The FBI is super sketchy. Questions abound over their role in various assassinations. The case of Martin Luther King Jr. is no exception.

Today is the 49th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a man who stood for peace and encouraged everyone to not judge people by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

The personal attacks that MLK suffered at the hands of the FBI are well documented, though they sound like conspiracy theories to the unaware.

The FBI investigation into King started as a national security issue, with the official stance of the FBI being that King was a communist sympathizer with close ties to card-carrying members of the communist party. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated, King gave a speech in which he denounced the Vietnam War, which the FBI took as proof of his communist affiliation.

Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover even publicly denounced King as a liar and a fraud. He is believed to have also initiated a letter sent to King in 1964 accompanied by a tape from an alleged sex party in a DC hotel room. The letter appears to be crafted to sound like it was a disappointed former follower, describing King as an “evil, abnormal beast.” But that wouldn’t provide an explanation for how the disillusioned fan got access to all this knowledge on King’s “adulterous acts” “immoral conduct” and “sexual orgies.”

Only the FBI would have that knowledge, from the wiretaps and monitoring they were doing supposedly for national security purposes.

The letter concludes,

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is… You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

King interpreted the last part of the letter to be urging him to commit suicide rather than have the information go public. And that wasn’t the FBI’s last attempt to smear King out of the public eye. They attempted to get news organizations interested in his immoral behavior in order to publicly shame King and counteract his message. However, these campaigns failed.

Is it possible that the blatant failure of the FBI’s public smear campaign against King, made them decide to go to the extreme to rid the nation of this “troublemaker”?

Not that his words alone should hold much weight, but King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, claims to have been the fall guy for a larger conspiracy. Even Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow and children believed Ray innocent and later advocated for him.

Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King’s murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King’s assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named “Raoul” had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray’s motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years.

James Earl Ray had escaped from prison in April of 1967. The gun running operation he was supposedly recruited for would explain how his fingerprints could have ended up on the gun that was left behind at the scene after King was killed. Ray died in prison in 1998 of liver failure, after officials refused to allow him to be evaluated out of state for a liver transplant.

Another person had even admitted to killing King, after a large sum of money somehow found it’s way into the mix, to support the assassination.

December 1993: Former Memphis restaurateur Loyd Jowers says he paid laborer Frank Holt to shoot King. Jowers says he was paid “a large sum of money” by Memphis producer dealer Frank C. Liberto to find someone to kill King.

This was confirmed by the civil trial in 1999 which found that there was indeed a conspiracy to kill King, as opposed to one lone shooter, motivated by racial hatred.

After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. In a press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta Scott King welcomed the verdict, saying , “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.”

Of course, multiple government investigations into the matter of a larger conspiracy concluded that James Earl Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. What a surprise that when the government investigates itself, it finds nothing amiss.

But even without smoking-gun proof that the FBI ordered the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the organization’s behavior towards him was remarkably abhorrent. Using the excuse of national security, the FBI monitored him. But when they found nothing to pursue, they turned to a smear campaign from information they had gathered.

It sort of makes you wonder what the government might do with all the information collected by the NSA–or perhaps already has done.