VP Pence, defending the firing of Comey, told media “The American people have to have confidence in the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” dismissive & clueless about how the firing has compromised that.
As one of the thousands of Americans with an FBI dossier & not a single incident of criminal misconduct, the exposure of the FBI is something we should maximize. Good luck to its criminal investigations but its spying operations involving undercover agents, surveillance of phone calls, emails, social media, malicious meddling in social movements, assassinations of Black activists, involvement in criminal activities need to be exposed & shut down.
Unlike Trump & his associates, most activists, including myself, don’t have a secret life the FBI can use for blackmail or shaming. I like to keep my mortal sins & felonious offenses to a minimum because staying out of court & jail seems to be a wise life strategy.
In the 1970s, class action COINTELPRO lawsuits were initiated against the FBI for spying on activists & disrupting social movements with undercover agents. Their activities involved break & enter jobs to obtain files, egging activists into violent activities or confrontations with police, gathering dirt on people to blackmail them into acting as informants, disrupting meetings or taking notes for their dossiers. But even worse, undercover FBI agents in the KKK incited the group in 1963 to bomb the Birmingham, Alabama Black church which killed four little girls. By the 1970s, FBI agents openly engaged in assassination programs of Black activists like Fred Hampton.
George Lavan Weissman, a longtime socialist of the 1930s generation & a mentor of mine, got his FBI dossier released under the Freedom of Information Act as part of COINTELPRO. He was active in civil rights defense cases in the 1940s & 50s & frequently collaborated with Black activists in the South. Dissension would break out with no apparent cause & they would sever association with him. He told me he never understood why or what happened until he saw letters in his dossier from undercover FBI agents to Black activists making inflammatory & false accusations against him to destroy their collaboration.
Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who flagged my criminal record in 2001 for using a WMD, explained to me, after her metamorphosis into a libertarian do-gooder, that somewhere along the line the FBI became misdirected & needs to get back to the good old days. What good old days were those? The ones where J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI like a gestapo? Where FBI agents could torch churches, kill activists, disrupt movements, destroy reputations with impunity? Where she could flag my criminal record for a crime I did not commit, was never accused of, charged with, interrogated about, & wasn’t even informed about till I was refused employment?
The women’s, antiwar, & socialist movements were always riddled with undercover operatives on wrecking operations. Some organizations were paranoid about it. But wiser activists do not engage in witch hunts looking for agents. It’s divisive & pointless because it will not stop them from intervening. It’s what they do & they’re pros at it. Wiser activists focus on the work, keep their nose clean, work collaboratively with others as much as possible, & don’t play stupid but leave witch hunting to the trouble-makers.