As a patriotic organization, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce was vehemently opposed to communism and socialism in the 1930s. However, the members had a blind spot when it came to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” which had remarkable similarities to the socialist and fascist policies of Europe’s Hitler and Mussolini.
Many of the members felt that the government’s funding for businesses and farmers was revolutionizing capitalism and America’s economy. When a California businessman named Bill Mullendore became very vocal and very critical of the New Deal, the head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Bill Read, paid him a visit to set him straight. Instead, it was Mullendore who set Read straight.
Mullendore explained that the New Deal was filled with fairy-tale promises, but really boiled down to taking money away from producers and redistributing to those who lobby the most for the cash. Government was enriching itself through the New Deal, while productivity was dropping, and personal freedom was vanishing.
It was like a lightbulb had gone off. Read went back to the LA Chamber of Commerce and became an evangelist opposed to the New Deal as the fascist federal takeover of the economy that it was.
In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wiretap the phones at the LA Chamber of Commerce and began spying on those upstart conservatives. Roosevelt personally decided, with no input from his Attorney General or Congress, that the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce was a “subversive” organization and that the Communications Act of 1934 and the Fourth Amendment did not restrict him from spying on it.
Opposing Roosevelt’s New Deal was a “grave matter of national security” – at least to Roosevelt. In addition to wiretapping phones, Roosevelt authorized the FBI to pore through and surreptitiously open the Chamber’s mail.
John F. Kennedy and his Attorney General brother, Robert Kennedy, likewise put wiretaps to use against their political opponents. It’s common knowledge that they bugged Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hotel rooms when the Soviets were attempting to infiltrate the Civil Rights movement.
“Bobby” Kennedy hounded Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa for three years with a team of more than 100 investigators and failed to prove that Hoffa had ever taken a single dime inappropriately from the union.
People have speculated for years that Jimmy Hoffa was “disappeared” by the mob, but maybe he just “disappeared” himself after being hounded by a political witch hunt that failed to ever produce any charges against him.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, planted a CIA spy in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Johnson had all of Goldwater’s speeches before he even gave them, thanks to a “woman secretary” the CIA was running inside the Goldwater campaign. This was extremely useful politically, to say the least.
Goldwater was about to introduce his plans to create a presidential Task Force on Peace and Freedom in September of 1964. Just three hours before he was to deliver that speech, Johnson announced that he had just formed a 16-member panel of experts to consult with him on international affairs. It was news to the 16 members, to say the least.
In a private RNC meeting, the main campaign staffers discussed the possibility of Goldwater stopping in Chicago for an appearance. The RNC’s regional Chicago director was enthusiastic and promised to keep the matter in strictest confidence. Within an hour, a Chicago reporter called him asking for details on Goldwater’s upcoming campaign stop.
Trouble was brewing in Vietnam at the time and it was of course a campaign issue. Goldwater had a private discussion with his two closest aides about a plan to ask Eisenhower to travel to Vietnam and do an on-the-ground assessment, and to then report back to Goldwater. Two reporters soon came knocking, asking about Goldwater’s Vietnam plan.
Stunned, he asked where they had heard about it, since literally no one outside the room he was standing in knew about it. The reporters insisted they had heard about it at the White House.
Years later, J. Edgar Hoover admitted that he had had agents bug Barry Goldwater’s campaign plane. It was a goldmine of information for the Johnson campaign and the DNC because Goldwater and his most trusted allies made their campaign war plans there, thinking they were beyond the reach of Johnson’s spies.
Richard Nixon’s Assistant Attorney General, Robert Mardian, asked Hoover to debrief him on electronic surveillance techniques in 1971. Hoover very openly explained to him how FBI agents acting under his orders had bugged the RNC phone lines across the country, Goldwater’s offices and Goldwater’s campaign plane back in ‘64.
Shocked at the brazen illegality of using a law enforcement agency to spy on a political campaign, Mardian asked how Hoover could justify such a thing. Hoover said – on tape, no less – “You do what the President of the United States tells you to do.”
The American media has historically been wildly incurious when a Democrat administration wields the power of US intelligence agencies to illegally spy on conservatives such as Goldwater and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet when Richard Nixon attempted to do the same and got caught doing it, it cost him his presidency.
Watergate, for the American media, is the holy grail – the highest pinnacle to which all journalists aspire. The thought of taking down a Republican president the way that Woodward and Bernstein did, with a lot of help from the Deep State, is on the bucket list of nearly every talking head you see on TV (minus Tucker, Hannity and a small handful of others).
The idea that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Clapper, John Brennan, Peter Strzok and others would have conspired to falsely smear President Trump is treated as a conspiracy theory by today’s media. Yet many of those same reporters have been complicit in the effort to frame President Trump. Look back at how quickly the story changes, every single time a new revelation comes to light.
Media outlets had the fake Russian dossier in their possession for four months before the election and never reported on it. Hillary Clinton’s months-long declaration in 2016 that “Putin was helping Donald Trump” was viewed with extreme skepticism, even by the New York Times, right up until the moment that Hillary lost. The Russia dossier was then released and suddenly confirmed as “true” because the FBI used it to secure a FISA warrant.
Ten months later, when America learned that the dossier was opposition research, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the dossier became a tiny, insignificant piece of the puzzle – as far as reporters were concerned.
Jeff Sessions “lied under oath to Congress” about Russian contacts, until the FBI finally mentioned, months later, that Sessions had told the truth.
Stephan Halper was not a “spy,” he was “gathering intelligence” to help the Trump campaign. Flip flop, flip flop.
Democrats have been using American law enforcement and intelligence agencies to try to break and defeat their opponents for more than 80 years. Will Donald Trump finally be the conservative with the backbone to withstand their attacks? Or will The Swamp consume another innocent victim in order to protect itself?
