Abolition and the argument from institutional culture
In a November 2022 episode, attorney Harvey Silverglate told host Bob Zadek that the FBI should be abolished. Silverglate’s argument rested on culture: the Bureau, he said, has had a culture that started with its first director, J. Edgar Hoover, who spent his life as director, and that culture cannot be changed or reformed. It does not matter who the president is, whom the president appoints as director, or who the Attorney General is; the culture is ingrained. Silverglate recommended abolition and, if a federal police agency is needed—which he called questionable—a new organization with a new name, new agents, and a new director, bound by strict regulations governing its obligation to honor civil liberties The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022).
Zadek framed the episode around the gap between the Bureau’s media image and Silverglate’s account. Zadek described the FBI as having always worn suits and ties, rarely used their guns, dressed impeccably, and been polite—at least as the media taught—and invoked Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Eliot Ness in The Untouchables as the popular archetype. He asked Silverglate to give the headline of what is wrong with the FBI before drilling into specifics.
Silverglate dated the problem to the first decade of the twentieth century, when the FBI was started, and said it has been going on for a long time. He rejected the possibility of internal reform: the Bureau is not capable of reform, in his account, because the practices are institutional and longstanding rather than the work of particular directors or administrations.
Form 302, 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and the witness interview
Silverglate described a system in which FBI agents record interviews in a Form 302 rather than by tape recording. A witness who later says he did not say what the form attributes to him, or that the account is inaccurate, faces indictment. The consequence, Silverglate said, is that the witness is indicted because it is a federal felony to lie to any employee of the federal government—not only FBI agents; lying to a postman is also a federal felony. He identified the offense as a violation of 18 United States Code Section 1001, making it a felony to give a false statement to an agent The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022).
Zadek set up the exchange by stressing that the encounter is an interview, not an examination under oath, and therefore not perjury. In Silverglate’s telling, the government then threatens the witness: testify to something the agents say you did not say, or deny saying something the 302 form claims you did say. Because the witness has no tape recording to prove otherwise, Silverglate called it a perfect system for putting words in a witness’s mouth and a pernicious system.
Silverglate also said that enacting a statute to require recording of interviews is not simple. He said he tried, and the FBI managed to convince Congress not to do it. He offered two explanations: any congressman voting against the FBI is thought to be soft on crime and not good on law and order, and Congress is afraid of the FBI because it can pin a crime on virtually every congressman. He described the federal criminal system as having vague, broad statutes that can indict a ham sandwich, with the ham sandwiches afraid of the butcher. In his account the FBI terrorizes the people who in theory are supposed to control it, and even presidents are nervous because they can be investigated under the same problem; the presidency, he said, is an incredibly complicated job, and arguably a president commits three felonies a day, with the FBI deciding which felonies to investigate.
The Martin Luther King Jr. blackmail
Silverglate cited the blackmailing of Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the most high-profile examples. Hoover was the director and hated King, Silverglate said; the FBI illegally bugged a hotel room where King was having an assignation with a young lady, let King know it had the recording, and tried to derail the civil rights movement. Silverglate presented the episode as an example that stands out in his mind The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022).
Personal encounters with FBI tactics
Silverglate described two personal experiences. In a criminal case about fifteen years earlier in Boston, a high-profile corruption case in which he represented a client he could not identify because of attorney-client privilege, he learned years later that two agents had been stationed outside his office building with instructions to follow him everywhere. One day a man came out of the building whom the agents mistook for Silverglate, went to a parked car beneath the then-elevated Southeast Expressway, and was given oral sex by a woman behind the steering wheel. The agents wrote this down. Three or four years later, a criminal defense lawyer friend told Silverglate he had come across the report in discovery in his own case—a report about Silverglate getting oral sex from this woman during the lunch break. Silverglate said the material was held in case he gave them trouble, so they could blackmail him, and stressed that it was not even him The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022).
In a second account, Silverglate said his law partner at the time was Nancy Gertner, later a federal judge and now a professor at Harvard Law School, and that they had a criminal case together under the firm name Silverglate and Gertner—a marijuana importation case. A man called saying he had firsthand information that could exonerate their client. They brought him into the conference room with Gertner and Silverglate present. The man then said it was not true that he had exonerating information, but that he liked their clients and was prepared to testify falsely, and he described what he was prepared to say. Gertner and Silverglate stood up, told him it was a crime to suborn perjury, to perjure himself, and for them to cooperate, and asked him to leave. As he walked out, Silverglate noticed a lump over his suit jacket on the right shoulder: a Kel-set recorder, so that if they had agreed, they would have been indicted. Silverglate later complained to the U.S. Attorney—Mueller—who, Silverglate said, told him the office had information that Silverglate might have wanted the witness to perjure himself and had an obligation to follow it through. Silverglate called it entrapment, said he and Gertner had never had a disciplinary charge, and said he had been practicing for 53 years with a clean record.
The U.S. Private Vaults raid and civil forfeiture
In a January 2023 episode, Mike Greenberg of the Institute for Justice described the raid on U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly Hills business that rented safe deposit boxes. Greenberg said the firm represented seven clients who rented boxes there, among more than 700 box holders. Two clients, Paul and Jennifer Snitko, lived in a wildfire-prone area and wanted a safe place for family heirlooms; Jenny Pearsons and her husband had about $20,000 in precious metals as a retirement nest egg. U.S. Private Vaults opened a few years earlier, had a convenient location, good hours, good prices, and was a member of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
Greenberg said law enforcement was investigating the business and its owners without the knowledge of the clients or the overwhelming majority of the 700-plus box holders. The evidence was limited to the business, its owners, and its managers; there was no evidence against any individual box holder, and the government did not know who most of them were. In early 2021 the government secured a criminal indictment against the business and applied for a warrant to search and seize it and its equipment. The warrant application also sought to seize the vault nest—the metal superstructure—and the boxes containing the renters’ valuables, on the theory that they were the business’s property and proceeds of malfeasance.
Greenberg said the government told the magistrate it would seize the boxes but look inside only to identify owners and reunite them with their property, and to inventory contents solely to protect agents against claims of theft or loss. The application specifically said the warrant would not authorize a criminal search of any box, and the magistrate signed off on that understanding. The lawsuit later uncovered, Greenberg said, that the government deliberately misled the magistrate: months earlier, high-level agents in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office had determined that when they took down U.S. Private Vaults they would seize, keep, and permanently confiscate or move for civil forfeiture on everything in the boxes worth more than $5,000. Greenberg said $5,000 was the FBI’s minimum for moving for forfeiture because that is the break-even point after labor hours and paperwork. If the Bureau stood to profit, it would move for forfeiture; if not, it was not interested. None of this was told to the magistrate Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
Zadek asked what gloss could be put on the behavior, and Greenberg said he had nothing; the government conceded it misled the magistrate and did not share the plan. Greenberg said there was no defending the plan to assume any cash or valuables worth more than $5,000 were per se evidence of criminality. On the day of the raid, he said, the most glaring example of a criminal search rather than an inventory search was that agents worked with local police departments to have drug-sniffing dogs on site, and for every box estimated to contain $5,000 or more, they ran it past a dog. Agents eventually admitted the dogs served no inventory purpose but could be useful as evidence in a subsequent forfeiture case. Inventory forms instructed agents to note how cash was bundled, any odor, or drug residue—details Greenberg said do not help forestall claims of theft or loss but do help determine whether cash is related to a crime. Meanwhile, entries for contents were often “miscellaneous coins,” “assorted jewelry,” “miscellaneous items,” or “uncounted currency.”
Greenberg said more than 700 customers woke up one morning to news that their valuables were gone. The FBI moved for forfeiture on more than $80 million in cash and millions more in precious metals and jewelry, all in one document listing everything at once—easily approaching a hundred million dollars, if not exceeding it, in a couple of days’ work. Clients were dumbfounded; Paul and Jennifer Snitko bolted to the U.S. Private Vaults location and found nothing to do but a sign on the door telling box holders to go online, fill out a form identifying themselves, and wait for the FBI to be in touch. Hundreds did exactly that, Greenberg said, with no idea what had happened, why their property was seized, or what the government wanted with it.
Across episodes: the Bureau as institution
Two episodes carry the topic. In November 2022 Silverglate argued for abolition on grounds of an unchangeable culture dating to Hoover and the first decade of the twentieth century, and described the Form 302 and Section 1001 system, the King blackmail, and two personal encounters with agents. In January 2023 Greenberg described a specific operation—the U.S. Private Vaults raid—in which agents misled a magistrate and moved to forfeit more than $80 million from innocent box holders. The later episode does not revisit the abolition argument or the reform question; it supplies a concrete case of the institutional behavior Silverglate described. A July 2020 episode with Pat Eddington on federal agents in Portland and the 100-mile border zone lists FBI history among its topics, but the excerpt contains no substantive discussion of the Bureau.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the FBI’s founding date, the statutes or cases that established its jurisdiction, or the outcomes of the U.S. Private Vaults litigation. They do not give the legal basis on which the Snitkos, the Pearsons, or the other box holders sought return of their property, nor the result of any forfeiture proceeding. The July 2020 episode’s treatment of the FBI is limited to a topic listing, and the November 2022 excerpts break off mid-sentence at several points, leaving the “police” versus “investigation” distinction and the closing institutional discussion without stated conclusions.