David Garrow, Pulitzer winner and Obama supporter/Biography writer BLASTS the left in OpEd

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Democrats and FBI Abuses
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In the 1970s, progressives stood up for civil liberties. Today they’ve reverted to the J. Edgar Hoover era.

Only a few aging historians still remember Rep. John J. Rooney, but from the 1940s into the 1970s he was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s most powerful enabler. Rooney, a Brooklyn, N.Y., Democrat, led the House appropriations subcommittee that oversaw the Justice Department. He remained Hoover’s steadfast ally as presidents from Truman through Nixon came and went.

John Rooney personified an era in which congressional Democrats eagerly aided and abetted the FBI’s running amok, as the bureau surveilled political activists who attracted Hoover’s ire. Rooney’s retirement in 1974 ushered in a radically different age, featuring rigorous and aggressive congressional oversight. A new generation of Democrats, led by principled progressives like Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike, courageously proved ready and willing to expose and eliminate the abuse of Americans’ constitutional rights that had long been Hoover’s political bread and butter.

Yet anyone eager to embrace the belief that today’s FBI is a rigorously professional and politically unbiased agency is overlooking the facts.

The same FBI knowingly relied on the “Steele dossier”—third-hand, anonymous partisan gossip about Donald Trump, brokered by a paid operative—to obtain a top-secret court order for surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page, an American citizen. Yet so far as we know, Mr. Page is guilty of nothing more than pursuing unsuccessful business ties in Moscow while mouthing naive platitudes about Vladimir Putin.

Worst of all, the court order for surveillance of Mr. Page was renewed three successive times at the behest of officials including Mr. Comey, the FBI’s then Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. To anyone who has studied how Hoover’s FBI worked, this continuing approval immediately calls to mind the bureau’s never-ending surveillance of King’s closest adviser, Stanley Levison. Year after year, the wiretaps of Levison produced no evidence to support the FBI’s hypothesis that he was a Soviet agent. Still, successive attorneys general, including Bobby Kennedy, readily approved the FBI’s surveillance of Levison and his family.

At first blush, Mr. Rosenstein might welcome the comparison to RFK. But the important point is that the modern Justice Department’s surveillance of law-abiding American citizens—whether in New York or Dallas—is no more defensible than the 1960s blanket coverage of Levison and King.

Yet that bright truth is, at the moment, being outshone by Democratic lawmakers’ eagerness to cover up, excuse and defend FBI behavior that their predecessors of the 1970s would have readily denounced. The ignominious irony is that judgment-blurring partisan hatred is leading many Democrats to ignore and forsake the lessons that the FBI’s history so richly teaches.

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