Ian Haworth: The FBI Is The Worst

In the fourth episode of my new show, “Off Limits with Ian Haworth,” we dived into the history of the FBI, and how it’s filled to the brim with scandal after scandal, screw-up after screw-up, and crime after crime.

Full episodes are available on Sundays 9pm EST, exclusively on YouTube.

Last week, we talked about the FBI’s raid of Donald Trump’s Florida home, which sparked our culture’s familiar level of division, with Donald Trump — again — smack-dab in the middle.

And then there’s the hypocrisy of it all, given that Hunter Biden commits criminal acts on an almost daily basis, and Hillary Clinton handed classified documents to Russia before destroying the evidence with Clorox and a baseball bat.

But if you can just plug your ears and ignore the screaming from both sides, anybody with half a brain cell should at least question how much we can trust an institution controlled by one party in power that openly hates the other side. 

After all, the FBI reports to attorney general Merrick Garland, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, whose primary political rival is Donald Trump — also the man who stopped Garland from getting his dream job on the Supreme Court. Oh, and Merrick Garland gave the order on the raid!

So when you view it through that lens, and look past the murky swamp that is D.C., you’ll find something really important that people are missing”:

The FBI sucks.

And it’s sucked since its inception.

When you understand just how awful they’ve been for decades, it’s shocking that anyone can still trust the integrity of the FBI, the principal federal law enforcement agency of the United States, operating under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice.

The history of the FBI is full of screw-up after screw-up, and crime after crime, many of them happening under one of the agency’s most instrumental founders, J. Edgar Hoover. 

He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, and was director of the FBI from its founding in 1935 until Hoover’s death in 1972.

And the fact that Hoover referred to the FBI as “the seat of government” tells you all you need to know, with a rich history of secrecy and abuses of power.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

In the 1970s, an anti-war group conspired to break into FBI offices to uncover what they believed to be illegal spying and harassment of antiwar protesters. With Scooby Doo level disguises, they were able to walk right in the unlocked building while the entire bureau was distracted by the Ali-Frazier title fight.

And despite the FBI investigating a burglary of their own office, they never figured out who did it.

Surprisingly, the files stolen ended up proving that the worst accusations and conspiracy theories about the FBI’s behavior at the time were utterly true.

This was all exposed in 1971, after NBC reporter Carl Stern successfully sued for access to the stolen documents, leading to the uncovering of one word: CO-INTEL-PRO. 

Hoover started CO-INTEL-PRO, a covert “dirty tricks” program, in 1956, with tactics including infiltration, burglaries, setting up illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents, and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations, while some even argue that methods included inciting violence and arranging murders.

One example was the surveillance and harassment of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., including attempts to bully him into killing himself.

A letter sent to the civil rights icon labelled him as a “fraud” and a “great liability to all of us negroes,” threatening him with exposing all of King’s supposed “dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk,” repeating time after time that he’s finished and that all of his evilness, including “sexual orgies” will be on the record.”

Here’s how this particular letter, again, sent by the FBI, ended:

“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 (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.”

The FBI also tried to blackmail King with recordings of him having sex with other women, sending them to his wife and offering the recordings to journalists.

Apparently, this is one element of institutional racism that no-one seems to care about anymore…

And the racist undertones of the FBI didn’t start or end with Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you’ve seen the movie, Judas and the Black Messiah, you know the story of Black Panther Fred Hampton, who was shot and killed in his bed by Chicago police in December 1969 after being drugged. He was also set up by an FBI informant. 

Actress Jean Seberg killed herself after the FBI planted a story with a news columnist that she had slept with a Black Panther and gotten pregnant, and in 1965, a white civil rights worker was murdered by a group of KKK members — one of whom was an FBI informant.

The Klansmen chased Viola Liuzzo and fired shots into her car when they saw that her passenger was black. Afterwards, the FBI spread rumors that the murdered Liuzzo was a communist, a drug addict, and that she abandoned her children to have sex with African Americans in the civil rights movement. 

According to FBI records, J. Edgar Hoover personally relayed these insinuations to then-President Johnson.

But it’s unfair to blame all of the FBI’s failings on Hoover himself, because after his death, the FBI kept on going.

Who knows what damage was done by the crime boss Whitey Bulger from 1975 onwards. The FBI essentially allowed him to do what he wanted because he was handing over information on the inner workings of a rival mafia family. 

And this trail of violence was more brutally obvious in other cases.

The FBI were involved in the disastrous Waco siege in 1993, which culminated in a fire that killed 76 of the Branch Davidians living in the besieged building, including 26 children. Years later, it was revealed that some of the 400 tear gas canisters fired by the FBI were flammable.

In 2005, Puerto Rico’s governor claimed that the FBI assault which led to the killing of a Puerto Rican nationalist leader was “improper” and “highly irregular,” and that his government was never told of it. Some people labeled this as an assassination, and the FBI refused to release any information beyond the official press release.

In 2013, Ibragim Todashev — an associate of the mastermind of the Boston Marathon bombers — was killed by an FBI agent during an interrogation. The FBI blocked the autopsy report because the “case was still under active investigation.”

And then there’s violence not due to violent intent (or alleged intent), but violent incompetence.

For example, two days after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, the FBI admitted that they had received a tip-off one month beforehand. The caller provided information about the shooter’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.

They did nothing about it, and later reported that protocol was not followed when the tip was not forwarded to the Miami Field Office.

17 people were killed by the shooter.

And, in 2015, a white supremacist committed a mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, despite the fact that he shouldn’t have been able to buy a firearm legally, having confessed to possessing narcotics. But the FBI didn’t reject the background check because they screwed up the individual’s information and confused two different police departments. So, the shooter was able to buy a firearm, and murdered nine people.

And in one case, the FBI looked into someone who wrote on a message board that he was “plotting a mass shooting” and looking for “weapons that are good for killing a lot of people within a budget.” He then told the agents that he’s “not the type to actually do any of this stuff,” and they agreed and closed the case. 

They also didn’t inform the school. 

The next year, that person committed a school shooting, killing two students and then himself. 

And the history of the FBI is as bloody as it is…incompetent.

First, there’s what the Department of Justice called “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history,” when special agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for spying for the Soviet Union and then Russia for over twenty years.

When the FBI raided the home of a political activist in 2010, they left the confidential government operations order behind — which included plans for the raid, photographs, and potential interview questions — and didn’t even realize what they’d done until the documents were posted online.

In 2008, the FBI had their phone line cut during a national security investigation because they forgot to pay the bill.

And maybe we should all be worried that the FBI might use our likeness for a wanted poster if they really need a good photo.

When the FBI were trying to catch Whitey Bulger after he fled, they used the photographs of a random retired couple who suddenly became the center of an international manhunt. This also happened to a Spanish politician when the FBI used a bunch of his facial features to build what they thought an up-to-date image of Osama Bin Laden would look like.

And finally, there are cases which are just plain weird.

There’s the time an FBI agent impersonated an Associated Press journalist, and unintentionally infected a 15-year-old suspect’s computer with malicious surveillance software.

And a Caltech graduate student found that FBI computers were used to edit the FBI article on Wikipedia.

There’s the story when a would-be school bomber noticed before his arrest that a nearby wireless connection popped up as “FBI_SURVEILLANCE_VAN.” 

There’s an undercover FBI agent who admitted to using a video camera that didn’t record audio and didn’t catch visual evidence of an alleged murder-for-hire scheme.

Another FBI agent crashed a top-of-the-line Ferrari F50 into a bush and refused to pay $750,000 in damages after being instructed to move the vehicle — which was still involved in an investigation.

There’s also a time the FBI were investigating video of an apparent murder scene which turned out to be footage of the band Nine Inch Nails filming a music video.

And then there’s the FBI agent who fell in love with the person she was investigating. Oh, and that person was a German rapper turned ISIS terrorist. In 2014 the agent fell in love with Denis Cuspert, whose rap name was Deso Dogg and terrorist name was Abu Talha al-Almani. She left her husband to marry Abu Talha al-Almani, fleeing to Syria, before fleeing back to the U.S. when she realized that being married to a man who held a freshly severed human head in a propaganda video for ISIS wasn’t the romantic fairytale she was promised.

Time after time, the FBI screws up, let alone the multiple high-profile calamities in recent years, like the FBI’s failure to act on allegations made by U.S. gymnasts against former team doctor Larry Nassar, or taking orders from a fraudster who was stealing from a crime scene, butt-dialing a serial killer, tipping him off and setting him free, or spending two years investigating an anti-goth cult which was actually a satirical website.

So when the FBI is built on a rotten foundation, and populated by the kind of geniuses who name their wifi “FBI SURVEILLANCE VAN”, is it really any surprise that the agency is so easily abused?

Are you really surprised that the FBI would be used to target political enemies, given that’s what they’ve been doing from the start? 

Are you really surprised that the FBI would be used to mislabel law-abiding American citizens as domestic terrorists to justify censorship (or worse), given that’s what they’ve been doing from the start? 

Are you really surprised that the FBI routinely fails in its fundamental responsibilities to protect law-abiding American citizens from actual crime, given that’s what they’ve been doing from the start?

If you still think the FBI is a force for good at this point, you’re either stupid, or you’re in the FBI.

But I repeat myself.