Since it was tasked with going after revolutionary-minded workers and “subversive activity” in 1939, the FBI has an unbroken record of trampling on political rights.
In their frenzy to derail the Donald Trump presidency, the liberal press and middle-class left are increasingly championing the rulers’ political police — the FBI and the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts. Democrats in Congress, American Civil Liberties Union spokespeople and more, say that what the FBI is doing is necessary and good. They seek to reinforce former FBI chief Robert Mueller’s witch hunt against the Trump administration.
But the FBI is a deadly enemy of the working class. Its reason for existence is to spy on and disrupt the working-class, revolutionary-minded political fighters and others the propertied rulers choose to target.
The liberals are trying to defend the FBI against a short memo by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes that reports how agency operatives and lawyers used deceptive methods to get a warrant to go after a former adviser to the Trump campaign. They did not acknowledge the source used was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Christopher Anders, deputy director of the ACLU, claims Nunes’ account is false. What Nunes recounts simply bears out the fact that FBI bosses — along with President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice and the Hillary Clinton campaign — were trying to derail Donald Trump’s campaign.
Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Spier called for defense of “our intelligence community” and its work seeking to buttress Mueller’s “investigation” into whether Trump colluded with Moscow to influence the election. Like grand juries and all such bodies, the special counsel starts with a target and digs around for “evidence” to get them. Neither the FBI nor Mueller’s freewheeling probe are “ours” as Spier claims.
The FBI was set up to defend the class interests of the capitalist rulers. It has been the spearhead of decades of attacks on working-class militants, Black rights fighters, opponents of Washington’s wars and many others.
Historically, the liberals have led drives to attack political rights in the interests of the propertied rulers. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt unleashed the FBI on the Socialist Workers Party and others in the labor movement who were campaigning against the U.S. rulers’ drive to make working people the cannon fodder in the fight for spoils in the second imperialist world war.
The FBI engineered the frame-up that imprisoned 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and others in the class-struggle leadership of the Teamsters union in Minneapolis.
In 1939 Roosevelt signed a secret executive order tasking the FBI with stamping out “subversive activities.”
When Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch was asked what that meant during the 1981 trial of the SWP’s lawsuit that challenged decades of FBI attacks on the party, he said the White House was trying to stop those like the SWP “who were trying to influence public opinion to keep the United States out of war.”
The secret FISA courts were set up so the FBI didn’t have to go to a regular court to get a warrant, to keep its requests to target and spy on people veiled in secrecy. They are an integral part of the agency’s frame-up operations.
They rubber stamp 99.99 percent of spying requests. The written request of the FBI’s proposal for a warrant to wiretap an official of the Trump campaign remains under wraps.