FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Dr. King Biographer David Garrow Rips Democrats’ Backing of FBI Crimes
Feb. 6, 2018 (EIRNS)—David Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross—Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and an advisor for the 1987 PBS documentary series “Eyes on the Prize” on the history of the Civil Rights Movement, ripped into the Democrats who are currently sucking up to the FBI illegal operations. He makes an example of Rep. John Rooney, who headed the House committee which oversaw the FBI until 1974, and did anything J. Edgar Hoover wanted, including the dirty operations against King and others in the Civil Rights Movement. But when he left, says Garrow, the likes of Frank Church helped expose the “politically motivated misbehavior that had occurred when executive-branch controls and meaningful congressional oversight were absent.”
He further describes how the Bureau claims that they are now clean, “Yet anyone eager to embrace the belief that today’s FBI is a rigorously professional and politically unbiased agency is overlooking the facts.” The FBI
“knowingly relied on the ‘Steele dossier’—third-hand, anonymous partisan gossip about Donald Trump, brokered by a paid operative—to obtain a top-secret court order for surveillance of former Trump advisor Carter Page, an American citizen. Yet so far as we know, Mr. Page is guilty of nothing more than pursuing unsuccessful business ties in Moscow while mouthing naive platitudes about Vladimir Putin.”
He names former FBI Director Comey, newly former FBI Deputy Director McCabe, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as signers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, as revealed by the Nunes memo.
“To anyone who has studied how Hoover’s FBI worked, this continuing approval immediately calls to mind the Bureau’s never-ending surveillance of King’s closest advisor, Stanley Levison. Year after year, the wiretaps of Levison produced no evidence to support the FBI’s hypothesis that he was a Soviet agent. Still, successive attorneys general, including Bobby Kennedy, readily approved the FBI’s surveillance of Levison and his family.”
He concludes by denouncing
“Democratic lawmakers’ eagerness to cover up, excuse and defend FBI behavior that their predecessors of the 1970s would have readily denounced. The ignominious irony is that judgment-blurring partisan hatred is leading many Democrats to ignore and forsake the lessons that the FBI’s history so richly teaches.”
