WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:05.440 On Saturday night, Donald Trump announced he intends to appoint Cash Patel as director of the FBI. 00:05.900 --> 00:11.020 The purity experts were deployed to the Sunday morning news shows to characterize the move as 00:11.020 --> 00:16.660 evidence that Trump intends to politicize the FBI and use it as a weapon against as many political 00:16.660 --> 00:21.140 opponents. The political establishment's concerns about what a Trump FBI could do 00:21.140 --> 00:25.420 mirror a lot of what we've heard from the right in recent years as they found themselves 00:25.420 --> 00:29.980 in the Bureau's crosshairs. But almost all of these complaints and warnings have operated under 00:29.980 --> 00:36.320 the assumption that with maybe the exception of a few bad episodes in the 1960s, the FBI has long 00:36.320 --> 00:41.180 been an essential crime fighting force that has only recently become, or threatens to become, 00:41.540 --> 00:46.000 corrupted by politics. In truth, the FBI has always been used as a weapon against 00:46.000 --> 00:50.580 political movements and rivals of the established political class. That's the reason it was 00:50.580 --> 00:56.700 created. At the end of the 1800s, left-wing anarchists were attacking heads of state all across Europe. 00:57.400 --> 01:02.620 In a few short years, the King of Italy, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress of Austria, 01:02.920 --> 01:08.120 and the President of France were all assassinated by anarchists. While no communist or anarchist 01:08.120 --> 01:12.780 movement had yet to take over a country, the tenacity of these activists and revolutionaries 01:12.780 --> 01:18.160 was seriously concerning those in power in the United States. Then, in 1901, President William 01:18.160 --> 01:22.940 McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist while attending a meet and greet in Buffalo, New York, 01:22.940 --> 01:28.360 which brought his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, into office. It was President Roosevelt who tapped 01:28.360 --> 01:34.000 his attorney general, Charles Bonaparte, the grand-nephew of Napoleon, to create the FBI. The 01:34.000 --> 01:39.200 AG was required by law to get congressional approval before creating this new investigative 01:39.200 --> 01:44.220 service of special agents within the Department of Justice. In the spring of 1908, Bonaparte 01:44.220 --> 01:49.300 officially requested the money and authority to create the FBI. Congress came back with an 01:49.300 --> 01:54.500 emphatic no. Members of the House saw through the innocuous language of the request and figured 01:54.500 --> 01:59.440 out exactly what the president and AG were doing, creating a secret police force that was 01:59.440 --> 02:04.420 answerable only to them. House Democrats like Joseph Swagger and John J. Fitzgerald 02:04.420 --> 02:09.760 and Republicans like Walter I. Smith and George Waldo all loudly condemned the proposal, 02:09.760 --> 02:14.880 saying it called for a system of espionage comparable to the Tsar's secret police in Russia 02:14.880 --> 02:19.460 that stood in stark contrast to the very principles at the heart of the American system. 02:19.840 --> 02:25.720 Congress explicitly forbade the AG from creating this new bureau. So what did Bonaparte do? He 02:25.720 --> 02:30.060 waited for Congress to break for the summer and then went ahead and created the FBI anyway. 02:30.480 --> 02:34.380 Congress was only notified about the new federal police force half a year later 02:34.380 --> 02:38.340 when Bonaparte included a quick throwaway line at the end of his annual report, 02:38.900 --> 02:43.920 saying, quote, it became necessary for the department to organize a small force of special 02:43.920 --> 02:49.660 agents of its own. So the FBI was not created in response to out-of-control crime. Its creation 02:49.660 --> 02:54.820 was a crime. Immediately the bureau was unleashed on anyone and everyone who was perceived as a 02:54.820 --> 02:59.960 threat to those in power. That started with left-wing anarchists, but quickly expanded to 02:59.960 --> 03:04.740 include many anti-war activists as President Wilson pulled the country into World War One. 03:04.740 --> 03:11.100 From the outset, the FBI operated primarily as a domestic intelligence agency, recruiting spies 03:11.100 --> 03:15.940 within groups they were targeting and breaking into homes and offices, intercepting mail, 03:16.360 --> 03:21.060 and tapping the phones of anyone they considered a threat. As the years wore on, like most other 03:21.060 --> 03:25.320 executive agencies, the bureau evolved away from serving the direct interests of whoever 03:25.320 --> 03:30.180 happened to sit in the Oval Office to instead serve its own interest and the interest of the 03:30.180 --> 03:36.360 broader, entrenched, permanent power structure in Washington. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the FBI 03:36.360 --> 03:41.840 conducted covert operations aimed at inciting violence between domestic groups, breaking up 03:41.840 --> 03:47.360 political organizations it disapproved of, and perhaps most famously, collecting blackmail on 03:47.360 --> 03:52.140 Martin Luther King Jr. that they then tried to use to drive him to commit suicide. Although 03:52.140 --> 03:56.960 today's FBI acknowledges and publicly disavows these past activities, they are still 03:56.960 --> 04:01.140 carrying out egregious operations that always seem to benefit the political class. 04:01.460 --> 04:05.060 The bureau has taken up a kind of sting operation where, over and over again, 04:05.480 --> 04:10.800 agents find isolated, gullible, often mentally handicapped young men, pretend to be political 04:10.800 --> 04:15.700 radicals or higher-ups in a terrorist organization, and then convince the young men to plan and 04:15.700 --> 04:20.920 carry out a terrorist attack with FBI funds and resources. Agents then step in at the end 04:20.920 --> 04:25.320 and act like they heroically stopped a real plot. The FBI did this relentlessly with 04:25.320 --> 04:30.640 young Muslim men after 9-11. The arrests helped prolong the perception that the global war and 04:30.640 --> 04:35.660 terror and extreme measures like the Patriot Act were necessary. In recent years, the FBI has 04:35.660 --> 04:40.280 conducted a number of similar schemes with right-wing groups, advancing the establishment's 04:40.280 --> 04:45.180 narrative that Donald Trump is radicalizing uneducated middle Americans and turning them 04:45.180 --> 04:49.420 into violent insurrectionists. And then there are, of course, all the ways the FBI 04:49.420 --> 04:54.720 directly tried to undermine and hinder Trump's first term. Right-wingers are correctly 04:54.720 --> 05:00.040 deriding the establishment for panicking about Trump's FBI doing to them what they have tried 05:00.040 --> 05:06.080 to do to him. But many, on both sides, go wrong when they present the bureau as only recently, 05:06.600 --> 05:09.960 or imminently, being corrupted into serving the interests of those in power. 05:10.580 --> 05:12.240 That's been its role since the beginning.