End the FBI blackmail

AP reported, “Former Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum is on trial in federal court on charges of corruption and lying to the FBI, facing a potentially long prison sentence if convicted of multiple wire fraud counts and conspiracy.”

Paragraph 4 said, “Prosecutors also say Gillum lied about his interactions with undercover FBI agents posing as developers who paid for a 2016 trip he and his brother took to New York, which included a ticket to the hit Broadway show Hamilton. Gillum is accused of falsely telling the FBI later that he never received anything from these undercover ‘developers’ and that his brother provided the Broadway ticket.

2016?

The FBI created a sting on a politician and held off prosecution for 7 years. Not only that but the FBI lied to him and then charged him with lying to the FBI. What a piece of blackmail the FBI would have held over a governor — if Gillum had been elected.

In this case, the FBI had evidence of what it now calls a crime in 2018 when Gillum almost became governor. No bust was made. The FBI — which has the ability to leak like a colander — said nothing to the press.

Imagine what power the bureau would have had in Florida if it could hold this over the head of a governor. Maybe it does. Who knows what dirt the FBI has in its files? The FBI tried to get Martin Luther King to kill himself once the bureau learned of his illicit affairs.

FDR created the FBI in 1935 from a previous Bureau of Investigation created when his cousin Teddy was president in 1908. From the beginning, its director J. Edgar Hoover manipulated the press like the Silly Putty the Fourth Estate devolved into.

Various radio and TV shows over the years billed as being from the files of the FBI have promoted the agency as a collection of men (and now women) dedicated to enforcing the law and protecting honest citizens. I call it Efrem Zimbalism.

The reality is far from that. Long after Prohibition ended, the mafia thrived under Hoover, who denied the existence of the Cosa Nostra. But the FBI kept files on Elvis, Mickey Dolenz and the Kingsmen, a garage band.

Classic Rock reported last August, “In the winter of 1963, a team of FBI agents spent their days hunched over portable record players, struggling to decode a message that threatened the morality of America’s youth.

“It wasn’t from the Russians or Castro, but a band of Portland teenagers called the Kingsmen. And the song was Louie Louie.

“‘J. Edgar Hoover felt we were corrupting the moral fiber of America’s youth,’ Mike Mitchell, guitarist and founding member of The Kingsmen, told me in 2016. ‘The FBI guys came to our shows, and they’d stand next to the speakers to see if we were singing anything off-color. It was a different time.’

“‘Louie Louie was kept out of the Number One spot on the charts by the Singing Nun,’ Kingsmen keyboardist Don Gallucci told me with a laugh. ‘That ought to tell you the mentality of the country back then. I thought, ‘Gee, I know the lyrics. What’s the deal?’ It never occurred to me how repressed teenagers were sexually. They were hearing all this stuff in the song. The genie was getting out of the bottle.’

“The world’s most infamous party song jumped out of the bottle in 1956. Penned by L.A. songwriter Richard Berry, the sailor’s lament had the singer pouring out his lovelorn heart to a bartender, Louie, over the girl he left across the ocean. The lyric’s sweet Calypso air includes couplets like ‘On the ship I dream she there / I smell the rose in her hair.’”

Louie Louie and the Singing Nun were chart-toppers in 1963. No wonder we had Beatlemania the next year.

As silly as the FBI was in the 1960s, it turned seditious in the 1970s. Nixon was re-elected in the first 49-state landslide in the nation’s history in 1972. But he made the mistake of passing Mark Felt over as Hoover’s successor.

Felt used the power of the FBI to push Watergate, which put forth the narrative that a president should not spy on his political opponents. In less than two years, the FBI and Congress forced Nixon to resign, negating the results of that election.

And 44 years later, Barack Hussein Obama used the FBI to spy on President Donald John Trump.

But it is setting crimes up — entrapment — that threatens our republic most. The FBI apparently decides who is a criminal, sets them up and then busts them.

Consider the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot.

C.J. Ciaramella reported in October, “The sort of informant-led investigation that resulted in the arrests of the Wolverine Watchmen is largely due to the rollback of Watergate-era restrictions on the FBI following 9/11. The Whitmer case wasn't just a poorly conceived investigation; it was the direct result of a strategic internal policy change that allowed the FBI to begin targeting people who had done nothing illegal in order to prosecute the war on terror.

“In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft amended the attorney general guidelines to expand the investigative techniques the FBI could use during preliminary inquiries.

“In 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey again broadened the FBI's power to investigate people absent any evidence that they were involved in a crime, something that would have been illegal prior to 9/11. The new guidelines also specifically allowed the FBI to consider religious affiliation and ethnicity when selecting targets, although those couldn't be the sole criteria to justify threat assessments. The FBI argued that its manual forbade racial profiling, but if you were looking for young men with ties to the Somali extremist group al-Shabab, for example, Somali immigrant communities would be the natural place to start.

“This made way for a substantial shift in agency strategy and tactics, argues Michael German, the former undercover agent. ‘You actually had to have articulable facts that provided a reasonable indication of criminal activity,’ German says of the pre-9/11 FBI.

“The new rules reflected the national security apparatus' biggest fear: not organized terrorist cells embedded in the U.S. but individuals radicalized and recruited through the internet or other propaganda, the so-called lone wolves.”

Crime prevention is not an appropriate use of government and police powers because it provides the state police the opportunity to frame people for crimes.

And to blackmail politicians.