Corruption in the Department of Justice
The Truth About the 'Weaponization of the Justice System'
At various times in recent decades, both Republicans and Democrats have accused their opponents of attempting to use control over the Department of Justice and law enforcement agencies for political advantage. But one of the things we learned from Sen. Frank Church’s Committee in 1975 is that this problem began much earlier, and included operations such as COINTELPRO, an FBI program started in the mid-1950s which involved the illegal surveillance, infiltration and disruption of a wide assortment of political organizations and movements that were regarded as undesirable. As with other covert (and illegal) activities that were exposed in the Church Committee hearings, the FBI issued a mea culpa and assured the public that COINTELPRO had been discontinued. However, the facts demonstrate that this was not the case.
The most spectacular and meticulously documented abuse of DOJ and FBI power was the decades-long campaign against the movement of economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche. About that corrupt campaign, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote, “I believe it involves a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge.” It involved defamatory stories planted in the media, attempted infiltration, bogus prosecutions, the jailing of movement leaders, the suppression of publications, and other, more covert forms of harassment, all of which took place after the FBI had claimed it had discontinued COINTELPRO.
These activities persist today; for example, Lieutenant Colonel Tulsi Gabbard, who has a high security clearance, was placed last year on a Transportation Security Administration watchlist called “Quiet Skies.” This prompts additional security screening before flights, a particularly insulting form of harassment.
Kash Patel has declared that he will have a “take no prisoners” attitude when confirmed to head the FBI. He writes in his book, Government Gangsters:
One of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the primary investigatory agency within the executive branch, which operates under the authority of the DoJ. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may have a greater air of mystery around it (and it’s certainly the subject of many more spy thrillers), but in many ways a hyperpoliticized FBI is a much greater threat to American freedom and self-government. That’s because while the CIA has the power and authority to collect intelligence and operate in clandestine manners overseas, the FBI focuses inside of the United States. We have legal and procedural safeguards in place in order to prevent abuses, but as the nation has learned, those safeguards are not even close to being enough. The FBI is now the prime functionary of the Deep State. The politicized leadership at the very top has turned it into a tool of surveillance and suppression of American citizens.
The Debacle of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
In recent years, a particular arena of political gamesmanship within the legal system has been the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
Ironically, the FISA and FISC were created during the Carter administration as a response to the COINTELPRO and related abuses uncovered by the Church Committee. They were supposed to limit “non-criminal electronic surveillances within the United States” to those that were conducted “for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence and/or foreign counterintelligence,” and established a system of courts to review and control applications by federal agencies for search warrants.
However, they left a gaping loophole in order to make it possible to spy on someone who could not be plausibly connected to nefarious foreign interests, by allowing something called “acquisition,” which is undefined in the statute. To fill this gap, the NSA has defined it as “interception by the National Security Agency through electronic means of a communication.” Thus, information acquired by Britain’s GCHQ, or one of the other UKUSA parties, and then passed to U.S. agencies, is not covered under the act. The U.S. and U.K. can simply spy on each other’s citizenry and swap the data.
Using a “national security” rationale, the proceedings of the FISC courts are kept secret. Applications for search warrants are almost never denied. The system is essentially toothless and has not lived up to the expectations of the Church Committee. Tulsi Gabbard said, “The [FISA] court has proven to be a dependable rubber stamp for government requests.”
During the heyday of Russiagate, the court issued warrants on false premises for the FBI’s surveillance against the Trump campaign, dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane (made all the more ridiculous for having taken its code name from the lyrics of a song by the Rolling Stones.) Then, having been caught with its hand in the cookie jar, the court appointed former Assistant Attorney General for National Security David Kris, a vociferous Russiagate partisan, as adviser on reforming its warrant processes, prompting Rep. Devin Nunez to say, “It’s a ridiculous choice. The FBI lied to the FISC, and to help make sure that doesn’t happen again, the FISC chose an FBI apologist who denied and defended those lies. The FISC is setting its own credibility on fire.”