Trump is right.

The FBI is chock a bloc with shnooks.

So stop clutching your pearls over his appointment of Kash Patel as the agency’s new director.

Patel promised as director of the FBI that “he’d shut down the bureau’s headquarters and re-open it the next day ‘as a museum of the deep state.’”

FBI might benefit from a little humor.

I have personal experiences with these gumshoes.

And we’ll get to that.

But it’s not just me.

The first trigger for agita is the long list of celebrities the FBI has investigated: Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, John Denver, John Lennon, Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda (gotta say . . . might have deserved it), Groucho Marx (really?), Charlie Chaplin, the band MC5, Lou Costello, Sonny Bono, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson and Mickey Mantle.

Congress reported in 1985 that the FBI had “installed over 7,000 security surveillances” from 1940 to 1960.

The FBI’s attacks on civil rights organizations are particularly disgraceful, targets included: Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congress on Racial Equality and, of course, the Nation of Islam.

Black Panthers were murdered.

Any organized opposition to the war in Vietnam drew FBI agents like flies on stink.

The National Lawyers Guild’s sins were those of attorneys with radical opinions.

Organizations promoting equal rights for women were targeted.

The odious log book is not a record accessed by Sherman and Peabody with their Wayback Machine.

The corpses in this graveyard are all over Wikipedia.

With an FBI agenda this diverse, naturally they had to also budget time and money for the Ku Klux Klan. But the agency’s record was mixed.

“In one particularly controversial 1965 incident, White civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen, who gave chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a young Black man; one of the Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe, an acknowledged FBI informant. The FBI spread rumors the Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and a heroin addict and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement. FBI records show that J. Edgar Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Johnson.”

The FBI’s fingerprints were all over the Waco siege where 76 Davidians died.

The G-men were at the lethal Ruby Ridge shoot out which concluded with the federal government paying over $3 million in settlement.

Boston mobster and killer Whitey Bulger was given free murderous reign in return for information on the city’s Italian hoodlums. Special FBI agent John J. Connolly alerted Bulger that law enforcement was closing in which allowed Bulger to flee to California living on the ocean for the next 16 years.

Less than two weeks before the presidential election of 2016, FBI director James Comey announced to Congress that Hillary Clinton’s handling of security emails was still under investigation.

It turned out to be a tempest in a teapot . . . but it smelled like nasty politics to those paying attention.

“On June 14, 2018, Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, released a report of a year long investigation into misconduct at the DOJ and FBI over its probe of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Horowitz faulted James Comey, FBI director at the time of the email server investigation, for deviating from bureau and Justice Department protocol, which damaged the agencies’ image of impartiality . . .”

President Trump had personal reasons for installing Kash Patel over the FBI.

CNN reported on October 14, 2022:  “Shortly before the 2016 election the FBI offered retired British spy Christopher Steele ‘up to $1 million’ to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.

“The cash offer was made during an overseas October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele’s claim that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.”

Steele provided no evidence.

But do you see what happened here?

The FBI wasn’t partisan; they were willing to infect both candidates, Clinton and Trump, with bogus allegations.

They skull-fucked both of them.

They wanted the leverage of fear . . . which, after all, was J. Edgar Hoover’s specialty.

In the early ’70s when The New Times was taking its first baby steps, I received a death threat in the mail.

An envelope from a local militia contained a piece of paper.

On the paper was the image of a rifle’s scope.

In the cross hairs of the scope was my name.

Misspelled!

I thought the bad spelling was a federal offense.

A friend drove me to the the Phoenix FBI office.

An agent schooled us by explaining the death threat.

“Look at what you write.”

Oh . . . I see.

Nearly 50 years later, in April of 2018, the FBI raided my house and took me into custody because of the internet escort ads on Backpage, a property once owned primarily by Jim Larkin and myself . . . though in fact the classified site had been sold some years earlier. They timed the raid and the arrest to incinerate a honeymoon party for myself and my new wife.

The agents put a gun on me, and worse, put a gun on my mother in law who was showering.

She was ordered out of the shower.

When she asked for a towel, the FBI gunman barked: “When an FBI agent tells you to do something YOU DO IT!!!”

As I was led off to prison, FBI agents stripped my Valley residence and were already inside my second home in Oak Creek, Arizona.

Their warrant said they could seize anything of value.

But, if you are lucky enough to have a second home, you might recognize that that particular dwelling is furnished mostly with second hand furniture, books and photos.

Seeing nothing of any obvious value, the FBI agents simply vandalized the vacation property by climbing into the crawl space and cutting all the wiring.

As if they were 12.

When I returned from prison I discovered in my office files a small souvenir from the Feds.

They left a small Styrofoam paddle about the size and shape you’d use in a game of ping pong.

It reads: “Today’s FBI. It’s for you.”

Kash Patel needs to bring his lunch bucket ‘cause he’s going to be awhile.

I mentioned earlier in this reverie a bit from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show involving Sherman and Mr. Peabody. The Wayback Machine episode usually ended with a groan inducing pun.

So how about this . . .

All the toilets in the FBI office have been stolen.

The agents have nothing to go on.

Want more Lacey? Read, “Within the Barred Bunker,” his series of columns about his time in prison. And check out his previous columns on a variety of subjects in the “Free Speech Rattler.”