NPR calls commentary that the FBI is not a political agency “a massive case of collective amnesia afflicting Washington and much of the media commentariat.” In fact, “achieving political goals of one kind or another have been part of the reason for the FBI since its inception,” NPR says. Everyone agrees that the FBI should be as professional and impartial as possible, and that its investigations should not be driven by any political agenda or vendetta. Yet it’s not correct to say that controversies surrounding the investigations involving the 2016 presidential election are the first time the bureau may have fallen short of that ideal.
Former FBI official Chris Swecker told NPR that, “there’s been plenty of controversies, but never accusations that the FBI has become a political tool for one party or another, or one set of political beliefs or another.” President Theodore Roosevelt started the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, in 1908. During World War I, it harassed political radicals of various stripes. In the 1950s, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover FBI collaborated with Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose years of committee hearings wounded many reputations but wound up unmasking no actual Communists. Plenty of Americans have regarded all these uses of the FBI’s resources as entirely legitimate; plenty of others have found them entirely unacceptable. It can’t be argued that they were not political.