Once hated by the left, the FBI is the new demon of conservatives and Donald Trump supporters

Agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are used to criticism, but never in the agency’s history have they faced anything like the conservative charge after the raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence last week. .

In its more than 100-year history, the FBI has been hated by racist and segregationist southerners, civil libertarians and African Americans whose liberation movement of the 1960s was treated by the agency as a serious national threat.

But last week’s extraordinary threats come from its political base: the Republican conservatives.

“It’s the world upside down,” says Kenneth O’Reilly, a retired University of Alaska historian and writer of books on the FBI and politics.

According to him, the FBI always has been a “deeply conservative institution” with bipartisan backing in Washington.

republican attacks

But ever since Trump called the body corrupt and fascist After his property in Mar-a-Lago was raided on August 8 for illegally hiding secret documents, the attacks have not stopped and his supporters continue to fuel the fire.

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel accused the office of “abuse of power”.

Senator Marco Rubio, R-Florida, compared the agency to the secret police of a Marxist dictatorship, while Rep. Paul Gosar said, “We must destroy the FBI.”

On the web, and also on Trump’s social network, Truth Social, the threats were more violentand they came true.

On August 11, a 42-year-old gunman attacked the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati after writing on social media attributed to him that people should “respond by force” to the raid on Trump’s residence and “kill the country. ‘FBI “.

The man was unable to enter the office in that Ohio city, and He was killed by a police gunshot.

The next day, another 46-year-old man was arrested in Pennsylvania for similar threats.

“If you work for the FBI you deserve to die,” he wrote on social media.

myth and reality

The FBI, long mythologized in movies and on television as the home of the “G Men” in the 1930s and the powerful and inscrutable J. Edgar Hoover, has received recurring criticism from all sides, O’Reilly told AFP.

“There was a huge backlash among southern racists in the early 1960s against the FBI, which they treated like the Gestapo” for investigating the lynching of African Americans.

The worst time, O’Reilly says, was also in the 1960s, when the agency spied on and tried to undermine the civil rights movementslandering Martin Luther King Jr. and fueling violence between rival groups to discredit them.

But the reactions at the time were one of outrage and contentiousness, which led to a wide-ranging investigation in Congress that exposed the abuses committed, says the man who documented the FBI’s war against the black nationalist movement.

“There was no direct violence against FBI agents.”

In 1995, the FBI’s actions sparked a violent attack. Anti-government extremists detonated a bomb in a federal office in Oklahoma City, where the regional headquarters of the FB was located. 168 people died.

The extremists’ reaction was partly motivated by the FBI’s mismanagement of two fatal kidnappings in 1992 and 1993.

But despite everything, the FBI has generally maintained strong political and popular support.

Donald Trump’s battle

The current wave against the agency has its origin in Trump’s long battle with the federal office and, in particular, the FBI’s investigation of hundreds of former president’s supporters who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

For O’Reilly, it is the outspoken threats from Trump politicians and supporters that make the current moment so shocking.

“I think the vast majority of FBI agents voted for Trump,” he said. “So it’s a crazy idea of ​​the more conservative elements of the Republican Party to see the FBI as a tool of the radical left.”

The strong response from US judicial authorities to threats has also been extraordinary.

Fences were erected to protect the FBI headquarters in Washington.

“Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be of grave concern to all Americans,” said agency director Chris Way.

The Homeland Security Department warned in a special bulletin that officers could be in danger.

“I don’t remember a threat like this in recent years,” Brian O’Hare, president of the Association of FBI Agents, told NPR.

“It’s worrying. It’s unacceptable. And it should be condemned by anyone who knows.” “It is a climate of acceptance of violence that must be changed,” she added.

Source: AFP

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