Reply #22: Remember the FBI suddenly demanding deceased journalist Jack Anderson's papers

[seafan]

...earlier this year, claiming that they were looking for information on AIPAC that should be *classified*, and his family is resisting turning over his private papers?

Only, his family became suspicious as they noted that Mr. Anderson had never written about AIPAC...


Interesting time frame of Mr. Anderson's work...

F.B.I. Is Seeking to Search Papers of Dead Reporter, April 19, 2006, by Scott Shane

WASHINGTON, April 18 — The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.
Mr. Anderson's family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.

Mr. Anderson's son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father's principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.
"It's my father's legacy," said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist's nine children. "The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to."

snip

But the F.B.I.'s quest for secret material leaked years ago to a now-dead journalist, first reported Tuesday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems unprecedented, said several people with long experience in First Amendment law.
"I'm not aware of any previous government attempt to retrieve such material," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Librarians and historians are having a fit, and I can't imagine a bigger chill to journalists."
The George Washington University librarian, Jack Siggins, said the university strongly objected to the F.B.I.'s removing anything from the Anderson archive.
"We certainly don't want anyone going through this material, let alone the F.B.I., if they're going to pull documents out," Mr. Siggins said. "We think Jack Anderson represents something important in American culture — answers to the question, How does our government work?"

snip

Kevin Anderson said said F.B.I. agents first approached his mother, Olivia, early this year.
"They talked about the Aipac case and that they thought Dad had some classified documents and they wanted to take fingerprints from them" to identify possible sources, he recalled. "But they said they wanted to look at all 200 boxes and if they found anything classified they'd be duty-bound to take them."
Both Kevin Anderson and Mr. Feldstein, the journalism professor, said they did not think the columnist ever wrote about Aipac.
Mr. Anderson said he thought the Aipac case was a pretext for a broader search, a conclusion shared by others, including Thomas S. Blanton, who oversees the National Security Archive, a collection of historic documents at George Washington.

"Recovery of leaked C.I.A. and White House documents that Jack Anderson got back in the 70's has been on the F.B.I.'s wanted list for decades," Mr. Blanton said.
Mr. Carter of the F.B.I. declined to comment on any connection to the Aipac case or to say how the bureau learned that classified documents were in the Anderson files.

And this, from a commenter at HuffingtonPost from April 30, 2006:

April 29, 2006 -- FBI agents lied about what they wanted from Jack Anderson's papers. The FBI agents who, in December, approached Olivia Anderson, the widow of deceased investigative reporter Jack Anderson and more recently, in March, author and researcher Mark Feldstein, who is writing a book about Jack Anderson, were interested in far more than the names of sources in the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) espionage case. That explanation by the FBI did not hold any water since Jack Anderson had not been active in pursuing that particular story -- he had suffered from Parkinson's Disease since 1986. According to individuals close to the FBI fishing expedition, the actual documents the FBI wanted to seize were files Anderson collected in the 1960s that linked George H. W. Bush's activities in Texas in 1963 to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 of that year. Bush was a friend of George DeMohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald's Belarusian-born contact officer. DeMohrenschildt befriended Oswald and arranged for him to settle in Dallas after leaving the Soviet Union. DeMohrenshildt "committed suicide" shortly before he was due to testify before the 1978 House Assassinations Committee. The elder Bush's name, address, and phone number in Midland, Texas was found in DeMohrenshildt's address book under the heading "Poppy."



Anderson's papers contain information on George H. W. Bush's role in Dallas in November 1963. Dubya ordered papers seized and withheld as "classified" U.S. government documents. It is clear that the man standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository and his son have much to be worried about.

In addition, the FBI wanted to remove from future public circulation Anderson documents that point to George H. W. Bush conspiring with the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran to keep U.S. hostages imprisoned in Iran until after the 1980 presidential election and avoid an "October Surprise" for Carter. The agreement between the Iranians and Bush (who was working with William Casey) sank the chances for Jimmy Carter's re-election and George H. W. Bush's entry into the White House as Vice President. The hostages were released at the very time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1981. That operation would lay the ground for future Bush-Tehran collusion in the Iran-Contra scandal. Another set of files involve the links between the Bush family and that of Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin John W. Hinckley. Had Hinckley succeeded in killing Reagan, the Bush political agenda would have commenced in earnest in 1981 rather than 1989.

The Bush family has been known to use retired FBI agents as their political heavies and clean up men in the past -- most notably to erase the Bush links to Dallas. George W. Bush's departing Press Secretary Scott McClellan has a close relative who continued to muddy the waters about the JFK assassination. McClellan's father, Barr McClellan, wrote a book claiming it was Lyndon Johnson, not George H. W. Bush, who conspired to kill the president.

All of these many hidden threads are weaving more tightly into a very nasty vision.