What are we to make of the FBI? 

For that matter, what are we to make of all the American institutions that many Americans have feared, distrusted and mocked for the past century? Growing up I was taught to treat the police, the FBI, pharmaceutical companies, banks, and big institutions of almost any kind, with skepticism. It was the same for many liberals. But today - because of Trump and his MAGA followers - we rise to their defense?  

Credit my skepticism to my mother, now 91. A former film reviewer and newspaper columnist, she preached to her children the sacredness of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the right to privacy.

When I was 14, we watched the Senate Watergate hearings together while she painted the kitchen in our New Jersey home. In the 70s, she headed back to college to earn her long-deferred degree and wrote her final paper on the CIA and its director Richard Helms, later charged and convicted of Watergate-related crimes. Her constant speeches on privacy and the dangers of Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover laid the foundation for my thinking today.  

And it was the FBI that drew her particular scorn. She would often name it as a danger to the rights of all Americans. She saw J. Edgar Hoover as one of the most powerful and corrupt men in the entire history of our country. For 37 years, Hoover reigned supreme, hoarding secret files on any politician he could blackmail. His most famous victim was my family’s personal hero, John F. Kennedy, whose reckless sexual life in the White House left him vulnerable to scandal and extortion. Hoover’s blackmail forced Kennedy and his brother Robert, Hoover’s boss and the attorney general of the United States, to keep him in the job for fear of Hoover leaking their secrets. 

But Hoover’s crimes didn’t stop there. He was legendary for preventing African Americans from joining the FBI. His dress code of a dark suit and a white button down shirt enforced a culturally conservative mindset that targeted bank robbers and the NAACP instead of terrorists and drug cartels. This mindset, the lack of diverse hiring, and misplaced priorities set American law enforcement back generations. 

Arguably Hoover’s greatest crime was the COINTELPRO program, a harassment campaign aimed at the civil rights leaders of the 1960s. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokley Carmichael, John Lewis, the Freedom Riders were all targets of Hoover and his thugs. The FBI stood by as King’s house was bombed and did little when he was unjustly jailed for leading marches and registering people to vote, all while infiltrating civil rights groups and using prison and harassment to weaken the movement. In the case of civil rights activist Fred Hampton, they used or encouraged the use of drugs and murder. They even sent King a note urging the minister to commit suicide.

Much to my mother’s satisfaction, a U.S. Senate committee investigated the program in 1976. Their published account condemned the FBI’s campaign as “intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.’’ They continued, labelling COINTELPRO as a “sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercising of First Amendment rights of speech and association…’’

The committee pulled the curtain back on a series of illegal activities by the IRS, CIA, FBI and other agencies that spied on and intimidated Americans. Democrats and Republicans were aghast and promptly passed legislation creating special oversight committees to monitor CIA activity. Congress even created a special court of judges to approve search warrants for surveillance in national security cases. Liberals rejoiced. But the damage had been done.

Fast forward to 2022 and everything has turned upside down. The FBI is now the favorite whipping boy for Trump and his conservative supporters. Republicans condemn their Gestapo tactics for their seizure of national security documents Trump illegally took after losing the election to Joe Biden. Republicans who spent entire careers praising law enforcement and attacking Democrats for being soft on crime have now turned on the FBI with a vengeance.

Like so much concerned with Trump, this shift has many liberals scratching their heads. How could a law enforcement agency go from the darling of the Republicans to the enemy? How could liberals go from distrusting the FBI throughout its history to becoming its defender? I think it is a deeper issue than the old saying “politics makes strange bedfellows.’’

It is a singular fact of the (soon to end) Trump era that he came to power by giving voice to the anger of Americans who felt (and still feel) powerless and shut-out of democracy. The angry white man who lost his job in the rush to embrace global free trade, who was audited by the IRS while Amazon pays nothing, who lost his house when the bank forecloses. That guy is so angry, so powerless, so embarrassed by his lot that he will do anything, vote for anyone who gives voice to his rage, his fear. That’s how Trump won the election. And that’s why the FBI is being attacked. 

The difference, of course, is that back in the 1960s, the FBI was a rogue agency run by a maniac who had the goods on every sitting U.S. president for almost 40 years. Today, those roots and history are being used against it by real criminals who would subvert democracy for their own grift. 

Again it’s hard to see how we got here. Liz Cheney, an arch conservative opposed to same-sex marriage, is the anti-hero holding Trump accountable for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The FBI, with Attorney General Merrick Garland in charge, is suddenly the defender of democracy via its seizure Trump’s documents.

I’m not sure where things go from here. Just as police forces now struggle to hire new officers it cannot be popular to join the FBI. And yet they are still effective, still powerful. At least we think. And therein lies the rub. Is the FBI still the rogue agency the Trump faction says it is? Or is has it a reformed and modernized? The problem is: we have no idea. 

Just last night I asked my mother how she feels about the FBI. Without hesitating she said with all the passion she had during Watergate:

“I will never trust the FBI.”