What is the FBI?

What is ___?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was created on July 26, 1908, with the mission to conduct investigations for the Department of Justice. It was created after the assassination of President McKinley from 28-year-old Ohioan anarchist Leon Czolgosz. President Teddy Roosevelt took over in 1901 with many progressive ideas in mind. A believer in the law and the enforcement of it, his reform-driven leadership would lead to the formation of the FBI.

It was not until 1906, however, that this new government bureau would be set into motion. President Roosevelt would appoint Charles Bonaparte as his second Attorney General. Being likeminded, they wanted to come up with a better way to create stronger, more efficient policing across the large nation. It was soon after Bonaparte became the nation’s top lawman that he realized his mission to tackle the rising crime and corruption.

However, Bonaparte had very little control over his investigations as he constantly had to borrow agents that reported not to the Attorney General, but rather the Secret Service. Frustrated, Bonaparte made his problem known to Congress who was wondering why he kept renting out Secret Service investigators. This was a huge deal because there was no specific provision in the law for renting out Secret Service investigators and Congress would go on to ban the loaning of Secret Service operatives in May 1908 to any federal department. This was all part of a complicated, political showdown with Congress where President Roosevelt was trying for a huge executive power grab.  

Nevertheless, with Roosevelt’s blessing, Bonaparte set on quietly hiring nine of the Secret Service agents he had previously borrowed in late June, bringing them alongside another 25 of his own.

The FBI remained unnamed until March 16, 1909, when Bonaparte’s successor, Attorney General George W. Wickersham decided to call it the ‘Bureau of Investigation.’

The first 15 years, this bureau wasn’t strong enough to withstand what fbi.gov calls “the sometimes corrupting influence of patronage politics on hiring, promotions, and transfers.” As the government agency continued to grow, it continued reaching into other areas of interests—not just law enforcement disciplines but also national security and intelligence arenas. By 1915, Congress had warmed up to this new “branch of government” and increased the Bureau’s personnel from its original 34 to around 360 special agents and support personnel.

As World War I would progress, German’s became more and more hostile to the U.S. Due to this, Congress declared war on April 6, 1917, and quickly passed the Espionage Act and later the Sabotage Act and putting the Bureau of Investigation into the counter-spy business. The Bureau also began rounding up thousands of Army deserters (except only a handful of them actually were draft dodgers) and policing millions of Germans in the U.S. that were not American citizens—“enemy aliens” as they were called. They would also enforce a variety of other war-related crimes.

After the war, the “Red Scare” became the hot new problem in the U.S. The extremely problematic Justice Department lawyer J. Edgar Hoover led a massive investigation for detailed information and intelligence on radicals and their activities. This would go down in history as the “Palmer Raids” after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer who was responding, or more accurately, reacting to the “Red Scare.” The Bureau received heavy criticism for its infringements on the civil liberties of thousands of people due to Hoover’s poor planning and execution, where most of the victims were arrested without a warrant, and the majority ended up being released either before or after their prosecution. Alas, when it comes to infringing on people’s liberties, the Bureau was only getting started.

Hoover was eventually selected in 1924 to clean up the disgraced agency after a round of additional scandals and the forced resignation of Attorney General Harry Daughterty who was acquitted of charges to defraud the United States Government in the Teapot Dome Scandal.

The FBI would get its current name in 1935 and Hoover would remain the director of the bureaucratic agency until his death in 1972. It was in the ‘70s that things really started going downhill for the FBI. In 1971, there was a theft of internal documents from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania from a group of anti-Vietnam war activists that revealed the Bureau had been conducting a massive, top secret surveillance program. Under direction of Hoover, the FBI had been unconstitutionally spying on the very people they claim to protect.

The FBI lost further credibility in the mid-1970s with the post-Watergate Congressional investigations. In both this instance and in the 1971 theft, it was shown that the FBI had invested a growing part of its budget and staff for political, rather than enforcement, purposes. According to trac.syr.edu “The FBI's Counter Intelligence Program — COINTEL — began as an effort to undermine the Communist Party. The Ku Klux Klan, black political activists such as Martin Luther King, student protesters against the Vietnam War and even some early leaders in the women's liberation movement ultimately were added as COINTEL projects.”

Hoover was also a racist, yet the FBI headquarters are named after him. He targeted Martin Luther King Jr. because of his hatred for Black people, writing him a letter telling King to commit suicide as well as monitoring him unconstitutionally.

During President Clinton’s term in office, the work of FBI directors Clarence Kelley and Judge William Webster, who tried to clean up the bureau, went out the window thanks to new problems like the 11 day siege at Ruby Ridge in 1992 that resulted in three human fatalities and the Waco siege (aka the Waco massacre) in 1993 carried out by the U.S. federal government, Texas state law enforcement, and the U.S. military.

In 1996 during the Atlanta Olympics, the FBI further showed off their incompetency by arresting a man who saved a bunch of people from a pipe bomb and ruined his life through the media, making him look like the bomber.

Today, President of the Convention of States grassroots movement Mark Meckler has claimed that many former FBI agents have come to him explaining that the FBI has become a corrupt political movement, despite what other media and government officials say. The reality is the bureau has always been incompetent, corrupt, and politically motivated, and its checkered past shows this. Under Hoover, the Bureau, despite violating the law and Constitution, was used to punish his enemies. Not to mention the constant attempts to keep Trump from getting into office, not just with Mar-a-Lago, but they also admitted to spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Yet, weirdly, people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, and Hunter Biden have not received such harsh enforcement from this government bureau, and this is not saying the FBI needs to go harder on these people, this is saying they need to be balanced, because they can say that they aren’t political in what they do, but their actions seem to tell a different story.  

As Meckler explained in his show The BattleCry, “If you look at the FBI in the modern era—if you look at it in the Trump-era, the FBI is responsible for illegal FISA warrants to lying to the FISA Courts so they could ruin Carter Page’s life, to get inside the Trump campaign. They are responsible for the Mueller investigation, which turned out to be completely bogus. Russia-gate which is all bogus…. The Stop the Steal dossier, all bogus. All of this stuff…. This is an entirely corrupt and politicized organization. This is an organization that when they discovered Hillary Clinton was using a private email server in her own residence which was in no way secure for top secret communications, declared such to be a breaking of the law and did nothing about it.”  

Furthermore, under current Attorney General Merrick Garland, the FBI has chosen to investigate concerned parents as domestic terrorists for appearing at schoolboard meetings and speaking on their concerns of what government schools are teaching their kids. Not to mention the amount of unconstitutional spying they have admitted to doing over recent years, and thanks to people like Edward Snowden, and that’s not ending anytime soon if we don’t speak up. In March of this year, the FBI signed a contract worth as much as $27 million for 5,000 licenses to use Babel X, a software by Babel Street that allows users to search social media. The agency specifically reported they would “gather information” from “Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Deep/Dark Web, VK and Telegram.”

Due to the FBI’s incompetency and corruption that has led Americans to be, in my opinion, less safe, not more, people are signing a petition to end the Bureau once and for all, and if you would like to as well, you can click here.