https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
You're treating the symptoms, the leaf nodes. The FBI is a criminal organization with a long history, that should be abolished outright.
You're treating the symptoms, the leaf nodes. The FBI is a criminal organization with a long history, that should be abolished outright.
/s
It would be logistically and all around easier to replace the corrupt FBI and it's culture than these two attempts by entire nations at replacing their corrupt police forces.
It is needed. Not because of anything that's happened the last couple years, but because the FBI has been run and staffed by criminals for decades.
This was true from it's earliest days when it was pulling dirty tricks on civil rights and anti war protestors.
Thinking this kind of things is cool when it's used against your political opponents is incredibly short sighted.
That's literally it. As long as the Feds were just cracking the heads of black protestors and snatching brown people up out of their beds, Trumpists were hard-core thin blue line. But the Feds dared disturb their oshi and now the same Trumpists have gone full #ACAB
It's basic fascist ideology - loyalty to the leader above all, and belief that the leader is above the system.
The FBI are investigators, not traditional police; they aren't generally the ones people are talking about when they say "thin blue line". It wasn't the FBI cracking heads and "snatching brown people out of their beds." The phrase is a reaction to perceptions of widespread civic disorder and violent crime; it really has nothing to do with the FBI at all.
Of course you do. Let's be outraged over them serving zero time before they are even sentenced.
All the "states misbehaving" issues that some people think they need the FBI for are traditionally handled by the US Marshall service.
* It’s not the 1920s, there aren’t large criminal organizations anymore
* The FBI in 2022 is a large criminal organization
"The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”"
https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list...
Happy now?
What smaller agency would take on a corrupt state Senator in Missouri?
In a solidly one-party state only the minority party gets prosecuted because the majority party will still win even if they look like corrupt buffoons. <insert Chicago joke here>
If the specific crimes are Federal as it was in this case, then the Federal law enforcement agency must get involved.
Otherwise your argument reduces to "there should be no Federal laws against wire fraud, honest services fraud, and money laundering"
Only when the state statute coincidentally matches the federal statute, for crimes like bank robbery that are defined at the state and federal level.
If the state doesn't have a law against the crime (i.e. South Carolina has no laws regarding hate crimes [1], but the federal government does [2]), then federal prosecutors are responsible for prosecuting those. One can't escape prosecution for a federal crime because there is no state law against it. Prosecuting federal crimes at a local level is exactly why the regional US attorneys offices exist.
In the case in from the article, the crimes committed by the state Senator (wire fraud, money laundering, etc) are federal by definition, so a local DA isn't going to prosecute them anyways.
1. https://apnews.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-columbia-south-caro...
The right solution is transparency and accountability. Make sure power abuse gets punished, no matter how powerful the abuser.
Strong public accountability and transparency. Actual "rule of law" without social or political bias as the first tenant.
The FBI really does have a very sordid history. Perhaps they can be reformed though, not sure.
Check the facts: there has never once been a Democrat in charge of the FBI. Not once. Not even the ones appointed by Democratic presidents; they have also all been Republicans.
Almost a century, and zero Democrats have ever run the FBI.
Yet if you look at the popular vote, the public has voted for Democrats to run the federal government continuously since the 1980s with only one exception (2004).
I believe this has some relevance to our situation.
We must assume that people are fallible, corruption is possible, and that we therefore need a means of redress when such corruption occurs.