The country is still reeling after the bombshell report that Donald Trump asked the former FBI director James Comey to shut down the bureau’s investigation into Michael Flynn. Did the president fire Comey to slow down the FBI Russia investigation? Did Trump obstruct justice?



These questions are getting the attention that they deserve. But the focus on Comey’s firing is obscuring the issue of who Trump will hire to replace him – and the threat that this appointment poses to Americans’ civil liberties and civil rights.



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Recently, the journalist Ashley Feinberg uncovered Comey’s personal Twitter account; he had used the pseudonym “Reinhold Niebuhr”. Tellingly, the real Niebuhr was a theologian, public intellectual, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient targeted for FBI surveillance because of his lawful opposition to the Vietnam war.



Niebuhr wasn’t alone. The FBI has a long history of abusing its power to serve political ends. In the early 20th century, J Edgar Hoover created his Radical Alien Division to conduct dragnet surveillance of American immigrants. It surveilled Marcus Garvey to collect evidence used in his deportation to Jamaica. It wiretapped Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the civil rights era. At President Dwight Eisenhower’s direction, Hoover compiled a “list of homosexuals” to root out gay people working for the government.



Comey had serious flaws. But he understood the past misdeeds of the FBI. He kept a copy of the original order to wiretap King on his desk and required new FBI agents and analysts to visit King’s memorial on the National Mall. As Comey put it in 2015, he tried to “to ensure that we remember our mistakes and that we learn from them”.



Trump, on the other hand, seems anxious to return to the Hoover era. Trump has pledged to spy on “certain mosques”. He endorsed a Muslim registry. He gave us an attorney general who seems to think the NAACP is “un-American”. Trump taunted Comey, suggesting he had recorded their private conversations. And he may have told the director he wanted to see journalists imprisoned for reporting on government leaks.

What’s worse is that Trump’s FBI will have tools unimaginable during the Hoover era, including face recognition technology that could enable unprecedented levels of political surveillance.

Face recognition allows the FBI to identify you from a distance and in secret. Would you feel comfortable protesting against the president if you thought his FBI was secretly scanning your face and cataloguing your movements? What about attending mosque? Or organizing for Black Lives Matter?



These risks are not hypothetical. Police in Baltimore probably used face recognition technology to identify and arrest activists during the Freddie Gray protests. Pennsylvania police used it at a courthouse to identify people attending a public hearing of an alleged gang member.

When the loyalty of the real Reinhold Niebuhr came under scrutiny, Niebuhr turned to the supreme court justice Felix Frankfurter for assistance. Niebuhr and Frankfurter would go on to become close friends. But in an era when the FBI’s stethoscope seemed to press against the chest of any dissenting voice, it is perhaps unsurprising that Frankfurter had himself been the subject of FBI wiretaps.

Niebuhr once wrote: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” In order to establish justice, the Senate must fulfill its duty and ensure the president’s nominee is independent from the White House. Because if the next FBI director pledges loyalty to the president, it would mean turning back the clock on an independent FBI and reviving the ghost of J Edgar Hoover.

What would an FBI beholden to the president look like? It is disturbingly easy to envision a revival of Nixon’s enemies list. Just imagine the president tasking the bureau with spying on his political adversaries. Will the next director rebuff the president if he asks the FBI to dig up dirt on Gonzalo Curiel? Will the director balk if asked to spy on Chuck Schumer? Or Rosie O’Donnell?

After Comey’s ouster, these questions demand answers.