrectionists. And then there are, of course, all the ways the FBI
directly tried to undermine and hinder Trump's first term. Right-wingers are correctly
deriding the establishment for panicking about Trump's FBI doing to them what they have tried
to do to him. But many, on both sides, go wrong when they present the bureau as only recently,
or imminently, being corrupted into serving the interests of those in power.
That's been its role since the beginning.