Would Buzzfeed Have Published the Martin Luther King Sex Tape?

Kompromat–the term for the acquistion and exploitation of compromising material, often of an embarrassing sexual nature–is very much in the news today, thanks to the allegation that Russian security services have dirt on Donald Trump and are blackmailing him to follow Kremlin policies.

On Martin Luther King Day, we can remember a great American–and one who was subjected to the most notorious kompromat exploit in US history–Martin Luther King Jr.

I’m re-upping a post I did last year on the FBI sextape/suicide campaign against King.

I’d also like to point out that the most successful kompromat dossier assembled on a US president was Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.

You know, the dress spotted with Bill Clinton’s semen that she put at the back of her closet and forgot to take to the cleaners?

The blackmail element, though denied and ignored by loyal liberals by myself and softpedaled during the impeachment hearings, was there as well.  If you think it was a matter of disinterested benevolence that caused President Clinton to set up a job interview for Monica Lewinsky with Vernon Jordan, well…

A president yielding to sexual blackmail and lying about it was stone impeachable.  Didn’t happen, though.

The best we got was Peggy Noonan enriching the vocabulary of American political ratf*ckery with her allegation that Castro was blackmailing Clinton with tapes of his phone sex sessions with Lewinsky, justified by the statement–which seems to be the lodestar for current discourse– “Is it irresponsible to speculate?  It would be irresponsible not to.”

Presidential semen, one might think, is the best kompromat there is but, as readers of thrillers such as Primal Fear and Gone Girl will tell you, there are ways even to mess with that!

Once the security services get involved, we’re all the way down the rabbit hole.

As an illustration, consider this:

There is plausible speculation that the US government forged a typewriter to convict Alger Hiss.  The typewriter was in question was convincingly identified as Hiss’s (he’d gotten rid of it but the FBI tracked it down) and shown to be the same machine that produced the notorious “pumpkin papers” produced by Whitaker Chambers.

But the scuttlebutt (including an alleged statement by Richard Nixon that “we built [a typewriter] on the Hiss case”) is that the FBI couldn’t find the Hiss typewriter; instead, a similar model was obtained and modified so it could reproduce the “fingerprint” of the original machine that typed the pumpkin papers.  Wikipedia has an excellent account of the case and the typewriter controversy.

Bad FBI!

But this rumor is layered on top of the conclusion that the FBI had identified Hiss as a Soviet agent thanks to the Venona intercepts, whose existence it did not want to reveal in open court as the price of nailing Hiss.

Erm…

As someone once commented in the case of the TV show “Making of a Murderer” sometimes the cops frame guilty people…

…or people they think are guilty…

…or people they hope are guilty.

Something to remember!

As in don’t let the IC push a particular political agenda, maybe.

So shoulda woulda Buzzfeed published the MLK sextapes?    Remember, it published the Trump dossier not because it could vouch for the accuracy of the allegations; release was justified by the fact that the dossier was circulating throughout official Washington and the media and the public had a right to know, even if was the last to know.

Apparently, lots of people in Washington got a listen to the MLK tapes, just as multitudes pored over the Trump dossier. The authenticity of the events on the Martin Luther King tapes–if not the sexually heroic composite generated by the FBI–is, as far as I can tell, challenged by no-one.

As for the public interest/puppet of Moscow angle, the proximate justification for surveilling King and trying to destroy him with sex tape was Hoover’s conviction–never successfully documented by the FBI, at least in the public realm– that a key King adviser was a Soviet agent.

Gosh, should the American public have a right to judge for itself as to whether America’s top civil rights leader was vulnerable to Soviet manipulation by listening to a mixtape of his alleged sexual exploits provided by an intelligence service?

The assumption is, however, that all copies of the King tapes were destroyed when Hoover died, sparing Buzzfeed the heartburn of a genuine, real-life choice.

But we can appreciate the bizarre spectacle of Donald Trump appearing as Martin Luther King’s 21st century doppelganger if only in the matter of deep state sexually-tinged kompromat campaigns.

Here’s a reup of my original post, trimmed a touch, with a couple grafs added from another Hoover post of mine, “Everybody Wants Their Own Stasi.”


By Peter Lee
Source: China Matters

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