How Trump is sending the FBI back to the 1960s

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In May 2024, Donald Trump was at his lowest.

He's free for now, but jail time is a possibility as Justice Swan Mashan decides what punishment Donald Trump deserves for his crimes.

He had become the first former U.S.

president to be convicted of a felony.

34 felonies, to be exact.

He could get some form of incarceration.

That could be house arrests, that could be weekends in jail, or it could be up to four years in a state prison.

In the lobby of the courthouse in Manhattan, a tired and deflated Trump claimed to be a victim of a corrupt justice system.

This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt.

an opponent, a political opponent.

He had spent the entire process from raid to arrest to trial to verdict railing against the Justice Department and the FBI.

This was a rigged disgraceful trial.

The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people.

And the real verdict from the people was

not guilty.

We agree with Trump.

It was rigged and corrupt and we want him back in power to fix it.

So, how do you do that?

How do you fix something that you say has been weaponized against you?

Well, you put people in charge who describe the investigations and prosecutions you faced as...

The biggest criminal enterprise the FBI had ever perpetrated against a political enemy by breaking the justice system and using it to their advantage for partisan politics.

This is Cash Patel, a regular contributor to Steve Bannon's podcast.

Talkbuster news for this audience, our own Cash Patel, just named the director of the FBI.

He has spent years railing against the weaponization of the Justice Department against Donald Trump and has called for the use of a constitutional guillotine, which he says is a literal metaphor.

And the term constitutional guillotine is meant as a metaphorical term to literally slice the head off of the deep state swamp monsters that have lied to you from Russia Gate to Jan 6 and all the way through all of the Trump trials.

Cash Patel is one of two people Trump has put in charge of enforcing federal law under his new administration.

The other person, Pam Bondi, is one of Trump's former defense lawyers.

Now, in a month where U.S.

government departments are being marked by Elon Musk for elimination, it can be hard to keep an eye on what's going on inside the Justice Department and the FBI.

But these two appointments are incredibly significant.

We're going to take two episodes to look at them.

And we're going to start with Cash Patel, because the job he has now been confirmed to, director of the FBI, has a complex and sordid history.

For almost 50 years, it was the job held by a figure many considered to be the most powerful man in America, FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover.

He used the FBI as a political weapon, and successive presidents let him.

In the 50 years since his death, the American justice system has been desperately trying to transform the FBI into a beacon of fidelity, bravery and integrity, which Hoover always claimed it was.

Now, with Patel's appointment, that work is at risk of being undone.

And that could have terrifying consequences.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is if you're listening.

How should you respond when a comment is published in the media about you or your organization that you think is unfair or incorrect?

There's a whole spectrum of options from ignoring it all the way up to a defamation lawsuit.

Or, if you are FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover, you can embark on a years-long crusade that ends with you trying to get the guy who made the comment to kill himself.

Hoover liked to think of himself as an open-minded man.

The FBI welcomes constructive criticism, but I think we ought to always consider the source from which criticism comes.

In November 1962, the source from which criticism came was civil rights leader Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Now, I had five decades of Hoover stories to choose from, by the way, to give a sense of what sort of power the FBI can have when it isn't operating with independence and integrity.

This episode could genuinely be seven hours long, but I'm going to focus on one story that really makes your jaw drop.

It all started in the FBI branch in Atlanta, Georgia.

The local paper in Atlanta had republished an article from the New York Times in which Dr.

King said that the FBI wasn't doing enough to get rid of racial bias in their forces.

His accusation was that FBI officers in the South, particularly in the city of Albany in South Georgia, were staffed with white southern-born agents who were too friendly with local police and segregationists.

I can easily understand that Dr.

King, in an emotional moment, might have made the statement.

This is Deke DeLoach, the third highest-ranked official in the FBI at the time.

The fact was that four out of five agents in Albany, Georgia at that particular time, were northern-born, reared, and educated.

The FBI special agent in charge of the Atlanta office read this in the newspaper and typed up a memo to the FBI director.

The memo listed where the five agents at the Albany office were born, and it noted that Dr.

King had got his facts wrong.

But it ended with, recommend no further action in this matter.

And maybe in a normal intelligence agency, that's what would have happened.

But this wasn't.

a normal intelligence agency.

In a way that is true of few organizations, J.

Edgar Hoover is the FBI, and that is our story.

The story of a man, an organization, and their service to the nation.

A story of fidelity, bravery, integrity.

Well, we'll have to see about that.

But this touched off a feud between Mr.

Hoover and Dr.

King.

In my opinion, it was a very unfortunate feud.

Fidelity, bravery, integrity, and very unfortunate feuds.

See, Hoover was not happy with how this had gone down.

He ordered his men to get the record corrected.

I was responsible for trying to contact Dr.

King.

Dr.

King would not return my calls.

Now I'm definitely on MLK's side in this story, but also I do reckon if the FBI calls you, you should probably call back.

Hoover became furious.

He thought this proved that Dr.

King was a liar who wasn't interested in the truth.

I don't share the feeling that has been advanced by some extremists that a man because he's born in the South can't conduct or won't conduct a fair, impartial investigation.

Extremists.

After the article came out, Hoover wanted to start spying on Dr.

King with bugs and wiretaps.

He began pressuring his boss, Attorney General Robert F.

Kennedy Sr.,

to allow him to do it, despite his claim that the FBI taps telephones only with the authority of the Attorney General and only in cases involving kidnapping where a human life may be endangered or in internal security cases.

And as of this morning, there are but 90 wiretaps in the entire United States and in the

months of hassling, Bobby Kennedy agreed to allow the taps.

The FBI tapped Dr.

King's phones, installed microphones in his home, and also installed them in every hotel room he stayed in while traveling around the country.

They didn't find evidence of connections with communist spies, but they did apparently hear Martin Luther King having a lot of extramarital affairs.

Meanwhile, Hoover just could not stop ranting about the Albany office story.

I've seen some fantastic statements that made that practically all of our agents in the Deep South offices are men who've been born and reared in the Deep South.

Two years after Dr.

King ignored his calls, he was still going on about it.

I can say that 70%

of the agents in the 23 southern offices were born in the north.

Finally, Dr.

King decided that that it was time to sit down face to face with Director Hoover.

I have had the opportunity to meet with Mr.

Hoover this afternoon and I might say that the discussion was quite amicable.

The meeting might have been amicable but as they had that meeting there was a parcel sitting in Dr.

King's mailbox.

Inside was a tape recording which appeared to be of Dr.

King having sex with women who were not his wife in various hotel rooms.

It was a supercut of sorts.

Alongside the tape recording was a typed note.

The note used horrific racist insults, threatened to expose King's affairs, and then implied that the only way King could save his reputation was to kill himself within 34 days of the letter being sent, before Christmas Day, 1964.

The package was unsigned, but Dr.

King knew it was from the FBI.

They are out to break me, King said.

We know this because he said it in a phone call picked up by wiretaps, transcribed, and sent to Hoover's office.

Hoover didn't break Martin Luther King, but he wasn't alone on Hoover's enemies list.

J.

Edgar Hoover had a party trick of relating bits of juicy gossip about people in high places.

Well, it turns out that the FBI director had a special squad prying into people's sex lives.

So what can we learn from this incredibly disturbing story?

Well, for 48 years, the United States of America had a secret police run by a single man on a mission to preserve what he saw as American values through a massive surveillance program.

Congressman Moss believes that there's a fail on one out of every two Americans, men, women, and children.

Hoover used the enormous power at his disposal to spy on, intimidate and threaten people he saw as threats to the status quo or public enemies.

How does the Bureau decide who is an enemy of the state?

Under J.

Edgar Hoover, it was a combination of statute and personal taste.

Sound familiar?

When you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people.

Go ahead.

I will say this.

Hillary Clinton has to go to jail, okay?

She has to go to jail.

Hoover operated almost entirely without oversight, and he didn't tolerate dissent from his staff.

FBI upper management compromised their own morals to comply with Hoover's orders, knowing that the alternative was being demoted to resident agent in charge of the office in Fairbanks, Alaska.

They anticipated his whims and acted accordingly, leading to a cultural rot from the top to the bottom.

The public had no idea of who Hoover really was, and he remained incredibly popular right up until his death.

From his office, J.

Edgar Hoover has placed on the entire organization his own rigid code of service, integrity, and morality.

But the eight presidents he worked alongside knew exactly who he was.

Not only did they not fire him, they changed laws to make sure that he could stay on.

On the 1st of January 1965, J.

Edgar Hoover turned 70.

By then, he'd been in office for 40 years.

And that should have been the end of his time as FBI director.

The law said that public servants had to retire at 70.

And knowing you as I do, Edgar, I know you won't break the law.

But President Lyndon Johnson, knowing that J.

Edgar Hoover was a corrupt, deceitful blackmailer, said that the nation could not afford to let him retire.

I have just now signed an executive order exempting you from compulsory retirement for an indefinite period of time.

And again, Edgar, congratulations and accept the gratitude of a grateful nation.

In the years since Hoover's death, as all these horrible stories came out into the open, there's been an inclination to portray him as an all-powerful villain who pulled the strings of America's political and cultural elite with blackmail.

Mr.

Hoover often told Mr.

Nixon about stories he had on other prominent politicians.

Perhaps he took the hint.

But Hoover biographer Beverly Gage argues that the only reason he stayed in power so long was because the political elite liked what he he was doing.

Presidents of both major parties relied on Hoover to keep subversive movements at bay and cover up any scandals that threatened their administration.

I have asked Mr.

J.

Edgar Hoover to stay on as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and he accepted.

By the end of the 1970s, the FBI had been significantly reformed.

Part of that was thanks to the strengthened Freedom of Information Act, which gives citizens the right to request their files.

But the main reason was new laws that gave the Attorney General and Congress the ability to actually find out what the FBI was up to.

House and Senate intelligence committees were set up to keep an eye on the intelligence agencies.

And decades later, this is where we come across Cash Patel.

2016 and 2017 were extremely crazy times to be working for the FBI.

The Republican presidential nominee got some good news.

The FBI is once again investigating his opponent.

A letter that the FBI director sent out yesterday.

His extraordinary allegation that Barack Obama had ordered wiretapping surveillance.

The Russians interfered in our election.

Donald Trump sacked the FBI director today.

By the end of 2017, Robert Mueller's investigation had charged former Trump campaign chiefs.

If you want to know more about that, it's the subject of the first two entire seasons of this podcast.

Understandably, this came under a lot of scrutiny from Congress, particularly the House Intelligence Committee.

Cash Patel was the senior counsel for the chairman of that committee and spent his time there spreading misinformation about the FBI and Justice Department.

He wanted everyone to believe that the real scandal wasn't Russia interfering in the 2016 election, but the FBI's conduct in investigating it.

And that's basically what he's been up to ever since then.

Spreading misinformation about everything from the Russia investigation to the 2020 election to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol building.

Steve, the January 6th truth has finally entered the American bloodstream writ large.

The insurrection that never was.

And he spread this misinformation in some very creative ways.

In 2022, he published a children's book about it all called The Plot Against the King, with a king that looks a lot like Donald Trump thinks he looks.

It's actually a trilogy.

There have been many plots against the king.

In 2023, he published a book for adults with basically the same storyline called Government Gangsters, The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy, which included in the back a list of people that he thinks are deep state operatives.

It's a super lazy list.

Basically, if you searched online for people who criticized Trump or people who didn't do what Trump wanted them to do, these would be the top results.

It includes Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton, as well as the last five U.S.

Attorneys General and the last three directors of the FBI.

The Senate has confirmed Cash Patel to be the next director of the FBI.

We are going to remove the weaponization of the intelligence community for political purposes.

Despite Democratic concerns, that he might look to operate as a Donald Trump loyalist and use the powers of the FBI to go after adversaries of the president.

They are afraid that President Trump is going to come in and actually use the law to prosecute those who broke it.

Whether they're in government, whether they're in the private sector, civilians, and yes, even if they're in the media, if they participated in a conspiracy to rig elections and break the law or do other corrupt activities, you'll be prosecuted.

Days after Patel's appointment, it was announced that Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent-turned far-right podcaster, would serve as his deputy.

If you're wondering who that is, here he is on his podcast six weeks ago.

I am absolutely certain this is the biggest political scandal of our time and that the FBI has been hiding a massive fake assassination plot to shut down the questioning of the 2020 election.

Yeah, so he is very much a conspiracy theorist, but that's not all.

Here he is from that same episode.

The left has a problem.

You know what the problem is?

Everybody hates you!

You suck!

So, that guy and Cash Patel at the head of the FBI.

No one is more excited about all this than Steve Bannon.

This is a glorious day.

You know why it's glorious?

Cash Patel's director of the FBI.

And to be honest, that's the most chilling thing for me.

A couple of months ago, when Patel was first announced as Trump's nominee, Steve Bannon engaged in a little bit of nostalgia.

When I was a kid growing up in our parish in Richmond, Virginia, St.

Paul's Catholic Church, and then St.

Benedict's later, the most revered dads in the parish were not the doctors or the lawyers, but the revered guys were the...

We had two FBI agents.

They were revered, the FBI, Jerry Gerhruva's FBI.

Okay, but like...

That's not the FBI today.

The FBI today is thoroughly incompetent incompetent and corrupt.

It has to be taken apart brick by brick and Cash Patel is the guy to do it.

If that's true and it is taken apart brick by brick, we all just have to hope that the thing that replaces it isn't Jerry Gerhoover's FBI.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Jess O'Callaghan.

Audio production this week is by Adair Shepard.

Next week, the other half of the federal criminal justice system.

The US Justice Department and judicial branch are already under pressure from the Trump administration.

There have been mass resignations over the new Attorney General Pam Bondi's decision to drop the prosecution of the mayor of New York City in exchange for him agreeing to back Trump's immigration policies.

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials are threatening to fire judges who rule against them.

In Donald Trump's first term, the judicial system pushed back against him.

Will that happen this time?

That's next on if you're listening.

Hi, it's PK, host of Politics Now.

And as the federal election looms, we've got you covered.

I'll be joined by the ABC's sharpest minds to bring you the latest news and analysis from the campaign.

It's called Politics Now, and you can find and follow it on the ABC Illicit app.