As you consider Kash Patel, remember J. Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro. (Colbert K King)

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Colbert I. King reminds us of FBI's illegal COINTELPRO and its implications for the nomination of kooky KASH PATEL as FBI Director: 

Opinion

Colbert I. King

As you consider Kash Patel, remember J. Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro

“We’re going to come after you,” Patel said, echoing the FBI’s secret ops in the ’60s and ’70s.

December 20, 2024 at 1:58 p.m. ESTYesterday at 1:58 p.m. EST

4 min

Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for director of the FBI, on Capitol Hill this month. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, has a well-earned reputation as a loyalist who adopts Trump’s perceived enemies as his own. Patel has identified enemies in the “deep state” who he says need to be purged from the federal bureaucracy. He has threatened retribution against critics in the media, telling Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon on a podcast that if he were to join the Trump administration, he would retaliate against journalists. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly — we’ll figure that out,” Patel said.

“Going to come after you.” The phrase has an ominous ring that calls to mind the bad old years of Cointelpro — FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s secret counterintelligence program directed at domestic groups and individuals, including college students, Black community organizations, left-wing campaigns and the antiwar movement.

The FBI wasn’t out to get only lawbreakers. Hoover was bent on disrupting, demeaning and neutralizing the effectiveness of groups and individuals he deemed subversive or a threat to his warped vision of domestic order.

A 1974 Justice Department  memorandum titled “FBI Cointelpro Activities” characterizes some of the FBI’s actions and tactics. To demonstrate what can happen when the FBI decides to come after you, let me show you some highlights from the 21-page document.

Follow Colbert I. King

Under Cointelpro, the FBI:

• Sent anonymous fictitious materials to targeted groups, designed to “create dissention and cause disruption.”
• Leaked informant-based or investigative materials to friendly media sources for the purpose of exposing the nature, aims and membership of those groups.
• Deployed informants to disrupt such groups’ activities by sowing dissension and exploiting disputes.
• Informed employers, prospective employers, credit bureaus and creditors of targeted people’s “illegal, immoral, radical and Communist Party activities,” aiming to damage their financial or employment status.
• Told people that the FBI was “aware” of their activity, with the goal of developing them as informants.
• Attempted to persuade religious and civic leaders to exert pressure on state and local governments, employers and landlords to the “detriment” of the targeted groups.
• Sent anonymous letters, including one to a political candidate alerting him that a targeted group’s members were active in his campaign and warning him not to be a “tool,” and another to a school board official, “purporting to be from a concerned parent,” pointing out that some candidates for the school board were members of a certain group.
• Furnished background on a candidate for public office, including arrests and questionable marital status, to news media contacts; furnished information concerning arrests of an individual to a court that had earlier given him a suspended sentence and furnished this same information to his employer, which later fired him.
• Made “an anonymous telephone call to a defense attorney, after a federal prosecution had resulted in a mistrial, advising him (apparently falsely) that one of the defendants and another well-known group individual were FBI informants.”
• Put out disinformation over “citizens band” radio, using the same frequency as demonstrators.
• Obtained tax returns of suspect group members, reproduced a group leader’s signature stamp and investigated a group leader’s love life.

• Did the FBI bug the Rev. Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms? Yes. Did it record intimate moments within? Yes. Did it threaten him and try to slime him in the media? Yes.

  That’s just a taste of what Hoover’s secret police did in the 1960s and ’70s. The FBI deliberately sought to defame the character, reputation and dignity of individuals who — in pursuit of private, legal and/or constitutionally protected activities — had run afoul of people holding power in high places.

  The FBI surveilled and wiretapped American citizens as if their right to privacy and rights guaranteed under the Constitution were figments of someone’s imagination — which, in the minds of feds gone rogue, they were.

  Said Patel of Trump’s political rivals and critics in the media: “Yeah, we’re putting you all on notice, and Steve [Bannon], this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators.”

  Under Patel, would the FBI become weaponized against people and the press once again? Remember Cointelpro.

  

  By Colbert I. King

  Colbert I. “Colby” King writes a column — sometimes about D.C., sometimes about politics — that runs in print on Saturdays. In 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. King joined the Post’s editorial board in 1990 and served as deputy editorial page editor from 2000 to 2007.follow on X@kingc_i