gracchusdixit

The much, and justly, criticized decision of FBI Director James Comey to intervene during the final days of the 2016 presidential election reveals something not only about the man himself but about the institution over which he presides.  Comey’s behavior is shocking, but it is not surprising.  The disquieting truth is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, far from being a body of disinterested law enforcement professionals who stand above the political fray, is not only a politicized institution but a deeply biased one.

We got our first, jarring glimpse of this unpleasant reality in 1975, when a congressional committee head by Senator Frank Church of Idaho uncovered extensive and systematic wrongdoing by the FBI as well as the CIA.  This included illegal wiretaps, the illicit interception of private mail, secret coups d’état designed to overthrow foreign governments, even assassinations of foreign political leaders whose views did not jibe with what the FBI and CIA imagined to be our national interests.  In the forty years since those revelations first appeared, we seem to have forgotten everything we learned about the dangers posed to our democracy by the intelligence and law enforcement institutions to which we give so much power.

Foremost among these institutions is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The FBI was all but created by J. Edgar Hoover in 1935, who, as its first director, reigned over the organization like an absolute monarch for the next forty years.  It was Hoover who carefully shaped the FBI’s “boy scout” image.  Behind the scenes, and belying that image, he was a controlling, manipulative, and profoundly prejudiced presence.  Hoover distrusted women and hated all minorities, African Americans most of all.  For years, he pursued a witch hunt against Martin Luther King that not only exceeded his statutory authority but broke innumerable laws and and violated the Constitution.

Even worse, Hoover spied upon public officials, including several Presidents of the United States, using innuendo and threats of scandal to intimidate and blackmail them.  In 1948, he directly intervened in a national election, leaking to Harry Truman’s Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, information that he hoped would doom Truman’s chances.  The ploy didn’t work, and Truman was handily elected, whereupon Hoover spent the next four years doing everything he could to undermine the democratically elected President of the United States.  When the next presidential election came around in 1952, and Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic candidate, Hoover repeated the trick, this time more successfully.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as ancient history and to think that Hoover’s pernicious legacy was expunged long ago.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Although J. Edgar has been dead for more than forty years, his paranoid personality continues to permeate the FBI.  How could it be otherwise?  Hoover was the architect of the agency’s organizational structure.  He designed its incentives.  He authored its ideology.  J. Edgar Hoover, in short, is responsible for the FBI’s internal “culture,” and, as anyone who has studied corporate and organizational “cultures” will tell you, they are stubborn and long-lived.

Thanks to the actions of James Comey, it is abundantly clear that the corrosive FBI culture created by J. Edgar Hoover persists to this day.  It is a culture of conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and lawlessness.  It is a culture in which the most powerful law enforcement organization in the land believes itself to be above the law.  It is a culture that feels entitled to undermine and overturn democracy itself.

As terrible as that is, the furor surrounding Comey’s actions has obscured a much bigger problem, one that extends far beyond the FBI.  Several of the largest police unions in the country have openly endorsed Donald Trump, a man who has incited violence at his rallies, has called upon his supporters to assassinate his opponent, and has declared his intentions to violate the most fundamental Constitutional protections. For national organizations representing law enforcement to endorse such a flagrantly lawless candidate is deeply shameful.  It indicates that these organizations care less about upholding the law than preserving and advancing their own tribal interests.

It also reminds us of something far more dangerous—the inescapable reality that law enforcement officers, officials, and organizations have an inherent tendency to behave in authoritarian ways and to support authoritarian political figures like Donald Trump.  This tendency is, as the popular phrases goes, “baked in the cake.”  When we give police officers and policing organizations power, when we sanction their right to exercise their power at gunpoint, whenever we allow democracy and the rule of law to be subordinated to the siren song of “law and order,” authoritarianism and abuse will follow.

The “boys in blue” to whom we give so much power and reverence—whether they belong to a local police department or the FBI—are not, never have been, and never will be, “boy scouts.”  The sooner we recognize this uncomfortable truth, the safer we will be.   We may need these people and the institutions that employ them, but we should never, ever give them our unconditional trust.  If we needed any reminder of that sobering fact, FBI Director James Comey has provided it.