The Original Creation of the FBI was a Criminal Venture
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The FBI Has Been Political from the Start
"It was President Roosevelt who tapped his Attorney General Charles Bonaparte—the grandnephew of Napoleon—to create the FBI."
"So, the FBI was not created in response to out-of-control crime; its creation was a crime."
On Saturday night, Donald Trump announced he intends to appoint Kash Patel as director of the FBI. The news sparked an immediate frenzy from establishment figures across media and politics. Legal and national security “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 his 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 grandnephew 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 Swagar 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 throw-away line at the end of his annual report: “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.