By Dalvin Aboagye
As the final full week of July came to an end, so too did the Democratic party’s pipe-dream of taking out Trump through impeachment. On Wednesday, July 24, special counsel Robert Mueller addressed Congress, and the rest of the nation, on the results of his extensive investigation into the Trump administration’s ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
While many critics of the administration hoped that Mueller’s televised testimony would be the key to turning Trump’s base against him, what actually transpired wasn’t even close. The whole plan seemed to be doomed from the start. Mueller’s performance was underwhelming and no stunning details emerged that weren’t already mentioned in the original report. Throughout the entirety of this two-year-long debacle—from the firing of James Comey in 2017 to the release of the final report in March of this year—those who supported the president from the get-go barely budged in their thinking. Despite all the developments along the way, his approval ratings remained steady during the course of the investigation.
The strategy that some on the left were hoping would deal him a massive blow was a predictable flop. It’s astonishing, really. Right now, we’re witnessing one of the rare moments where white liberals were neglected by the very authority figures—the clean cut devotees of the FBI—who for decades have actively protected their interests at the cost of minority lives. If they took a page out of the playbook of Black voices, they would’ve known it was futile to begin with.
If not for the benefits regularly afforded to them in many aspects of American life, maybe they wouldn’t have been blinded to the possibility that former members of the top cops in the country might not be able to take down the man who they naively viewed as the source of America’s ills.
In doing so, they’ve ignored what Black people have already known for decades: the FBI isn’t your ally, and given the chance, they can and will turn on you. As the country’s primary federal law enforcement agency, it, like any other institution, is subject to the same biases present throughout American society. Just ask those who’ve been on the front lines fighting for Black liberation.
Many of us are all too familiar with the various methods employed by the Bureau during the 1960s to derail the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. The documents obtained in 1971 by anti-war activists on COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) painted a picture of a law enforcement agency—under the command of known racist J. Edgar Hoover—that cast suspicion on anyone even remotely connected to the fight for Black rights in the country. They acted with little oversight as they spied, lied and destabilized their way towards their goal of taking down any progressive group operating at the time. While files on white supremacist groups like the KKK existed, the attention given to those malevolent factions of society paled in comparison to the attention given to revolutionaries they viewed as “subversive.” Not even those luminaries who operated within the bounds of white people’s preferred version of civility were safe from the onslaught.
In addition to wiretapping his calls, the FBI sent a disturbing letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1964 posing as a Black citizen dissatisfied with the movement’s direction. The demeaning taunts labeling him a “fraud” and “a great liability to all of us Negroes” were nothing compared to the most insidious portion of the letter that suggested King would be better off committing suicide lest he wished to see what comes next:
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
A little over a half a century later and we still remain in their cross-hairs.
In April, The Intercept reported on the FBI’s efforts to assess the threat posed by so-called “Black identity extremists,” a fear mongering designation placed on anyone involved in the Black Lives Matter movement post-Ferguson. Similar to COINTELPRO, the FBI put in extensive work infiltrating and incriminating members of a movement they viewed as having the potential to kickoff “an increase in premeditated retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.” These beliefs, which they disseminated to police departments across the country, could’ve potentially worsened relations between the police and the Black community.
“As one of the people I interviewed for the story, I think put it very well, is that when you create this idea that somebody is a terrorist and a threat to law enforcement, you authorized police to shoot first and ask questions later, which police already do with Black people often enough,” journalist Alice Speri, said on an episode of The Intercepted podcast. Consequently, the very clear and present danger of white supremacist-fueled domestic terrorism is ignored until the worst happens.
So why then rely on an organization rife with racial bias to take down an openly racist commander-in-chief? Why seek change through these stalwarts? The boy scout-esque image men like Mueller and Comey exude failed to sway a part of the public that didn’t want to listen to begin with. It should’ve been clear that their by-the-book facades were flimsy from the start. Where were the pleas for the “rule of law” when the FBI, under Mueller’s direction, detained almost a thousand immigrants post-9/11 in hopes of giving the impression that they were on the front-lines in the fight against terrorism? Where was the anger when a few of those detainees “were brutalized and jailed for up to a year” because of his glorified PR move?
To not call attention to these injustices is to assert that such actions are fine as long as the rhetoric is kept under wraps. As long as the acts being committed are done outside the purview of the American people and lack any sort of boasting, they somehow get a pass. It’s not unlike those who condemn publicly telling off politicians, regardless of their questionable track records. It’s a call to return to the previous era of political discourse that looked the other away as long as those in power stayed polite. The worst shouldn’t be seen or heard, just so everything can remain cordial. For them, Trump broke those rules while Mueller offered a possible quick fix.
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Dalvin Aboagye is a freelance writer and student at Stony Brook University. His work runs the gamut in terms of subject matter but he’s particularly focused on dissecting the meaning behind different media.
