The Return Of J Edgar Hoover

Alt media so far haan't been happy with either Attorney General Bondi or FBI Director Patel, accusing both of grandstanding on Fox News without making real progress on the Trump agenda.

At the moment, Bondi’s position is much more politically precarious with the right, which might explain her omnipresence on Fox News and Fox Business programming, where she’s repeatedly turned to safely articulate her explanation for the Epstein files mishap — “Everything’s going to come out to the public,” she assured host Sean Hannity — and return to her preferred message of cleaning up the Biden era Justice Department and prosecuting violent crime.

The same story suggests Trump is nevertheless happy with her:

By all indications, Bondi’s position remains secure with President Donald Trump, who called her “fantastic” on Thursday and gave her a glowing review during a visit to the Justice Department Friday. The longer-term question is how much more patience and grace Trump’s base will grant Bondi, who already bears scars as the central figure in arguably the administration’s earliest blunder.

Developments over the past few days suggest both she and Patel are beginning to deliver what Trump seems to have expected they would:

I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan – a county judge in Milwaukee – for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov.

No one is above the law.

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) April 25, 2025

In other words, high-profile, high-publicity arrests and prosecutions.

🚨BREAKING: First ARRESTS just made —

FBI takes New Mexico immigration judge Juan Cano and his wife into custody… accused of harboring a Tren de Aragua gang member inside their own home.

This is WILD. You can’t make this up.

How deep does this go?

Thoughts? ⬇️ 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/NuPsNWSktM

— Tony Lane 🇺🇸 (@TonyLaneNV) April 24, 2025

In both of these cases, it looks like the FBI alerted media to the upcoming arrests of both judges and made sure cameras were on scene to cover them. It seems to me that what we're beginning to see is the return of the old-time J Edgar Hoover FBI. A book review of the title linked at the top of this post says,

“The FBI gained complete control over how it was portrayed in the media and ultimately it exercised a lot of its power—and it was a powerful agency—in order to maintain that image and essentially to drown out critics,” [author Matthew} Cecil says.

. . . Hoover created an air of romance around the Bureau. There was a television series with scripts and actors vetted by Hoover and his men and a long line of articles that portrayed the agency in nothing less than a favorable light while dissent and dissenters were quickly squashed.

People keep forgetting that Trump had two successful careers before he went into politics -- he was a developer, and then he became a media figure. A big part of his political success comes from what he learned about media. One of those lessons is that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Look at what's come from the FBI arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee alone:

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued a statement accusing the Trump administration of undermining the country's judiciary "at every level."

"In this country, people who are suspected of criminal wrongdoing are innocent until their guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt and they are found guilty by a jury of their peers — this is the fundamental demand of justice in America," Evers said.

Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who is the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, said in a statement that while all of the facts about Dugan's arrest haven't been confirmed, "the implications of this arrest are chilling."

"This Administration has shown brazen contempt for the judiciary," Raskin continued. “Every American should be deeply troubled by this massive escalation."

My guess is that Trump is delighted with this. According to CNN,

The decision by the Justice Department to charge Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan for obstruction and concealing the individual from arrest turned a spotlight on the administration’s decision to exercise immigration enforcement in certain places that have in the past been mostly off-limits to such federal activity, including courthouses, schools and places of worship.

Her arrest Friday morning immediately drew intense criticism from legal experts and Democratic lawmakers, who widely viewed it as the Trump administration’s latest bid to strong-arm courts around the country as it pushes ahead with controversial immigration policies.

. . . Earlier this year, President Donald Trump revived a policy from his first term that allows federal officials to make immigration-related arrests in courts.

But as in so-called sanctuary cities around the US, court officials are not obligated to work with federal officials in such arrests if the warrant being executed is an administrative warrant and not a judicial one.

Such was the case for Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who federal officials were attempting to arrest on April 18, the day he was appearing before Dugan in a criminal matter. After learning that the officials were in possession of an administrative warrant for Flores-Ruiz, the judge allegedly helped him and his attorney leave through a nonpublic area of the courthouse. Flores-Ruiz was arrested by federal agents shortly thereafter.

. . . Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said that it’s likely Dugan wouldn’t be facing the federal charges had she only declined to cooperate with the agents that day.

For her conduct to result in the charges she’s facing, he said, “there needs to be some affirmative act taken. And here, showing this person the back door, giving this person access to the back door, and then ushering the person out the back door would be an affirmative act.”

What many commentators seem to ignore is that illegal migration is a major issue for the electorate, and Trump's policies have strong support:

Two separate polls released in the past week show strong support for President Trump’s key immigration policies: closing the border and deporting aliens here illegally. In fact, those are the most popular among the new administration’s policies, underscoring lingering discontent over the prior administration’s much more permissive immigration stances.

The more publicity for such arrests, the better -- and the more hard-left Democrats hysterically denounce them, the better for Republicans.

But let's recall that the last FBI hero in the public mind was James Kallstrom, who as assistant director in charge of the in New York field office led the investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. He came into the picture after the FBI's disastrous raids at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and before the FBI's involvement in the bogus Trump investigations that led to Director Comey's firing and Robert Mueller's public humiliation. Kallstrom, the last hero, who began his career during Hoover's final years, said of those developments that he "did not recognize the agency I gave 28 years of my life to".

It looks like Trump's aim -- recall that he's a proven genius at both media and politics -- is to put the FBI visibly back on the right side of things, where Hoover had originally put it. If that's the case, both Bondi and Patel are doing exactly what he expects. The same likely applies to other high-level appointees like Hegseth; there's no such thing as bad publicity where they're concerned.

UPDATE: CNN actulally gets the point:

ROSSI: You have the right to get an arrest warrant, and you have the right to get a summons, and that they got an arrest warrant for a judge shows that they wanted to make this a spectacle. . .

JENNINGS: Why wouldn't you want to make a spectacle of it? I mean, the fact of the matter is, there are Liberal Democrat elected officials, not all are judges, some are mayors and others, all over this country who have said repeatedly since Donald Trump became the president that they would like to obstruct his principles and his program when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants. Here, you have this person, if these facts are proven true, obviously that's exactly what she's trying to do here.