Greene County Democrat

Tag: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

  • Newswire :US Justice Department releases files on the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

    By: Blackmansstreettoday.com


    The U.S. Justice Department recently released on July 21 files regarding the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., despite some members of the King family opposing the release, though one family member supports it.
    The release contains 230,000 pages of documents and comes following President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 14176, said U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi.
    Dr. King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, while staying at the Lorraine Motel. 
    He was shot by James Earl Ray, a petty criminal. Ray was arrested in London, but not everyone is convinced that he was the assassin.
    Before he died of prostate cancer, Dexter Scott King, Dr. King’s youngest son, met with Ray in prison, shook his hand, and concluded that Ray did not kill his father. Dexter King died on January 22. He was 62 years old,
    J. Edgar Hoover hated Dr. King, believing that he would become a Black messiah. Organized crime figures also may have had a hand in his assassination. There are also suggestions that Carlos Marcello, the mob boss of New Orleans, was involved in the killing of Dr. King because he was challenging the way things had been done in the past.
    The FBI tapped Dr. King’s phone calls and even had people working for Dr. King who reported to the FBI. The FBI showed photographs to President Lyndon B. Johnson and other government officials of Dr. King having sex with other women, not his wife, Coretta Scott King.
    The release by the Trump administration is controversial. It comes after AG Bondi refused to release the Epstein files. Some observers feel this document release is part of efforts to divert public attention from the Epstein files.
    “We recognize that the release of documents concerning the assassination of our father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has long been a subject of interest, captivating public curiosity for decades,” the family said in a statement. But “the release of these files must be viewed within their full historical context. During our father’s lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
    The recent disclosure is the product of months of collaboration between the Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). DOJ attorneys spent hundreds of hours preparing and digitizing these documents for release.
    “The American people deserve answers decades after the horrific assassination of one of our nation’s great leaders,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “The Department of Justice is proud to partner with Director Gabbard and the ODNI at President Trump’s direction for this latest disclosure.”

  • Under Director Comey, FBI Special Agents were required to visit Dr. King’s Memorial

    FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called King a communist because of his fight for civil rights
    By Frederick H. Lowe

    Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

    king monument - obama family.jpg

    Visitors at the King Memorial in Washington, D. C.

    (TriceEdneyWire.com)–Former FBI Director James Comey, who was hired by President Barack Obama and fired by President Donald Trump, ordered the FBI’s new special agents to visit the Washington D.C. memorial honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a discussion concerning unchecked government power.
    As FBI director, Comey kept a memo on his desk written by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The memo described Dr. King as a Communist, and it requested a technical surveillance on the civil rights leader. The 1963 memo was signed by Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General, Comey said during an interview on “60 Minutes” the news magazine broadcast Sunday nights on CBS Television.
    Scott Pelley, a 60 Minutes reporter, who interviewed Comey, said, “there is no court order. It was a signature of the FBI director and the signature of the attorney general.”
    “Yep,” Comey said. ”And then open-ended. No time limit. No space restriction. No review. No oversight.”
    A 60 Minutes narrator said: “Some of the worst of the FBI’s history is its investigation of Dr. King. So, on Comey’s orders, FBI Academy instructors now bring new agents here [Dr. King’s statue] to talk about values lost in the pursuit of the man who became a monument.”
    The camera then focuses on the face of an unnamed black woman who said: “Character, courage, collaboration, competence. We have to be able to call on those tools in our toolbox to be able to make sure that we are correcting some of the things that happened in the past.”
    “What’s the lesson?” Pelley asks Comey.
    “The lesson is the importance of never becoming untethered to oversight and accountability. I want all of my new special agents and intelligence analysts to understand that portion of the FBI’s history the FBI’s interaction with Dr. King and draw from it an understanding of the dangers of falling in love with our own rectitude. And the importance of being immersed in that design of the founders with oversight by the courts and Congress so we don’t fall in love with our own view of things,” Comey said.
    President Trump fired Comey on May 9th. President Obama appointed him in 2013.