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Merrick Garland isn’t J. Edgar Hoover and Trump isn’t Fred Hampton
The history of the FBI and the Justice Department doesn’t mean they’re always the bad guys
I don’t need a lecture on the historical evils of the FBI or the Justice Department, of which it is a part.
Trust me.
I know and have many friends who were active in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Some were arrested and jailed. Others were prosecuted on bogus or exaggerated charges and though acquitted, were regularly hounded by federal law enforcement.
Martin Luther King Jr. was viciously targeted by the agency and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, initially with an assist from Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Other than fighting the Mafia, Hoover’s obsession was upholding white power and warring against the specter of communism, which he managed to find everywhere.
To this end, he oversaw the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, about which the nation would learn in the mid-1970s, two decades after it had begun.
Under COINTELPRO, some of America’s most important freedom fighters were targeted for defamation and destruction.
