"The FBI originated in the post-World War I ‘Red Scare’ atmosphere as an attempt by the [United States] government to crush all left-wing anti-war opposition in the country. That’s how J. Edgar Hoover got his start, leading the 1919-20 Palmer raids," Klein said.
Those raids, ordered by President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general Thomas Palmer, rounded up hundreds of socialists, anarchists and left-wing union activists and deported them, Klein recalled.
"Thus, the FBI’s purpose has always been highly political, but in later years they pretended to be above ‘politics’," he stated.
"Hoover’s harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders is well-known and documented, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which arranged the murder of Black Panther party leaders, is also well-documented," he added.
Therefore, the current FBI pretense of being simply a neutral, "professional" police force was without any credibility, Klein explained. "It is just a lot of hot air," he said.
Klein also noted the recent New York Times reports having revealed the intense faction-fighting going on in the FBI and the Justice Department ignited by the Trump-Clinton battle for the White House.
"The FBI’s release of that vague letter about Clinton’s emails smells of political motivation, but it’s hard to assess what forces are tearing them apart without inside knowledge, which I do not have," he said.
Klein is a now-retired 22-year AT&T employee who, in 2006, exposed that the company had a secret room in its San Francisco facility where the NSA had been allowed to record all Internet traffic on the company’s backbone lines.
