[News] COINTELPRO on steroids - Secret Docs Reveal: President Trump Has Inherited an FBI With Vast Hidden Powers

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/secret-docs-reveal-president-trump-has-inherited-an-fbi-with-vast-hidden-powers/ 



  Secret Docs Reveal: President Trump Has Inherited an FBI With Vast
  Hidden Powers

Glenn Greenwald <https://theintercept.com/staff/glenn-greenwald/>, Betsy 
Reed <https://theintercept.com/staff/betsyreed/>

January 31 2017

_In the wake_ of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI 
assumes an importance and influence it has not wielded since J. Edgar 
Hoover’s death in 1972. That is what makes today’s batch of stories from 
The Intercept, The FBI’s Secret Rules 
<https://theintercept.com/series/the-fbis-secret-rules/>, based on a 
trove of long-sought confidential FBI documents, so critical: It shines 
a bright light on the vast powers of this law enforcement agency, 
particularly when it comes to its ability to monitor dissent and carry 
out a domestic war on terror, at the beginning of an era highly 
likely to be marked by vociferous protest and reactionary state repression.

In order to understand how the FBI makes decisions about matters such as 
infiltrating religious or political organizations, civil liberties 
advocates have sued the government for access to crucial FBI manuals — 
but thanks to a federal judiciary highly subservient to government 
interests 
<http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/more_federal_judge_abdication/>, those 
attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Because their disclosure is 
squarely in the public interest, The Intercept is publishing this series 
of reports along with annotated versions of the documents we obtained.

Trump values loyalty to himself above all other traits, so it is 
surely not lost on him that few entities were as devoted to his victory, 
or played as critical a role in helping to achieve it, as the FBI. One 
of the more unusual aspects of the 2016 election, perhaps the one that 
will prove to be most consequential, was the covert political war waged 
between the CIA and FBI. While the top echelon of the CIA community was 
vehemently 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html> 
pro-Clinton 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-cia-chief-trump-is-russias-useful-fool/2016/11/03/cda42ffe-a1d5-11e6-8d63-3e0a660f1f04_story.html?utm_term=.fd5c80751242>, 
certain factions within the FBI were aggressively supportive of Trump. 
Hillary Clinton herself blames James Comey 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/politics/hillary-clinton-james-comey.html> 
and his election-week letter for her defeat. Elements within 
the powerful New York field office were furious that Comey refused to 
indict Clinton, and embittered agents reportedly shoveled anti-Clinton 
leaks to Rudy Giuliani 
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/03/meet-donald-trump-s-top-fbi-fanboy.html?via=desktop&source=twitter>. The 
FBI’s 35,000 employees across the country are therefore likely to be 
protected and empowered. Trump’s decision to retain Comey — while 
jettisoning all other top government officials — suggests that this has 
already begun to happen.

When married to Trump’s clear disdain for domestic dissent — he 
venerates strongman authoritarians, called for a crackdown on free press 
protections, and suggested citizenship-stripping for flag-burning — the 
authorities vested in the FBI with regard to domestic political activism 
are among the most menacing threats Americans face. Trump is also poised 
to expand the powers of law enforcement to surveil populations deemed 
suspicious and deny their rights in the name of fighting terrorism, as 
he has already done with his odious restrictions on immigration from 
seven Muslim-majority countries. Understanding how the federal 
government’s law enforcement agency interprets the legal limits on its 
own powers is, in this context, more essential than ever. Until now, 
however, the rules governing the FBI have largely been kept secret.

Today’s publication is the result of months of investigation by our 
staff, and we planned to publish these articles and documents regardless 
of the outcome of the 2016 election. The public has an interest in 
understanding the FBI’s practices no matter who occupies the White 
House. But in the wake of Trump’s victory, and the unique 
circumstances that follow from it, these revelations take on even more 
urgency.

After Congress’s 1976 Church Committee investigated the excesses of 
Hoover’s FBI, in particular the infamous COINTELPRO program — in which 
agents targeted and subverted any political groups the government deemed 
threatening, including anti-war protesters, black nationalists, and 
civil rights activists — a series of reforms were enacted to rein in the 
FBI’s domestic powers. As The Intercept and other news outlets have 
amply documented 
<https://theintercept.com/2016/11/19/infamous-post-911-california-sleeper-cell-case-continues-to-unravel/>, 
in the guise of the war on terror the FBI has engaged in a variety of 
tactics that are redolent of the COINTELPRO abuses 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/preemptive-prosecution-muslims-cointelpro> 
— including, for example, repeatedly enticing innocent Muslims into fake 
terror schemes 
<https://theintercept.com/2015/06/25/fort-dix-five-terror-plot-the-real-story/> 
concocted by the bureau’s own informants. What The Intercept’s reporting 
on this new trove of documents shows is how the FBI has quietly 
transformed the system of rules and restraints put in place after the 
scandals of the ’70s, opening the door for a new wave of civil liberties 
violations. When asked to respond to this critique, the FBI provided the 
following statement:

    All FBI policies are written to ensure that the FBI consistently and
    appropriately applies the lawful tools we use to assess and
    investigate criminal and national security threats to our nation.
    All of our authorities and techniques are founded in the
    Constitution, U.S. law, and Attorney General Guidelines. FBI
    policies and rules are audited and enforced through a rigorous
    internal compliance mechanism, as well as robust oversight from the
    Inspector General and Congress. FBI assessments and investigations
    are subject to responsible review and are designed to protect the
    rights of all Americans and the safety of our agents and sources,
    acting within the bounds of the Constitution.

Absent these documents and the facts of how the bureau actually 
operates, this may sound reassuring. But to judge how well the bureau is 
living up to these abstract commitments, it is necessary to read the 
fine print of its byzantine rules and regulations — which the FBI’s 
secrecy has heretofore made it impossible for outsiders to do. Now, 
thanks to our access to these documents — which include the FBI’s 
governing rulebook, known as the DIOG, and classified policy guides for 
counterterrorism cases and handling confidential informants — The 
Intercept is able to share a vital glimpse of how the FBI understands 
and wields its enormous power.

For example, the bureau’s agents can decide that a campus organization 
is not “legitimate” 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/hidden-loopholes-allow-fbi-agents-to-infiltrate-political-and-religious-groups> 
and therefore not entitled to robust protections for free speech; dig 
for derogatory information on potential informants 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-gives-itself-lots-of-rope-to-pull-in-informants> 
without any basis for believing they are implicated in unlawful 
activity; use a person’s immigration status to pressure them to 
collaborate and then help deport them 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/when-informants-are-no-longer-useful-the-fbi-can-help-deport-them/> 
when they are no longer useful; conduct invasive “assessments” 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/based-on-a-vague-tip-the-feds-can-surveil-anyone/> 
without any reason for suspecting the targets of wrongdoing; demand that 
companies provide the bureau with personal data about their users in 
broadly worded national security letters 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/national-security-letters-demand-data-that-companies-arent-obligated-to-provide/> 
without actual legal authority to do so; fan out across the internet 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/undercover-fbi-agents-swarm-the-internet-seeking-contact-with-terrorists/> 
along with a vast army of informants, infiltrating countless online chat 
rooms; peer through the walls of private homes; and more. The FBI 
offered various justifications of these tactics to our reporters. But 
the documents and our reporting on them ultimately reveal a bureaucracy 
in dire need of greater transparency and accountability.

One of the documents contains an alarming observation 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-investigated-white-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement> about 
the nation’s police forces, even as perceived by the FBI. Officials of 
the bureau were so concerned that many of these police forces are linked 
to, at times even populated by, overt white nationalists and white 
supremacists, that they have deemed it necessary to take that into 
account in crafting policies for sharing information with them. This 
news arrives in an ominous context, as the nation’s law enforcement 
agencies are among the few institutional factions in the U.S. that 
supported Trump, and they did so 
<https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/police-unions-reject-charges-of-bias-find-a-hero-in-donald-trump/> 
with virtual unanimity 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/09/16/fraternal-order-of-police-union-endorses-trump/>. Trump 
ran on a platform of unleashing an already out-of-control police — “I 
will restore law and order to our country,” he thundered when accepting 
the Republican nomination — and now the groups most loyal to Trump are 
those that possess a state monopoly over the use of force, many of 
which are infused with racial animus.

The Church Committee reforms were publicly debated and democratically 
enacted, based on the widespread fears of sustained FBI overreach 
brought to light by aggressive reporters like Seymour Hersh. It is 
simply inexcusable to erode those protections in the dark, with no 
democratic debate.

As we enter the Trump era, with a nominated attorney general who has not 
hidden his contempt for press freedoms and a president who has made the 
news media the primary target of his vitriol, one of the most vital 
weapons for safeguarding basic liberties and imposing indispensable 
transparency is journalism that exposes information the government wants 
to keep suppressed. For exactly that reason, it is certain to be under 
even more concerted assault than it has been during the last 15 years. 
The revealing, once-secret FBI documents The Intercept is today 
reporting on, and publishing, demonstrate why protecting press 
freedom is more critical than ever.

*READ OUR INVESTIGATION ON THE FBI’S SECRET RULES. 
<https://theintercept.com/series/the-fbis-secret-rules/>*

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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