The GOP’s Church Committee Wannabes

Last month, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted narrowly along partisan lines to establish a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by conservative firebrand Jim Jordan of Ohio.

Styling itself after the Church Committee — a special Senate panel established in 1975 to investigate crimes that U.S. intelligence agencies had committed against American citizens — the new committee claims a broad but vague mandate. As former Sen. Gary Hart, the last surviving member of the Church Committee recently observed, Jordan and his colleagues “appear to believe agencies of the national government have targeted, and perhaps are still targeting, right-of-center individuals and groups, possibly including individuals and right-wing militia groups that participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.”

Politics aside, as Hart argued, that agenda is “almost completely at odds with the purpose of the original Church committee.” In the aftermath of Watergate, Congress set out to learn just how vast and brazen the extralegal actions of government intelligence agencies had been. The committee exposed these activities and proposed strong measures to professionalize and de-politicize the intelligence sector and to impose meaningful congressional oversight. Many of these measures remain in place.

Jordan’s panel has barely begun its work, but early indications suggest it will regurgitate a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories, some of them so convoluted that one would have to binge Fox News to make sense of them. Did the FBI strong-arm Twitter and Facebook into suppressing a news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop? Did the FBI surveil and intimidate conservative parent activists at local PTA meetings? Did Hillary Clinton collude with Russia in 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign? (If that last one doesn’t make sense, that’s because it doesn’t.)

Charles Grassley, the Iowa senator who testified before Jordan’s committee, gave the game away when he delivered a rambling statement focused on the purported criminality of Joe Biden’s family, something he claims is straight out of a “fiction spy thriller.” “This story of government abuse and political treachery is scarier than fiction,” Grassley offered. “It really happened. Help us write the last chapter in this real-life drama. You must relentlessly produce the facts and the evidence.”

Compared to the Church Committee, which investigated on a bipartisan basis crimes committed by intelligence agencies under both Republican and Democratic presidents, the Jordan Committee seems to have one objective: Get Democrats.

To understand just how different this panel is from the one it purports to model, it’s worth reviewing the history.

Watergate came as a shock to most Americans, including members of Congress, because it exposed shocking criminality on the part of high-ranking government officials. Not just the Watergate break-in itself, or Nixon’s efforts to conceal it, but far-reaching abuses by the CIA, FBI, IRS and other agencies against American civilians. Even members of Congress, from both parties, were slack-jawed. Since the advent of the modern security state in the early years of the Cold War, congressional oversight of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies had been de minimis. Most legislators seemed to agree with Sen. Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, who in 1956 confessed that he was disinclined to “obtain information which I personally would rather not have, unless it was essential for me as a member of Congress to have it.”

In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, the Senate empaneled the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Sen. Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho. What the committee learned was astounding.

There was the criminality within the Nixon White House, of course. The committee laid bare a plan that Tom Huston, a young administration official, hatched to spy on and sabotage civil rights and anti-war protesters. In contrite testimony before the panel, Huston acknowledged that while the plan was inspired by legitimate concerns over radical violence, it posed a slippery slope from targeting “the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with a picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”

Worse still, the committee learned that the FBI had opened files on a half million Americans solely on the basis of their political beliefs, using illegal wire taps and surveillance to monitor their activities. The National Security Agency had intercepted and read every telegram or cable that American citizens sent or received from abroad over a period of almost 30 years. The IRS worked closely with intelligence agencies to weaponize citizens’ tax returns for political purposes. The FBI had sent field agents into urban neighborhoods in an effort to incite neighborhood violence, presumably to rationalize concerns about public safety.

It got worse.

The CIA, which as a general rule was not supposed to operate domestically, opened the mail of hundreds of thousands of citizens and, based on their correspondence, built a database of 1.5 million people it considered suspect. Those on the list included the composer Leonard Bernstein, the novelist John Steinbeck and, in an unusual twist, Richard Nixon. The agency also conducted illegal drug tests on civilians, rigged elections throughout South America and the Middle East and plotted a series of unsuccessful political assassinations abroad.

That was bad. But the worst was still to come.

The Church Committee blew the lid off of COINTELPRO, an FBI initiative intended to target, infiltrate and sabotage groups as ideologically disparate as civil rights and labor organizations and the Ku Klux Klan. In a typical operation, agents in Minneapolis goaded striking cab drivers into bombing the local Teamsters headquarters (the drivers were at odds with the union). In California, an FBI field agent filed a report noting, with approval, that “shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continue to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.”

Famously, the committee unearthed evidence that in 1964 the FBI mailed a package to the home of Martin Luther King, Jr., just a month before he was scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The parcel contained evidence of King’s extramarital affairs and a letter that warned: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it.” That the nation’s top law enforcement agency had attempted to blackmail a civil rights hero into taking his own life came as a profound shock to a public that had already grown deeply skeptical of public institutions.

Members of the Church Committee understood what some intelligence officials seemingly did not understand — that these activities were not only deplorable, but in many cases, patently illegal. In a remarkable exchange, Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota asked the deputy director of the NSA if it had ever considered the legality of intercepting the overseas cables of American citizens.

“Legality?” the official replied.

“Whether it was legal,” Mondale clarified.

“In what sense? Whether that would have been a legal thing to do?”

“Yes.”

“That particular aspect didn’t enter into the discussion.”

Unlike Jordan’s panel, which is sharply divided between a Republican majority pursuing a range of conservative grievances, and a Democratic minority outspoken in its contempt for the entire endeavor, the Church Committee was a wholly bipartisan effort. At Church’s request, Republican Sen. John Tower of Texas served as vice chair and led many subcommittee hearings personally.

Paul Michel, a former Republican staffer for the committee, recalled to the New York Times that “there were a lot of hints of some very bad conduct, but when we pursued all the documents and the witnesses, some of it turned out to be quite innocent.” He warned that “if the Jordan committee is evenhanded factually, they’ll do a good job and it’ll be credible. But if they pursue what some people might call conspiracy theories, and only look at things that seem to support that, it will eventually be viewed as not credible.”

In the aftermath of the Church Committee hearings, Congress imposed far more meaningful and consistent oversight of U.S, intelligence agencies, and the agencies themselves were compelled to professionalize their operations. Going forward, the legislative branch would keep watch to ensure an end to rogue operations against American citizens, the assassination of foreign elected officials and the use of intelligence agencies to advance partisan and political ends.

There is ample debate about the lasting effect or ineffectiveness of the Church Committee hearings, but one thing is clear: they bear no resemblance to the current congressional committee’s apparent mission or agenda.

Intelligence agencies are certainly not free of politics. But normative standards should dictate that they keep partisan motives at arm’s length. If the current Congress intends to chastise such agencies for doing their job — for investigating attempts by foreign governments or U.S. citizens to impede free and fair American elections — we are taking a giant step back. Back to the days when politicians used the intelligence sector to advance their narrow interests, in ways that were illegal and, as the Church Committee exposed, unethical.