Commentators are expressing surprise and outrage at FBI Director James Comey’s blatant interference in the 2016 presidential election with his letter to Congressional Republicans implying that  he was re-opening the probe into Hillary Clinton and her email use. Ryan Grim, Washington Bureau Chief of the Huffington Post, declared that this was “an unprecedented break with FBI practice throughout the agency’s history.”

The real FBI history, however, tells a very different story.  The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly attempted through covert and not-so-covert means to influence the outcome of presidential elections.  In the 1948 election, Hoover actively worked to ensure the election of Thomas E. Dewey.  During the Republican primaries that year, Hoover assigned numerous agents to review the agency’s files to gather derogatory information on Dewey’s main rival, Harold Stassen, information that was provided to Dewey who then used it to secure his nomination.

Thereafter, Hoover turned his attention to helping Dewey defeat Truman.  He provided Dewey with FBI materials on Truman’s past associations with the corrupt Kansas City Pendergast machine and had FBI staff prepare position papers for the Dewey campaign on a host of issues.  Prior to the election Hoover facilitated House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on “Communists in government” which HUAC Chairman J. Parnell Thomas later admitted were politically motivated “to keep the heat on Harry Truman.”

During the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, Hoover worked hard to help the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket defeat Democrat Adlai Stevenson. Seeking to exploit the rampant homophobia of the period to this end, he widely if covertly distributed statements the FBI claimed to have gathered from local police alleging that Stevenson had been arrested for homosexual offenses in two states. The 1950s’ press was not like the mass media of today, however, and while editors across the country were aware of the allegations, they did not become a public campaign issue.

Needless to say, the shared reactionary politics of Hoover and Richard Nixon ensured that Hoover actively aided Nixon in his successive bids for the White House as well.

Given this history, it should come as no surprise that FBI Director Comey would intervene now, in the last weeks of the 2016 election, to give a boost to the campaign of Donald Trump.  Comey has repeatedly clashed with the Obama administration over the “Black Lives Matter” movement, policing, and sentencing reform. Clearly, he would prefer a new Trump administration and has acted accordingly.

What we are witnessing is not “an unprecedented break with FBI practice” but the logical consequences of allowing an unreformed, secretive and reactionary federal law enforcement agency to abuse its power in order to secure the election of a presidential candidate who would be an unmitigated disaster for the country as a whole but a tremendous boon to the FBI.
After working tirelessly to assist Hillary Clinton in her campaign in recent months, President Obama must now be ruing his decision to appoint Director Comey in the first place. But he has no one to blame but himself in this regard. Like so many of his other appointments over the last eight years, Comey’s appointment represented not a clear break with the past, but more of the same. His failure to genuinely effectuate “change we can believe in” has now put his own legacy in peril.

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