This Tuesday, New Hampshire will hold its quadrennial first-in-the-nation primary.  I am sorry to say, I have come to know something of the seamier side of this small state, writing these past years about a great legal injustice that has occurred up there.  This is something most Granite Staters don’t like to think about: the Fr. Gordon MacRae frame-up.

Thanks to the state’s tiny, inbred legal and law enforcement community, the matter was kept quiet for years.  But the truth is inevitably coming out, especially regarding the “hero detective” who doesn't look so good now.

One of my New Hampshire friends who writes about this has even found a small army of New Hampshire lawyers, police, and politicos making a nice living off spurious sex abuse allegations.  The local FBI office, no surprise, may even be connected.  It’s worth reading the whole thing.  You will be appalled.

But you probably won’t be surprised.  Dirty tricks by national or local law enforcement against people they don’t like has become all too common.  The Whitmer kidnapping plot was just the latest instance of using informants to invent a criminal conspiracy that would never have existed otherwise.

Or there is the Alfa Bank hoax, which Clinton operatives easily foisted on the FBI’s McCabe and Comey.  Local agents in Chicago saw through it eventually, but the national media insist to this day that Trump was somehow deeply connected to Putin’s Russia.

Of course, the FBI has a long history of politics and lawbreaking.  At the behest of the Kennedys and LBJ, they spied on everyone, from Barry Goldwater to Martin Luther King, Jr., even sending MLK the so-called suicide package of blackmail information.

So as we continue to get the dribs and drabs about Hunter Biden’s laptop — yes, the FBI knew it was real all along — or the 200 federal operatives at the Capitol January 6 — yes, but they continue to insist they were just observing, not instigating — you know there is still a lot more to come.

As law-and-order conservatives, I am sure most AT readers, when in doubt, incline toward supporting our police, as do I.  But too often, that trust is abused, especially at the higher executive levels.  A lot of these people are actually just liberal bureaucrats, who are only out to game the system for their own ends.

J. Edgar Hoover himself was a D.C. insider Democrat, who got his start working for the Wilson administration.  Throughout his career, Hoover was criticized for not working harder against the Mafia and the KKK.  This is somewhat unfair, as he only followed the lead of national DOJ and the federal courts.  But when he was pushed hard, he would often cut corners.  The so-called Mississippi Burning case is a great example.  To solve the murders of the three civil rights workers, the FBI actually sent in their most infamous informant, Mafia hit man Greg Scarpa.  Scarpa kidnapped and beat many of the suspects in order to crack open the case. 

Today, things are not so different, with FBI offices conducting a massive surveillance program of Catholic churchgoers.  This would all be comical if it were not so infuriating.

Some of the blame for today’s mess of an FBI can be put on George W. and his FBI chief, Bob Mueller.  Many commentators, left and right, insist that after 9-11, they gave carte blanche to overbroad surveillance and “sting”-type operations to uncover terrorist plots.  But they were bookended by the Clinton and Obama administrations, who eagerly sought to politicize every department of federal law enforcement.

The way back to lawful law enforcement should not be that hard.  We just need a president who is serious about what is called “rotation in office” — that is, bringing in new, highly qualified appointees to run the federal government, men and women who have no investment in the institutional misdeeds of the departments they oversee.  I don’t think either President Eisenhower or President Reagan had much trouble on this front, because their political appointees usually had integrity.

Even President Nixon backhandedly proves the point.  John Dean and his burglars came about only because the Republican DOJ and IRS officials would not do political dirty tricks asked of them.  Several Nixon officials outright ignored requests to audit Democrats — unlike a number of the Democrat administrations before and after.

So it’s nice to see both President Trump and Gov. DeSantis  put forth aggressive plans to use more political appointees if they are elected.  That’s a great incentive for career federal employees to always follow the law.  They can never be sure to whom they may have to answer in the next four-year term. 

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.

Image: Tom Ahearn via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.