Counterpunch | Mainstream commentators display amnesia when they describe former FBI
Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey as stellar and credible law
enforcement figures. Perhaps if they included J. Edgar Hoover, such
fulsome praise could be put into proper perspective.
Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the
investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable
character by much of Official Washington, the truth is, as top law
enforcement officials of the George W. Bush Administration (Mueller as
FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided
over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled
Bush-Cheney fabrications used to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited
plain vanilla incompetence.
Long before he became FBI Director, serious questions existed about Mueller’s role
as Acting U.S. Attorney in Boston in effectively enabling decades of
corruption and covering up of the FBI’s illicit deals with mobster
Whitey Bulger and other “top echelon” informants who committed numerous
murders and crimes. When the truth was finally uncovered through
intrepid investigative reporting and persistent, honest judges, U.S.
taxpayers footed a $100 million court award to the four men framed for
murders committed by (the FBI-operated) Bulger gang.
Current media applause omits the fact that former FBI Director Mueller was the top official in charge of the Anthrax terror fiasco investigation into those 2001 murders, which targeted an innocent man (Steven Hatfill)
whose lawsuit eventually forced the FBI to pay $5 million in
compensation. Mueller’s FBI was also severely criticized by Department
of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law
improperly serving hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”
For his part, Deputy Attorney General James Comey,
too, went along with the abuses of Bush and Cheney after 9/11 and
signed off on a number of highly illegal programs including warrantless
surveillance of Americans and torture of captives. Comey
also defended the Bush Administration’s three-year-long detention of an
American citizen without charges or right to counsel.
