“You know what you need to do King,” an anonymous letter that was included in a package sent to Martin Luther King in 1964 after he had received the Nobel Peace Prize for his ceaseless efforts to end racial discrimination in the U S. Along with the letter, the Civil Rights leader also received tapes of some of his extra marital sexual encounters at various hotels that he had previously stayed. While the letter was said to have written to appear as it had been penned by someone close to King, a recent biography indicates that the Nobel Prize recipient realized that it had come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the direction of it’s then executive director, J. Edgar Hoover. Those tapes were also leaked to the media, but in accordance with the unwritten rules that governed the coverage of the private lives of public figures at that time. And as set forth in a documentary film made by acclaimed filmmaker Sam Pollard succinctly titled “ MLK/FBI,” it was subsequently revealed that FBI agents would routinely visit hotel rooms where King would be staying and would install listening and recording devices in adjacent rooms in violation of federal law, and that the agency had an informant in his entourage who would share that information with them. It is believed that Hoover hoped that the letter would result in King taking his own life. Pollard would later say that King was a man who had “a tremendous amount of burdens he had to deal with, both politically, socially, and personally.” But the civil rights leader courageously continued on, and would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 where he was marching on behalf of African American sanitation workers who were seeking increased wages and better working conditions using the poignant slogan “I am a man.” And it is now clear that the FBI under Hoover was often used as a political weapon to harass and intimidate other individuals and organizations that had aroused his ire. But in subsequent decades under more enlightened leadership, The FBI became a more professional law enforcement agency and gradually began to earn back the trust of the American people. The current director of the agency, Christopher Wray, had previously been a high ranking official in the Justice Department under the administration of George W. Bush. And the unfounded attacks on Wray by right wing Republican members of Congress in a hearing held last week, as noted by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, were nothing more than a cynical ploy to discredit the ongoing investigations of former President Donald Trump and his associates who were involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “You have personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives,” Wray was told by Representative Harriet Hagman. But Wray subsequently told the subcommittee that “The idea that I am biased against conservatives seems insane to me, given my own personal background.” As noted by Milbank, the attacks made on the credibility of the FBI by Hagman and her ilk and their allies in the right wing media have served to erode trust in the agency at least among voters who identify as Republicans. But the eventual results of the ongoing investigations and subsequent judicial proceedings may serve to vindicate the Federal Bureau of Investigation of today as well as Christopher Wray’s stewardship of it.
Against the Grain 