hoover memos are 'compelling proof,' lead congressman to seek Department of justice files by Suzanne Hanney
The discovery of memos from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, himself, regarding the assassination of Fred Hampton prompted U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and six of his colleagues to ask Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland on March 31 to release unredacted and unclassified Department of Justice files related to Hampton’s death. The 21-year-old Hampton was killed in his sleep Dec. 4, 1969, in a predawn raid by agents of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, Chicago Police Department and the FBI. “A wrongful death civil suit and FBI whistleblower later exposed Hoover’s nefarious COINTELPRO operation, a series of covert and illegal projects aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations including the Black Panther Party," Rush’s office noted in prepared material. “Such violations of legal and constitutional protections are not only unacceptable, they pose a direct threat to our notion of justice and to our standing as a nation of laws,” Rush and the members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-IL), wrote in their letter to Atty. Gen. Garland. William O’Neal was captain of security for the Panthers and an FBI informant, the subject of the movie, “Judas and the Black Messiah.” O’Neal’s FBI personnel file contained two documents that requested and obtained a $300 bonus for furnishing a “detailed floor plan of the [Hampton] apartment” that “subsequently proved to be of tremendous value” and “was not available from any other source,” attorneys Flint Taylor and Jeff Haas of the People’s Law Office wrote in Truthout. The documents were among 200 suppressed FBI files the two attorneys eventually received in their federal civil rights case brought on behalf of the families of Hampton, slain Panther Mark Clark and seven survivors. In order to avoid judicial condemnation for the suppression, the government joined with Cook County and the City of Chicago to settle for what was at the time the largest police violence settlement in federal court history, Taylor and Haas wrote.
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However, the FBI never produced the personnel file for Roy Martin Mitchell, O’Neal’s control agent in the Chicago office. Nor were the two attorneys ever permitted to recall Mitchell to question him about O’Neal’s bonus document. Fifty-one years after the raid, on Dec. 4, 2020, writer/historian Aaron Leonard received a redacted copy of Mitchell’s personnel file in response to a Freedom of Information request filed five years earlier. Among the several hundred pages of documents was a Dec. 10, 1969 memo from Hoover praising Mitchell’s handling of O’Neal and recommending him for a $200 incentive award. On Nov. 6, 1970, Hoover provided Mitchell with another $200 incentive, and wrote, “The manner in which you have developed and handled a source of information of great importance to the Bureau in the racial field is certainly commendable.” The two memos provided “compelling proof,” Taylor and Haas wrote, “that the highest level of Bureau officials, including Hoover, were partners in the conspiracies.” The attorneys wrote that they wish to assist Leonard in his quest for FBI files because he has chronicled other 20th century leftists who have been victims of surveillance and harassment. They cited more recent government attacks on racial movements, such as TigerSwan at Standing Rock, and sophisticated military technology such as drones, sound cannons and concussion grenades in Ferguson, Mo. Not only are the government’s suppression mechanisms continuing, Taylor and Haas wrote, “but law enforcement continues to be closely aligned with emboldened forces of the violent and racist far right.” Also 51 years to the day after the raid, on Dec. 4, 2020, U.S. Rep. Rush quoted Hampton: “You can kill the revolutionary, but you cannot kill the revolution.” The occasion was Rush’s introduction to Congress of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, named after the 14-yearold Chicagoan who was violently killed in Mississippi in 1955. The legislation would make lynching a hate crime that would apply to cases like the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, and the death of Ahmaud Arbery, which it would compel the FBI to investigate, Rush said.
