The FBI executed a search warrant at the Mar-a-Lago residence of former President Donald Trump this week. This is an unprecedented move. No other former president has ever been searched.
This is the subject of such an investigative procedure. In response, chief Trump supporter and MAGA cheerleader Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed outrage at the FBI’s actions by tweeting, “DEFUND THE FBI!” Far right Rep. Paul Gosar hit similar notes, tweeting, “We must destroy the FBI. We must save America.” While this about-face on “Back the Blue” is an amusing example of the right-wing ideological confusion that ensues when lawmakers adhere to diehard Trump loyalism, we on the left should use this moment as an opportunity to explore a plan to actually do that. The FBI should indeed be defunded — though the reasons for that have nothing to do with the fact that the agency searched Donald Trump’s home.
The Capitol attack of January 6 revealed the deep fissures within the Back the Blue concept, which was created by the right to respond to the Black Lives Matter protests. Conservatives may claim to support police, but they only do so on a very limited basis. They only want police authority to be directed at the suspect classes they see, which includes poor people, BIPOC groups, trans peoples, immigrants, antifascists and sex workers. Built into right-wing support for the police is an understanding — grounded in history — that police authority should not be exercised against the powerful classes, including the wealthy, the politically dominant — and white nationalists. This understanding is why many on the right do not view images of “Back the Blue” proponents beating Capitol police with their Trump flags as hypocritical.
This apparent contradiction allows us to discover a deeper truth about police power. The FBI and the police were not created to serve justice. The history of the FBI has been one of repressing liberation movements and waging war on marginalized communities under the guise wars on drugs and crime, terrorism, gangs, and communism. The FBI’s long-running stretches of state-sanctioned violence have served to criminalize those that challenge the status quo, either through organized resistance or through survival strategies that interfere with capitalist notions of protecting the private property and individual autonomy of the rich and powerful.
The Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to the FBI was established in 1908 to investigate political threats to power of the robber barsons. These threats included strikes by workers, anarchists, and communists. The Bureau of Investigation was initially motivated by fears of communist revolution after the Russian Revolution, and then the massive strikes of labor militancy of 1930s, and became the federal primary tool for surveillance and subverting left-leaning organizations. It was taken over by J. Edgar Hoover in 1924 and transformed into the FBI in 1934, when it became a massive domestic intelligence-gathering operation with files on millions of Americans including politicians, celebrities, labor leaders, journalists, religious figures, and anyone suspected of subversive leanings, many of whom were people of color, Jews, and other members of historically oppressed communities. In his book, Tim Weiner. The FBI’s History of Enemies,The FBI’s political origins and dirty tricks are meticulously documented.
Hoover identified a new subversive danger in the 1960s: the civil rights movement. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), an FBI-created program, monitored and undermined socialist leaders as well as civil rights movement leaders such Martin Luther King Jr. and coordinated local attacks against the Black Panthers, Socialist Workers Party and other groups. FBI agents attended activist groups’ meetings, openly photographed license plates of attendees, wiretapped phones, sent fake correspondences, and used informants to plant false rumors about marital infidelities and police cooperation to sow fear and dissension. The FBI was directly involvedLocal officials in Chicago conspired with Fred Hampton, the leader of the Black Panthers, to assassinate him.
The FBI has been used for political subversion since its inception to suppress any threats to the status-quo. But, in contrast to the claims of Trump loyalists, the focus of the FBI’s attacks has rarely been the right-wing extremists that now dominate much of the Republican Party. His book Disrupt, Discredit and Divide Michael German, an ex-FBI agent, points out that federal law enforcement has largely ignored and excused right-wing violent acts, leaving a focus on Muslim immigrant, environmental activists, and Movement for Black Lives, along with other marginalized group.
Given the history behind politically motivated repression it is only right that the left calls for defunding and defanging of the FBI. Here’s a concrete plan to get you started:
1) End the FBI’s role in political policing. The FBI should be forced to shut down the intelligence-gathering activities that make possible the subversion tactics at the center of the agency’s history. Following the revelations made by COINTELPRO during the 1970s, the Church Committee attempted this through the power of congressional oversight, but many of the FBI’s harmful practices remained, although they were better hidden from view and protected by language intended to restrict — but not eliminate — their activities.
2) End the FBI’s role in the “war on terror.” One of the primary tools in waging this war has been the entrapment of people who are lured into fantastical plots invented by FBI agents so that they can be arrested for planning actions they had no intention or ability to ever complete. These operations have one goal, as in the case of an intellectually disabled man in New York who was lured into a heist. FBI-created plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station, seem designed to give the FBI the appearance of winning — to garner support for counterterrorism funding for the agency. We should also demolish fusion centers, Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and other terrorist organizations. As Brendan McQuade documents in Pacifying the HomelandThese efforts have not done much to protect us against actual violence. Instead, they have morphed into all-purpose “predictive” policing operations that spend much of their time preparing threat assessments for local police and private business interests that both exaggerate the threat of politically motivated violence and use complex algorithms to justify intensive and invasive policing of poor and BIPOC communities.
3) End the FBI’s role in the “war on drugs.” The war on drugs has been an unmitigated failure, if your metric of success is saving lives and improving community safety. If your metric of success is to criminalize political enemies and target the poor and people of colour, then you have succeeded. The federal prohibition against many drugs has been a major driver for mass incarceration, criminalization of non-white communities, and the overdose crisis. Susan Phillips’s Operation Flytrap It is clear that the FBI anti-drug operation, which was aptly named by the FBI, did nothing to stop drug flows into Los Angeles. Instead, it criminalized most vulnerable people in a community already hard hit with poverty, unemployment, disinvestment from the public and the private sector. We should also abolish the Drug Enforcement AgencyYou can save your money for police-free harm reduction projects, high quality and noncoercive drugs treatment, and targeted economic growth programs.
4) End the FBI’s role in so-called violence reduction. Presidents have repeatedly used the FBI as a political tool for looking “tough on crime.” “Gang takedowns” and special initiatives have been created to give the appearance of federal action to tackle crime, but have little to show for themselves other than police-perpetrated abuse and mass incarceration. The FBI has used RICO conspiracy laws for years to target youth violence. As The Policing and Social Justice Project documentedThese takedowns in New York City entrap large numbers of young people based upon their associations with violence, rather than direct involvement. Babe Howell, City University of New York law professor showed that in one such mass arrest of 120 young people, half of those charged were simply accused of drug-related offenses, despite being called the “worst of the worst” and held without bail for up to two years awaiting dispositions. Even if they were actually accused of violence, it would not justify treating them this way. Instead of pouring money into “anti-violence” initiatives that are themselves purveyors of violence, we should be looking to community-driven solutions. The New York City G.A.N.G.S. CoalitionOthers from the U.S. called for investments in community anti-violence initiatives, and reinvestments to communities that have been affected by deindustrialization redlining and austerity.
Donald Trump announced in 2019 that he would use the FBI for his reelection efforts. Operation Relentless Pursuit. He targeted seven cities run by Democratic mayors to receive infusions of federal agents and money for more local police to engage in intensive policing of “high crime” communities, backed up by intensive federal prosecutions. Local activists in the cities were targeted Memphis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, BaltimoreAnd AlbuquerqueMobilized against local cooperation in this initiative, citing federal accountability and the need of community investments, rather than more policing.
These four steps would drastically reduce the FBI’s power and reach a point where it can be abolished. It has not provided justice or protection for large sections of American society. As right-wingers make a bizarre and twisted case for defunding the FBI, we on the left need to make our own case for defunding the FBI’s intrusive and illegitimate political policing. Then, we need to question the basic function federal law enforcement plays in supporting a system that is characterized by extreme inequality, injustice, and state violence.
