Picture Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Day by day Beast/Reuters/Public Area
Final month, a Home subcommittee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) convened to research the alleged “weaponization of the federal authorities.” Witnesses, together with two former F.B.I. particular brokers, testified to their perception that the U.S. Division of Justice and its Federal Bureau of Investigation have been concentrating on political opponents of the Biden administration. No bombshells dropped, however Jordan guarantees extra to come back.
For those who doubt him, droop your disbelief for a second and suppose that Jordan’s subcommittee does produce convincing proof of “weaponization.” Think about additional that F.B.I. brokers, appearing below direct orders from a vengeful Lawyer Basic Merrick Garland, fan out throughout Jordan’s residence state of Ohio, wanting into the congressman’s previous. Lastly, envision that Justice Division prosecutors then indict Jordan on trumped-up fees, threatening to place the congressman behind bars.
Far-fetched? In 2023, nearly definitely. However as I recount in my new ebook, Crooked: The Roaring '20s Story of a Corrupt Lawyer Basic, a Crusading Senator, and the Beginning of the American Political Scandal, an identical situation performed out practically 100 years in the past.
On the middle of the storm was a firebrand senator and former U.S. lawyer from Montana, Burton Okay. Wheeler, a Democrat, who was satisfied that Lawyer Basic Harry M. Daugherty, a Republican, was abusing his position because the nation’s prime legislation enforcement officer. In March 1924, Wheeler took cost of a choose committee particularly set as much as examine the lawyer basic.
As a parade of colourful witnesses, together with detectives, boxing promoters, and convicted felons, testified, Daugherty was maybe essentially the most unscrupulous individual ever to move the Division of Justice. To quote simply essentially the most egregious instance, Daugherty allegedly accepted $250,000 in safety cash from America’s so-called bootleg king, George Remus.
Extra to the purpose, Wheeler’s investigation established that Daugherty had “weaponized” his division’s Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, to guard his pals, persecute his enemies, and settle political scores.
Based in 1908 by government fiat of President Theodore Roosevelt and his lawyer basic, 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 infamous secret police power. Others extra pointedly invoked “Foucheism”—a reference to Napoleon’s ruthlessly efficient police chief, Joseph Fouché, who, one critic recalled, “grew so highly effective that he intimidated the emperor himself by causes of the state secrets and techniques he held.” To those critics, nothing lower than the independence of Congress was at stake. What would cease these authorities sleuths, they requested, from gathering kompromat on congressmen who refused to do the president’s bidding? Or from framing senators who pried too indelicately into government department affairs? They warned that the Bureau would inevitably devolve right into a instrument of political surveillance and repression. Authorities by blackmail appeared assured.
Beneath Daugherty’s handpicked director and pal of forty years, William J. Burns, a legendary detective with a well-earned status for soiled tips, the Bureau seemingly proved these early detractors proper. It refused to even open a case file on the brewing Teapot Dome scandal, and it harassed anybody who dared to peek below the rug of the Harding administration—even its personal particular brokers. One was fired when his investigation into an interstate fight-film distribution scheme (in violation of federal legislation) led to a few of the lawyer basic’s closest pals. One other was dismissed when his inquiry into Prohibition violations alongside the U.S.-Mexican border implicated a U.S. marshal who occurred to be Daugherty’s brother-in-law.
Harry M. Daugherty
Library of Congress
Essentially the most damning testimony towards Daugherty got here from Gaston Bullock Means, a infamous sleuth who spied for Germany throughout World Warfare I, bragged that he’d been accused of “each crime within the catalogue,” and nonetheless discovered an undercover job working for Burns on the Bureau of Investigation. Means confirmed what the Harding administration’s congressional critics already suspected—that the Bureau had been finishing up black-bag jobs to silence them. When one senator launched a decision to research Teapot Dome, as an example, Means ransacked his Capitol Hill workplace searching for compromising info. When one other shared sharp phrases about Daugherty on the ground of the Senate, Means assembled a spy ring that infiltrated the senator’s interior circle and confirmed rumors that he’d fathered a toddler along with his secretary.
“The way it was going for use, I don’t know,” Means mentioned of the intelligence he gathered, “besides this manner, I might interpret it. For those who discovered one thing damaging on a person you'd quietly get phrase to him via a few of his pals, or in any other case, that he had higher put the gentle pedal on the scenario.”
And so, when Sen. Wheeler began listening to from his personal pals that Bureau brokers have been snooping round his residence state of Montana, combing over his previous, he knew he was within the crosshairs himself.
On March 28, mounting proof of malfeasance compelled Daugherty’s resignation. Eleven days later, in an obvious act of retaliation, federal prosecutors indicted Wheeler on trumped-up fees of accepting authorized charges from an oil firm whereas serving as a U.S. senator, in violation of a longstanding statute. Though a dramatic trial ultimately cleared the senator of all fees, such a nakedly vindictive prosecution undermined the rule of legislation and shattered People’ confidence within the federal authorities’s legislation enforcement paperwork.
Nearly a century later, as historical past’s echoes develop louder, we must always keep in mind that the potential for abuse throughout the D.O.J. and F.B.I.—even when lengthy dormant—stays actual. Blind belief in these establishments, particularly as they sail into uncharted waters by investigating a former president who can be the presumptive frontrunner for his occasion’s subsequent presidential nomination, can be an abdication of Congress’s constitutional accountability.
But Jordan’s subcommittee can not fake that these establishments are nonetheless mired within the corruption of the Roaring Twenties. With its sensational revelations, Wheeler’s investigation shocked the American individuals, for maybe the primary time within the republic’s historical past, into caring whether or not the Division of Justice was residing as much as its identify. Larger public scrutiny, in flip, inspired professionalization among the many ranks and impressed new institutional norms round political neutrality and prosecutorial independence. A half century later, these norms solely hardened within the wake of the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s demoralizing makes an attempt to make use of the Justice Division as a political protect.
In the present day, prosecutors and investigators are anticipated to serve the rule of legislation, not a vindictive lawyer basic or the slim pursuits of a political occasion. Furthermore, the workplace as soon as occupied by Harry Daugherty and John Mitchell (who went to jail for his position in Watergate) now belongs to Merrick Garland, a former appellate choose who, in comparison with his predecessors, approaches his job with near-judicial impartiality. To suggest, as Jim Jordan has, that the Division of Justice is backsliding into its outdated Daughertian methods isn't just irresponsible rhetoric that erodes confidence in our judicial system; it ignores a century of progress set in movement by Wheeler’s investigation.
Harry Daugherty died in 1941 a damaged, discredited man. As Congress flexes its oversight energy over the Division of Justice, it should confront realities of the establishment as we speak quite than exorcise the ghosts of the previous.
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Nathan Masters is the creator ofCrooked: The Roaring '20s Story of a Corrupt Lawyer Basic, a Crusading Senator, and the Beginning of the American Political Scandal. Hehas hosted and produced the Emmy Award-winning public tv sequence Misplaced L.A. since 2016 and is the creator of a whole lot of articles about Los Angeles historical past. He works on the USC Libraries and lives within the mountains of Southern California along with his spouse, creator and tv author Kseniya Melnik, and their two youngsters.