Hoover's FBI Would Have Stopped Jan. 6 Before It Happened

If Jim Jordan brushed up on the history of the real Church Committee, he'd know that the very reforms it created are what expose his "weaponization" committee as a sham.

Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is off to a rocky start. After claiming for months that he had dozens of FBI “whistleblowers” waiting in the wings to blow the lid off of rampant investigative abuse and political persecution in the FBI, Jordan has so far produced three witnesses for the committee. The general thrust of the claims made by these witnesses — all FBI employees who either retired, resigned, or were suspended — is that the Bureau’s investigations were politically motivated and used illegal investigative methods, and that they were pressured to participate in them.

The problem is that these witnesses can’t point to any rule or law the FBI violated, which is required in order to meet the legal definition of a whistleblower. Incidentally, they also lack firsthand knowledge of the wrongdoing they are alleging, traffic in conspiracy theories, have conducted interviews with Russian propaganda outlets while still employed by the FBI, and, oh, happened to be funded personally and legally by Kash Patel. (If you don’t remember who Kash Patel is, he was the Forrest Gump of the Trump administration, always lurking in the background of every major event from the Nunes Memo to the Ukraine quid-pro-quo to being at the top of the civilian chain of command at the Department of Defense on January 6 to somehow being involved in the transfer of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.)

As I like to say, hoo boy.

Of course, the background on the witnesses is laid out in a staff report by Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, so maybe this isn’t the whole story. Maybe these witnesses have real claims of wrongdoing. Maybe Jim Jordan really has created the twenty-first century “Church Committee,” as he has characterized it, that will reveal widespread abuse of power against people who were merely exercising their First Amendment rights. But I seriously doubt it. That’s because the real Church Committee led to major reforms and changes to prevent precisely the types of actions that Jordan’s witnesses are now alleging — and in fact is a big reason why he and his lackeys were able to pull off the January 6 attack.

You’ve probably heard of COINTELPRO, the FBI program which came to light during the Church Committee hearings in 1975. COINTELPRO — short for “counterintelligence program” — used counterespionage techniques against domestic targets. Most people correctly associate COINTELPRO with FBI surveillance of Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists like Dr. Martin Luther King — people that then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed to be subversive, in league with Communists, and a threat to the United States. But most people don’t know that one subset of COINTELPRO targeted another group that Hoover also believed was a threat to national security: The KKK. Although the Klan didn’t have ties to Communism, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE characterized the Klan as a subversive group that justified the FBI’s using the same tactics as it did against its other domestic targets.

Let’s be clear: Hoover didn’t suddenly become woke and decide to dismantle white supremacy. As Professor Beverly Gage, author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century notes in her biography of the legendary director, Hoover was a racist and remained one until the end of his life. But she also notes that he was a complicated figure, and his racism was in tension with his reverence for federal law enforcement and law and order, both of which the KKK stood in opposition against. The government also had a Cold War interest in clamping down on the Klan, because the group provided easy propaganda fodder for the Soviet Union: Communists pointed to the racism and violence against Blacks as evidence that American claims of “equality” were a sham. (We discussed in my Substack course how the CIA enlisted unwitting Black musicians in its covert operations to counter this claim, as well.)

The tactics used in WHITE HATE are a fascinating look at the FBI’s capacity for both intelligence gathering and psychological warfare. In this excerpt from her book, Gage writes that “[a]ll of the techniques deployed in earlier operations were now fair game: writing anonymous letters, spreading rumors, using informants as provocateurs, planting false stories in the press.” In what look very much like Soviet-style active measures, the FBI sought to sow internal paranoia about FBI infiltration through a series of cartoon comics mocking the Klan. The most hilarious part of the cartoon campaign Gage describes is the reasoning behind it:

The bureau…assumed that Klansmen would not—indeed, could not—read anything more complicated than a simple letter or cartoon. When one agent proposed writing a harsh critical history of the Klan for distribution to members, Hoover vetoed the idea. Unlike the intellectually nimble Communists, FBI correspondence noted, Klansmen were ‘emotionally unprepared to completely absorb and fully comprehend the significance’ of such material. When the bureau faked letters written by Klansmen, they made sure to include spelling and grammatical errors, and to keep the messages short.

(One wonders if Donald Trump had access to the Bureau’s insight before running for president.) Gage also details how the Bureau also covertly harassed Klan members:

In addition to poking fun and building paranoia, White Hate did its best to make life difficult for Klansmen, especially for local leaders charged with holding meetings and collecting dues. In one Florida town, an anonymous bureau mailing persuaded county supervisors to withhold funds for a paved road near Klan headquarters. In another incident, agents reached out to friendly media contacts and persuaded them not to provide press coverage for a seemingly benign Klan-sponsored turkey shoot. Bureau agents printed flyers showing the wrong time and place for Klan meetings, and made a point of interviewing Klan members in public locations, where other men could see them and wonder whether they were working with the authorities. They dug up information on tax- and fire-code violations, then anonymously passed on the evidence to the relevant authorities.

In her book, Gage quotes journalists from the time period describing Hoover as having the Klan “by the balls,” and observes that after three Klansmen were convicted of the murder of a civil rights protester in 1965, the Klan ultimately “began to fall apart…unable to withstand the juggernaut of prosecution, in addition to the FBI’s ongoing campaign of exposure, surveillance, and disruptive measures.”

There is a concept in law enforcement called “left of boom,” which refers to the point on the timeline before a terrorist plot is executed (the “boom” being the explosion of the bomb) at which the government intervenes to disrupt it. If the FBI had the same latitude and free rein to operate before January 6 as it did in Hoover’s day, it would have had the pulse on the Proud Boys’ and Oath Keepers’ plans well before they had a chance to put them into action, or at least made sure that the groups self-destructed before they could act on them. It could have, to use the lingo, stopped the January 6 attack left of boom. But would we want them to be able to do that?

When I teach about COINTELPRO in my National Security Law class, my students are surprised to learn about WHITE HATE…and are ambivalent, if not outright supportive, of it. They intuitively feel like it’s different than the kinds of operations taken against civil rights activists and war protesters — I mean, who can really object to taking down the Klan? But when I press them to try to come up with a facially-neutral, bright line rule that would allow the FBI to surveil and collect intelligence on the KKK — or their modern day equivalents — but would clearly exclude things like Black Lives Matter protesters, they find it hard to come up with one. As we note in class, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, and leaving the discretion to make that distinction in the hands of law enforcement, or the President to whom they answer, can be a recipe for a civil liberties disaster.

This is why the reforms and protections created in the aftermath of the Church Committee hearings protect all domestic groups, regardless of ideology. Initially, Congress intended to subject the FBI to a legislative charter that would govern its investigations. But that effort lost momentum after the Justice Department itself issued rules and regulations for domestic national security investigations in 1976, known as the Levi Guidelines (named after the Attorney General at the time, Edward Levi). The Levi Guidelines, now known as the Attorney General Guidelines, “proceed[ed] from the proposition that Government monitoring of individuals or groups because they hold unpopular or controversial political views is intolerable in our society.” The current guidelines lay out specific bases upon which the FBI can initiate and pursue investigations against domestic terrorist groups, namely “when the facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that two or more persons are engaged in an enterprise for the purpose of furthering political or social goals wholly or in part through activities that involve force or violence and a violation of the criminal laws of the United States.” In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which excluded from domestic intelligence collection any individuals or groups that are not connected to a foreign power (like an international terrorist organization).

In short, the reforms since the Church Committee have truncated the “left of boom” window in which the FBI can intervene in domestic terrorism plots to after the point where ideology and rhetoric have clearly crossed the line into criminal conspiracy. This is the tradeoff we have made to balance our First Amendment freedoms against national security.

The FBI’s buffers around investigating First Amendment activity explains to some extent its failure to thwart the attack on January 6: There is no doubt that precisely because of its checkered past, the Bureau would have been leery of being seen as surveilling protected political speech and protest — which a lot of the “Stop the Steal” activity online would have been considered. As I have written previously, though, this doesn’t explain the FBI’s failure to look into many instances where political speech clearly crossed the line into threats of violence and made their way onto the agency’s radar. The Government Accountability Office agreed, finding in a recent report that the FBI received credible threats of violence in the days and weeks leading up to January 6 but “did not follow policies for processing some tips, resulting in them not being developed into reports that could have been shared with partners. Specifically, the FBI did not process all relevant information related to potential violence on January 6.”

Not only was the FBI not illegally monitoring of people based on political ideology, it looks like the FBI ignored or looked the other way when it received threats that it could have legally acted upon. We don’t know the reasons why (Director Christopher Wray hasn’t undertaken a review of what happened), but it’s fair to ask whether it was due in whole or in part due to implicit bias that downplayed the threat these individual posed or due to some agents’ ideological sympathy with Trump. (The latter hypothesis certainly seems to be supported by recent reporting that even in the aftermath of January 6, some FBI agents and supervisors have been loath to move forward on investigations against Trump — to the point where compromises and concessions were made in prosecutorial choices in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.)

Some of the statements made by Jordan’s witnesses echo this problem. In one instance detailed in the Committee staff report, a witness stated that he received investigative leads from an agent in another field office to follow up on an anonymous tip connected to the January 6 attack. Apparently, he didn’t feel that the tip needed further investigating, as he explained to the committee:

But I received a lead about someone based on an anonymous tip, and in law enforcement anonymous tips don't hold very much weight, especially without evidence that you can corroborate pretty easily. I wasn't able to corroborate anything they said, even after speaking with the person they alleged potential criminal behavior of. WhileI'm trying to figure all that out, I get another lead from the same agent who sent me that lead.

[He explained that he decided to call the agent who had sent him the lead]

After talking to her, my mind was blown that she was still trying to get me to do some legal process on the guy that I got the anonymous tip on. And so I ended up writing that all up and denying it. When we got off the phone, I was like, just going to close this. She still wanted me to do what she wanted me to do in the lead, and I was like, no. I can't.

Q: So, to your knowledge, that case was closed?

To my knowledge, yeah.

Far from being “pressured” to go after individuals with possible connections to January 6, it sounds to me like agents had a lot of freedom to nip leads and investigations in the bud, without any pushback from their supervisors. And this is after January 6. That, to me, is troubling.

The legacy of the Church Committee is that it resulted in more guardrails for the FBI’s domestic terrorism investigations. And this is the problem for Jim Jordan’s “weaponization” committee: When you have clear rules and policies you can easily discern if they’ve been broken. Jordan’s band of disgruntled employees (they aren’t legally whistleblowers) can’t point to a single rule or policy that the FBI broke…at least in the ways that they claim. As the GAO report details, however, the FBI did violate its own policies in following up on credible threats that should have been investigated more fully. The problem doesn’t appear to be that the FBI was too aggressive against January 6 protesters, it’s that the FBI wasn’t aggressive enough — so much so that its entire investigation into the January 6 attack is squarely “right of boom.” That’s what needs to be investigated.