On September 16, 1975, Senator Frank Church (D-ID) opened the first public hearing of the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations [the Church Committee] in the ornate Senate Caucus Room in the Russell Senate Office Building, the storied site of the Watergate hearings and the inquiry into the Pearl Harbor attacks. As two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner James Risen has noted in his 2023 bestselling book, The Last Honest Man, “Frank Church and his committee took on the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, and succeeded in bringing them under the rule of law for the first time.”

The Durham report’s conclusion that the 2017-2019 Mueller “Russian collusion” investigation was seriously flawed understates the degree to which, in the intervening 40-plus, the Department of Justice has politicized justice. The DOJ created the code-named Operation Crossfire Hurricane as an FBI counterintelligence operation, not a criminal investigation, to allow FBI agents to work with the CIA, NSA, and foreign intelligence officers to dethrone the Trump presidency.

Today, our law enforcement and intelligence operations are intertwined in their joint conviction that woke neo-Marxist policies take precedence over traditional American values. We should no longer be surprised by seeing the FBI take a knee to Black Lives Matter or the CIA developing a “WELCO-ME!” theme for Pride Month 2023.

Departments of Injustice by Andrea Widburg

On July 17, 2023, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt if he refuses to comply with two subpoenas dealing with FBI targeting of concerned parents and Catholics. In a pointed letter, Jordan noted that of particular interest was “the FBI’s weaponization of its law enforcement powers against Americans who exercise their First Amendment rights.”

In October 2021, the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) formed a joint task force to use the Patriot Act to investigate as domestic terrorists those parents who spoke up at school board meetings about their district’s woke policies. In February 2023, an intelligence analyst within the Richmond Field Office of the FBI released an intelligence document targeting “Radically-Traditionalist Catholics” (RTC) as a “white supremacy” threat for their preference for the Latin Mass, based on information developed by the radically leftist Southern Poverty Law Center.

On July 18, 2023, former President Donald J. Trump released a statement announcing that he had received a letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith notifying Trump that he is now a target of the January 6 Grand Jury Investigation and giving him four days to report to the Grand Jury. Trump stated that this “almost always means an arrest and indictment.” A January 6 indictment would be Trump’s third in the Biden administration’s blatant determination to imprison Biden’s leading political opponent in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Meanwhile, Attorney General Garland has relegated the Biden family crime investigation to the FBI’s office in Wilmington, Delaware.

The Church Committee’s most relevant exposé of the weaponization of the FBI and the merging of law enforcement with intelligence activities came from its investigation into the FBI’s counterintelligence program, code-named “COINTELLPRO.” COINTELLPRO was a DOJ program designed to “neutralize individuals deemed threats to national security.”

The Church Committee established that, under this program, the FBI’s tactics included anonymously attacking targets’ political beliefs to induce their employees to fire them; anonymously mailing letters to spouses of intelligence targets to destroy their marriages; obtaining from the IRS a target’s tax returns and then attempting to provoke an IRS investigation; falsely naming as government informants members of dissenting groups to have the group expel the falsely named member; and using “misinformation” to disrupt demonstrations. (Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, U.S. Senate, Book II, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976], p. 11.)

The same report showed that the FBI had concluded that Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 1963 March on Washington was a “demagogic speech” that established Dr. King as the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” The FBI

gathered information about Dr. King’s plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau’s disposal to obtain information about the “private activities of Dr. King and his advisors” to “completely discredit” them.

The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording from microphones in his hotel rooms to destroy his marriage. A note accompanied the tape, which Dr. King and his advisors interpreted as threatening to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide.

The Church Committee concluded:

In early 1968, Bureau headquarters explained to the field that Dr. King must be destroyed because he was seen as a potential “messiah” who could “unify and electrify” the “black nationalist movement.” Indeed, to the FBI, he was a potential threat because he might “abandon his supposed “obedience” to white liberal doctrines (non-violence).” In short, a non-violent man was to be secretly attacked and destroyed as an insurance policy against his abandoning non-violence.

Ironically, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the 1960s saw Dr. King’s equal rights movement as subversive, while the DOJ under Merrick Garland and the FBI under Christopher Wray sees Christians and parents protecting children in school from woke sexuality as subversive.

When we criminalize politics, we invite law enforcement to define crime ideologically. When we weaponize the First Amendment, we allow intelligence gathering to see truth-tellers as domestic terrorists. With technology today empowering totalitarian surveillance on a scale never before imaginable, we are well advised to remember a note that President Truman wrote longhand on May 12, 1945: “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.”

Since 2004, Jerome R. Corsi has published over 30 books on economics, history, and politics, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation in 1972 was entitled Prior Restraint, Prior Punishment, and Political Dissent: A Moral and Legal Evaluation. His book, Volume I, in his Great Awakening Trilogy, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, received highly positive reviews from prominent climate scientists. Volume II, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation, is scheduled for publication on November 14, 2023. Dr. Corsi has resumed podcasting on his new website TheTruthCentral.com, which is now on the Internet in its first development phase.