I was listening to MPR last week (so you don’t have to), and almost had to pull the car over when I heard this interview – with Beverly Gage, historian and author of “G-Man – J Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century”.
And I almost pulled off the road because the generic female NPR host got sooooo close to realizing “giving big governent unlimited, unaccountable power can have bad unintended consequences”…
,,,but just couldn’t quite say it.
Back when the Peter Strzok/Lisa Page affair made the news I was surprised to see how much the FBI standards had slipped.
The story goes that the FBI that Hoover built expected its agents to be non-partisan and to have the morality of boy scouts. Hoover built the FBI this way because the FBI is not a national police force. The FBI’s work required the trust, voluntary cooperation, and positive help from local officials and ordinary Americans because the FBI’s jurisdiction was so narrow.
I guess that what has happened was inevitable as the FBI’s jurisdiction and policing power grew. If the FBI can demonstrate contempt for congress and the president, do you think they care what you think of it?