What if I told you that the current scandal accusing the federal government of weaponizing the Department of Justice was nothing new? Guess what. History is once again repeating itself. Don’t believe me? Check this out.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-justice-dept-was-indeed-weaponizeda-century-ago
The Justice Department Was Indeed Weaponized—a Century Ago
Last month, a House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) convened to investigate the alleged “weaponization of the federal government.” Witnesses, including two former F.B.I. special agents, testified to their belief that the U.S. Department of Justice and its Federal Bureau of Investigation have been targeting political opponents of the Biden administration. No bombshells dropped, but Jordan promises more to come.
If you doubt him, suspend your disbelief for a moment and suppose that Jordan’s subcommittee does produce convincing evidence of “weaponization.” Imagine further that F.B.I. agents, acting under direct orders from a vengeful Attorney General Merrick Garland, fan out across Jordan’s home state of Ohio, looking into the congressman’s past. Finally, envision that Justice Department prosecutors then indict Jordan on trumped-up charges, threatening to put the congressman behind bars.
Far-fetched? In 2023, almost certainly. But as I recount in my new book, Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal, a similar scenario played out nearly one hundred years ago.
At the center of the storm was a firebrand senator and former U.S. attorney from Montana, Burton K. Wheeler, a Democrat, who was convinced that Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, a Republican, was abusing his role as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. (Sound familiar folks?) In March 1924, Wheeler took charge of a select committee especially set up to investigate the attorney general.
As a parade of colorful witnesses, including detectives, boxing promoters, and convicted felons, testified, Daugherty was perhaps the most unscrupulous person ever to head the Department of Justice. To cite just the most egregious example, Daugherty allegedly accepted $250,000 in protection money from America’s so-called bootleg king, George Remus.
More to the point, Wheeler’s investigation established that Daugherty had “weaponized” his department’s Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, to protect his friends, persecute his enemies, and settle political scores.
Founded in 1908 by executive fiat of President Theodore Roosevelt and his attorney general, Charles Joseph Bonaparte (grandnephew of Napoleon I), the Bureau of Investigation initially elicited howls of protest from Capitol Hill.
Some raised the specter of the Okhrana, the tsar’s notorious secret police force. Others more pointedly invoked “Foucheism”—a reference to Napoleon’s ruthlessly effective police chief, Joseph Fouché, who, one critic recalled, “grew so powerful that he intimidated the emperor himself by reasons of the state secrets he held.” To these critics, nothing less than the independence of Congress was at stake.
What would stop these government sleuths, they asked, from gathering kompromat on congressmen who refused to do the president’s bidding? Or from framing senators who pried too indelicately into executive branch affairs? They warned that the Bureau would inevitably devolve into a tool of political surveillance and repression. Government by blackmail seemed assured. (Did these guys have a crystal ball that allowed them to see where we are today?)
Under Daugherty’s handpicked director and friend of forty years, William J. Burns, a legendary detective with a well-earned reputation for dirty tricks, the Bureau seemingly proved these early detractors right.
It refused to even open a case file on the brewing Teapot Dome scandal, and it harassed anyone who dared to peek under the rug of the Harding administration—even its own special agents.
The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery scandal involving the administration of United States President Warren G. Harding from 1921 to 1923. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, as well as two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of a seminal investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies, Fall became the first presidential cabinet member to go to prison; no one was convicted of paying the bribes
One was fired when his investigation into an interstate fight-film distribution scheme (in violation of federal law) led to some of the attorney general’s closest friends. Another was dismissed when his inquiry into Prohibition violations along the U.S.-Mexican border implicated a U.S. marshal who happened to be Daugherty’s brother-in-law.
The most damning testimony against Daugherty came from Gaston Bullock Means, a notorious sleuth who spied for Germany during World War I, bragged that he’d been accused of “every crime in the catalogue,” and nevertheless found an undercover job working for Burns at the Bureau of Investigation.
Means confirmed what the Harding administration’s congressional critics already suspected—that the Bureau had been carrying out black-bag jobs to silence them.
When one senator introduced a resolution to investigate Teapot Dome, for instance, Means ransacked his Capitol Hill office in search of compromising information. When another shared sharp words about Daugherty on the floor of the Senate, Means assembled a spy ring that infiltrated the senator’s inner circle and confirmed rumors that he’d fathered a child with his secretary.
“How it was going to be used, I don’t know,” Means said of the intelligence he gathered, “except this way, I would interpret it. If you found something damaging on a man you would quietly get word to him through some of his friends, or otherwise, that he had better put the soft pedal on the situation.”
Surely this isn’t happening today!
And so, when Sen. Wheeler started hearing from his own friends that Bureau agents were snooping around his home state of Montana, combing over his past, he knew he was in the crosshairs himself.
On March 28, mounting evidence of malfeasance forced Daugherty’s resignation. Eleven days later, in an apparent act of retaliation, federal prosecutors indicted Wheeler on trumped-up charges of accepting legal fees from an oil company while serving as a U.S. senator, in violation of a longstanding statute. Although a dramatic trial eventually cleared the senator of all charges, such a nakedly vindictive prosecution undermined the rule of law and shattered Americans’ confidence in the federal government’s law enforcement bureaucracy.
Wait a minute. Is he saying that the federal government trumped up fake charges as a political weapon and used the DOJ? The result being that people lost confidence in the federal Department of Justice? There it is folks. History truly does repeat itself. We are right back where we were 100 years ago!
Still not convinced the federal government can be used as a weapon against its political opposition? Let me share another, even more horrible example.
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/outlawing-opposition
Scholars Timothy Ryback, Wendy Lower, Jonathan Petropoulos, Michael Berenbaum, and Peter Hayes discuss Adolf Hitler’s final steps in securing total power in Germany.
Outlawing the Opposition
While the Nazis were focusing on putting Germans back to work in the midst of the Great Depression, they also unleashed attacks on their political opposition as soon as Hitler became chancellor.
On the evening of February 27, 1933, alarms suddenly rang out in the Reichstag as fire destroyed the building’s main chamber. Within 20 minutes, Hitler was on the scene to declare: “This is a God-given signal! If this fire, as I believe, turns out to be the handiwork of Communists, then there is nothing that shall stop us now from crushing out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”
Marinus van der Lubbe was the man the Nazis captured that night. He confessed to setting the building ablaze but repeatedly insisted that he had acted alone. Adolf Hitler paid no attention to the confession. He saw a chance to get rid of what he considered the Nazis’ most immediate rival—the Communists—so he ordered the arrest of anyone with ties to the Communist Party.
Within days, the Nazis had thrown 4,000 Communists and their leaders into hastily created prisons and concentration camps. By the end of March, 20,000 Communists had been arrested, and by the end of that summer more than 100,000 Communists, Social Democrats, union officials, and other “radicals” were imprisoned.
Were any of them responsible for the fire? The question was irrelevant to the Nazis. They had been given an opportunity to get rid of their enemies, and they took it.
After the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, Hitler ordered the arrest of anyone with ties to the Communist Party. By the end of March, approximately 20,000 people had been arrested.
OK, let’s stop here for a moment and think about this. Let’s just say. Someone sets fire to the US Capitol tomorrow. When the smoke clears, Biden accuses the Republican Party of setting the fire. He then immediately calls for the arrest of Jim Jordan and Mitch McConnell. Needless to say, the conservative party would throw a fit. The response Hitler took was to hunt down all of those followers, arrest them, and ship them off to concentration camps. That’s right folks, Hitler’s concentration camps were originally built for political opponents not the Jewish population of Germany.
The day after the fire, February 28, 1933, President Hindenburg, at Hitler’s urging, issued two emergency decrees designed to make such arrests legal, even those that had already taken place.
Their titles—“For the Defense of Nation and State” and “To Combat Treason against the German Nation and Treasonable Activities”—reveal how Hitler used the fire to further his own goals.
The two decrees suspended, until further notice, every part of the constitution that protected personal freedoms. The Nazis claimed that the decrees were necessary to protect the nation from the “Communist menace.”
On March 5, 1933, the government held an election for control of the Reichstag. The Nazis won 288 seats (43.9% of the vote). The Communists won 81 seats (12.3%), even though their representatives were unable to claim those seats—if they appeared in public, they faced immediate arrest.
Other opposition parties also won significant numbers of seats. The Social Democrats captured 119 seats (18.3%), and the Catholic Center Party won 73 seats (11.2%). Together, the Communist, Social Democratic, and Catholic Center Parties won nearly as many seats as the Nazis. But their members distrusted one another almost as much as they feared the Nazis. As a result, these parties were unable to mount a unified opposition to the Nazi Party.
So, look out Bernie Sanders and any Libertarians out there thinking about running for President. Hitler eliminated ALL opposition. Not just the communist party officials.
Still under Nazi control, the Reichstag passed a new law on March 21, 1933, that made it a crime to speak out against the new government or criticize its leaders. Known as the Malicious Practices Act, the law made even the smallest expression of dissent a crime. Those who were accused of “gossiping” or “making fun” of government officials could be arrested and sent to prison or a concentration camp.
(Can you say Twitter and Facebook recent revelations concerning DOJ censorship?)
Then, on March 24, 1933, the Reichstag passed what became known as the Enabling Act by a vote of 141 to 94. It “enabled” the chancellor of Germany to punish anyone he considered an “enemy of the state.” The act allowed “laws passed by the government” to override the constitution. Only the 94 Social Democrats voted against the law. Most of the other deputies who opposed it were in hiding, in prison, or in exile.
The Enabling Act was Hitler’s final step in taking complete control.
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1933, the Nazis used the new laws to frighten and intimidate Germans. By May, they forced all trade labor unions to dissolve. Instead, workers could only belong to a Nazi-approved union called the German Labor Front.
Then, in June, Hitler outlawed the Social Democratic Party. The German Nationalist Party, which was part of Hitler’s coalition government, dissolved after its deputies were told to resign or become the next target.
By the end of the month, German concentration camps held 27,000 people. By mid-July, the Nazi Party was the only political party allowed in the country.
So, there you have it folks. Two examples of what can happen when the federal government is weaponized as a tool to be used against the people. Can it happen here? As I have shown, it already has 100 years ago. The big question is. Will we allow history to repeat itself having learned nothing from our past?