MEDIA MONDAY / HOW THE FBI BECAME A POLITICAL TOOL, AGAIN

 

Left to Right: J. Edgar Hoover; L. Patrick Gray; Kash Patel

History is repeating itself at the FBI as agents resist a director’s political agenda 

 GUEST BLOG / By Douglas M. Charles, Penn State via theconversationUS@substack.com 

Three converging events in the 1970s – the Watergate scandal, the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War and revelations that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had abused his power to persecute people and organizations he viewed as political enemies – destroyed what formerly had been near-automatic trust in the presidency and the FBI. 

 In response, Congress enacted reforms designed to ensure that legal actions by the Department of Justice and the FBI, the department’s main investigative arm, would be insulated from politics. These included stronger congressional oversight, a 10-year term limit for FBI directors and investigative guidelines issued by the attorney general. 

 Some of these measures, however, were tenuous. For example, Justice Department leaders could alter FBI investigative guidelines at any time. 

 Donald Trump’s first presidential term seriously tested DOJ and FBI independence – notably, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. Trump claimed Comey mishandled a 2016 probe into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but Comey also refused to pledge loyalty to the president. 

 Now, in Trump’s second term, prior guardrails have vanished. The president has installed loyalists at the DOJ and FBI who are dedicated to implementing his political interests. As a historian of the FBI (and author or this essay), I recognize the FBI has had only one other overtly political director in the past 50 years: L. Patrick Gray, who served for a year under President Richard Nixon. 

 Gray was held accountable after he tried to help Nixon end the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Whether Trump’s current director, Kash Patel, has more staying power is unclear. 

 After Hoover 

 Ever since Hoover’s death in 1972, presidents have typically nominated independent candidates with bipartisan support and law enforcement roots to run the FBI. Most nominees have been judges, senior prosecutors or former FBI or Justice Department officials. 

 While Hoover publicly proclaimed his FBI independent of politics, he sometimes did the bidding of presidents, including Nixon. Still, Nixon felt that Hoover had not been compliant enough, so in 1972 he selected Gray, a longtime friend and assistant attorney general, to be Hoover’s successor. 

 Gray took steps to move the bureau out of Hoover’s shadow. He relaxed strict dress codes for agents, recruited female agents and pointedly hired people from outside the agency – who were not indoctrinated in the Hoover culture – for administrative posts. 

 Gray asserted his authority with blunt force. 

 FBI agents at field offices and at headquarters who resisted Gray’s power were censured, fired or transferred. Other senior officials opted to leave, including the bureau’s top fraud expert, cryptanalyst and skyjacking expert, and the head of its Crime Information Center. Agents regarded these moves as a purge, and press reports claimed that bureau morale was at an all-time low, charges that Gray denied. According to FBI Associate Director **Mark Felt, who became Gray’s second in command, 10 of 16 top FBI officials chose to retire, most of them notable Hoover men. Gray surrounded himself with what journalist Jack Anderson called “sharp, but inexperienced, modish, young aides.” FBI insiders called these new hires the “Mod Squad,” a reference to the counterculture TV police series. 

 Gray helps Nixon. 

 In contrast to Hoover, who had rarely left FBI headquarters and publicly avoided politics, Gray openly stumped for Nixon in the 1972 campaign. He was so rarely spotted at FBI headquarters that bureau insiders dubbed him “Two-Day Gray.” 

 At the request of Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, Gray told field offices to help Nixon campaign surrogates by providing local crime information. Gray cooperated with Nixon to stymie the FBI’s investigation of the 1972 Watergate break-in and the ensuing cover-up. He provided raw FBI investigative documents to the White House and burned documents from Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe. 

 Smoking Gun. 

When Nixon had CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters ask Gray, in the name of national security, to halt the FBI’s investigation, Felt and other agency insiders demanded that Gray get this order in writing. The White House backed down, but Nixon’s directive had been recorded. 

 That tape became the so-called “smoking gun” evidence of a Watergate cover-up. Felt, in classic Hoover fashion, then leaked information to discredit Gray, hoping to replace him. 

 Gray resigned in disgrace. 

 While Felt never got the top job, he is now remembered as the prized anonymous source “Deep Throat,” who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate investigation. 

 But it was internal FBI resistance, from Felt and agents at lower levels, that led to Gray’s departure. Political from the start Campaigning in 2024, Donald Trump vowed to “root out” his political opponents from government. Realizing he was a target because of his investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, FBI director Christopher Wray, whom Trump had nominated in 2017, resigned in December 2024 before Trump could fire him. 

 In Wray’s place Trump nominated loyalist Kash Patel, a lawyer who worked as a low-level federal prosecutor from 2013 to 2016 and then as a deputy national security appointee during Trump’s first term. 

 Patel publicly supported Trump’s vow to purge enemies and claimed the FBI was part of a “deep state” that was resistant to Trump. Patel promised to help dismantle this disloyal core and to “rebuild public trust” in the FBI. Even before Patel was confirmed on Feb. 20, 2025, in an historically close 51-49 vote, the Justice Department began transferring thousands of agents away from national security matters to immigration duty, which was not a traditional FBI focus. 

 Hours after taking office, Patel shifted 1,500 agents and staff from FBI headquarters to field offices, claiming that he was streamlining operations. Patel installed outsider Dan Bongino as deputy director. 

 Bongino, another Trump loyalist, was a former New York City policeman and Secret Service agent who had become a full-time political commentator. He embraced a conspiracy theory positing the FBI was “irredeemably corrupt” and advocated “an absolute housecleaning.” 

 In February, New York City Special Agent in Charge James Dennehy told FBI staff “to dig in” and oppose expected and unprecedented political intrusions. He was forced out by March. Patel then used lie-detector tests and carried out a string of high-profile firings of agents who had investigated either Trump or the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Some agents who were fired had been photographed kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington, D.C. – an action they said they took to defuse tensions with protesters. 

 In response, three fired agents are suing Patel for what they call a political retribution campaign. 

 Ex-NFL football player Charles Tillman, who became an FBI agent in 2017, resigned in September 2025 in protest of Trump policies. Once again, there are assertions of a purge. 

 Will Patel be held accountable? 

 Patel’s actions as director so far illustrate that he is willing to use his position to implement the president’s political designs. When Gray tried to do this in the 1970s, accountability still held force, and Gray left office in disgrace. Gray participated in a cover-up of illegal behavior that became the subject of an impeachment proceeding. 

 What Patel has done to date, at least what we know about, is not the equivalent – so far. Today, Patel’s tenure rests solely upon pleasing the president. If formal accountability – a key element of a democracy – is to survive, it will have to come from Congress, whose Republican majority has so far not exercised its power to hold Trump or his administration accountable. Short of that, perhaps internal resistance within the administration or pressure from the public and the media might serve the oversight function that Congress, over the past eight months, has abrogated. 

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Douglas M. Charles is a Professor of History at Penn State University. 

 **NOTE: Mark Felt, the FBI's Associate Director, came forward in 2005 via an article in Vanity Fair written with his lawyer—that he had indeed been “Deep Throat.” Woodward and Bernstein then confirmed that Felt was their source for info during the Watergate years. 

SUNDAY REVIEW / LET'S GO SAILING WITH JENNIFER

Editor's Note: For the next year, this blog will publish stories by Jennifer Silva Redmond, a literary gypsy, who has lived aboard the yacht that she and her husband sail the Americas. A long time voice in book publishing, she recently launched a memoir of her own: Honeymoon At Sea, a romance with husband Russel and the sea. When we asked Jennifer for a paragraph long bio to launch the beginning of her posts with PillartoPost.org she submitted the following. Yes, it's a bit longer than we asked but life is full of surprises. Our 14-year-old daily blog is delighted Jennifer ignored our paragraph request. Please meet Jennifer Silva Redmond: 

*** 

Jennifer and Russel

How did a 28-year-old young actress living in New York City end up spending the next 36 years of her life on a sailboat on the West Coast of North America? 

 Well, when Russel proposed to me we’d just spent the day sailing San Diego Bay on board his 26' Columbia, Watchfire, so I knew what I was getting into. He wanted to travel and had been preparing the boat to go cruising. I was living in New York City—not the ideal place for a sailboat. Russel said he was willing to move East and relocate his illustration business, since I was enjoying some hard-earned success as an actress in NYC, adding that he could ship the boat to Long Island and we’d sail when we could, while pursuing our careers in the city. I changed that sensible plan one day by asking the man I was about to marry what he would like to do more than anything. 

He answered that he'd like us to sail down Baja and up into the Sea of Cortez while he painted the area. It sounded so good—I was a California girl who loved the sun and the water and after six years, was getting a little tired of the Big City. However, I knew nothing about sailing. I'd only been a passenger on the boat in San Diego and it wasn’t clear if I could learn to love it as much as Russel did or even enough to enjoy myself. 

But it seemed an ideal way for us to spent a lot of time together building a strong foundation for our marriage as well as being productive for him and relatively inexpensive. We decided to do it. Nine months later, in November of 1989, after a wedding, dozens of boat jobs, and seemingly endless preparations, we untied the dock lines and sailed south. 

I learned to tolerate sailing and to enjoy what sailing meant—living in beautiful spots that were hard to get to—and more often inaccessible—by car. I fell in love with Baja and we ended up staying for a year in the Sea of Cortez, spending a majority of that time sailing and anchoring in the waters around Puerto Escondido and La Paz. 

Then we headed south, spending a few months along Mexico’s Gold Coast and Central America. We went through the Panama Canal and sailed up to Florida where we lived for a year in a marina near Sarasota, with Russel getting his paintings ready to exhibit, and me waiting tables and bartending. Then we sailed along the Intercostal Waterway along the US Gulf Coast to Texas, where we hauled little Watchfire out and trucked it back to San Diego. 

***

Then, a couple of years later, in June of 1996, we sailed down to Baja again, and spent three more years in the Sea of Cortez. While we were there, we started a magazine called “The Sea of Cortez Review” which was a collection of stories and poems about Baja, beautifully illustrated and designed by the Uber-talented Russel. 

We did three annual versions, with the last issue in 2000 being published and distributed by Sunbelt Publications of San Diego, a small press that specializes in books about California, Baja California, and Mexico. 

I fell in love with Sunbelt and the feeling was mutual; I worked for them for 11 years doing marketing and acquisitions, and was Editor-in-Chief when I left to become a freelance editor. I am still their Editor-at-Large, always keeping my eye out for great San Diego publications and partnerships. 

Russel sold many paintings over those years, but also began teaching screenwriting at San Diego City College, where he is still an adjunct professor. 

***

One sad note: In 2003, we were living aboard Watchfire up at a friend’s ranch in Harbison Canyon, near Crest. Our plan was to fix up the little boat and sell it along with the trailer we’d bought to transport it back from San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico back in 2000. 

Our friends had offered us a place to live and work in the shade of dozens of old oak trees in their home’s vast “backyard.” In October of that year, the Cedar fire began out in the backcountry and moved toward the city of El Cajon. Our friends evacuated their house and advised us to do the same, “just to be safe,” so we drove out in my new-to-me Nissan and our old Dodge RV, leaving Watchfire and our 1970 VW Van behind. 

The fire became a firestorm as it came down that valley and nothing in the canyon survived. We lived in the RV for a few months, then moved into a friend’s La Jolla home to housesit while she traveled, and one day while having tea on the patio I saw an ad for a 35 foot Coronado. I knew the boat was much like a big Columbia 26, so I pointed the ad out to Russel. 

We went up to Newport Beach and bought Watchfire 2 in August of 2004. After we moved it down to San Diego, we lived aboard in Harbor Island for 6 years, while I worked and Russel worked on the boat any day he wasn’t teaching. In the spring of 2011, after my jump into freelancing, we took off for Catalina, where we enjoyed being on a mooring in glorious Avalon. 

The rest of the summer was spent in Los Angeles, working on producing a screenplay that Russel and I had written that spring. The next few years were spent living on the boat in the winters, much of that time spent on a mooring in Coronado Island. 

We found our dog Ready, a small red rescue mutt, at PAWS in Coronado; she was little, with a big personality, and made a great addition to the crew. Being that close to my mom who lived in San Diego's historic North Park, I was able to take care of her after a stroke in 2011, and when she fell and broke her arm a couple of years later. 

 During the summers, when Russel was off school, we would sail up to Morro Bay or Monterey, rent a slip, and get to know the town by walking everywhere. My editing business was slowly becoming a viable support, and Russel’s teaching job now offered us both benefits. He started teaching hybrid classes, that met for a few sessions then transitioned to online. Eventually he was teaching exclusively online, and I was working exclusively online, except for teaching at a couple of local conferences. 

Life was good. 

Yet, in 2016, my mom started to show signs of memory loss, and was diagnosed with vascular dementia, as a result of her stroke. I spent a lot of time in her tiny North Park duplex, with my niece Emma living in the front half. Russel enjoyed having a garage and workshop for boat jobs and renovations, so we gradually became landlubbers. 

By 2018, my mom began to wander off and it was clear that she was unable to live in her house anymore. By then we were all sharing the tiny half-house, me, my mom, Russel, and Ready, who loved having a yard to run in. I was lucky enough to get my mom involved with PACE, and they found her a room at the Villa, a memory care facility located on the east side of Balboa Park, and run by the amazing people of PACE. (I can’t say enough about how great a resource PACE is for San Diego’s low income seniors!) 

We sold the North Park house and moved back aboard Watchfire in the summer of 2019. When my mom passed away in hospice in the fall, it was clear that nothing was keeping us tied to San Diego any longer. We made plans to leave in March of 2020. Yeah, no. That didn’t happen. The Pandemic hit and we got stuck on the boat through May. We stayed in the lovely Pier 32 Marina in National City, which afforded us great walks through mostly uninhabited neighborhood of industrial buildings. 

There was also a nearby boatyard to haunt out and fix up our rigging and some other boat jobs. Then in June we sailed north out of Mission Bay, stopping in Oceanside, Dana Point, Long Beach, and Oxnard where we visited with family. We sailed on to Morro Bay and spent a month there, enjoying the quiet of that normally bustling summer tourist town. Finally, we made it to San Francisco, sailing under the Golden Gate in August of 2020. We spent fall in South Beach Marina, right by the Giant’s ballpark, before heading east for a winter in the Delta, and then back for another summer and fall in the SF Bay area. 

In the winter of 2022, we trucked the boat up to Washington state and spent the summer exploring Puget Sound. During this relatively quiet couple of years, I had finally turned to finishing the Baja memoir I’d been promising myself I’d write since about 1993. I wrote and rewrote chapters, and shuffled them again and again, like someone doing a thousand-word jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. 

Finally, I was pretty happy with the first 50 pages, and I started thinking about looking for a publisher. One day on Instagram I saw a post about a new publisher looking for true stories about adventurous women, so I sent my query and the first fifty pages off to Rebecca Eckles at Re:Books of Toronto. 

 In January of 2023, I was in San Diego when I got the message that Re:Books wanted to publish my memoir, Honeymoon at Sea. I was thrilled of course, and spent that year editing, finalizing, copyediting, and anticipating the publishing of my book. I even recorded the audiobook in a sound studio in Seattle that summer. I had started my Substack, also called Honeymoon at Sea, earlier that year and I did a zillion podcasts and appearances of all kinds in Washington that summer and in Southern California during the winter and spring. 

Since then, we have spent another three summers up in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, with summer 2025 dedicated to exploring British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. I have been posting occasional travel columns for Womancake Magazine for the last two years, and now—thanks to PillartoPost.org—I’m going to share them with you here. I’ll update them with info about how we got to each place, unless that is made clear in the piece, add more photos where I can, and I’ll be happy to take any questions from readers: Jsilvaredmond@gmail.com 

***

Note: Jennifer's first article will appear next Tuesday: www.pillartopost.org 

COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / HOW EURO DEFORESTATION LAWS IMPACT WORLD COFFEE TRADE

 European Parliament gave final adoption on the EU Deforestation Regulation [EUDR] on May 16, 2023 in session, Brussels

Via TheConversation.com 

GUEST BLOG / By Paul Mwebaze, Research Economist, University/Illinois--Urbana-Champaign--If your morning can’t begin without coffee, you’re in good company. The world drinks about 2 billion cups of coffee a day. However, a European Union law might soon affect your favorite coffee beans – and the farmers who grow them. 

Starting in 2026, companies selling coffee on the European Union market will have to prove that their product is “deforestation-free.” That means every bag of beans, every jar of ground coffee and every espresso capsule must trace back to coffee plants on land that hasn’t been cleared of forest since Dec. 31, 2020. 

The new rules, found in what’s known as the EU Deforestation Regulation, are part of a wider effort to ensure European consumption doesn’t drive global deforestation. 

However, on the ground – from the coffee hills of Ethiopia to the plantations of Brazil – the rule change could transform how coffee is grown, traded and sold. 

Why the EU is targeting deforestation

 Deforestation is a major driver of biodiversity loss and accounts for about 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And coffee plantations, along with cocoa, soy and palm oil production, which are also covered by the new regulations, are known sources of forest loss in some countries. 

Under the new EU Deforestation Regulation, companies will be required to trace their coffee to its exact origin – down to the farm plot where the beans were grown – and provide geolocation data and documentation of supply chain custody to EU authorities. 

They will also have to show proof, often through satellite imagery, that any open land where coffee is grown was forest-free before the 2020 cutoff date. 

The rules were initially set to go into effect in early 2025 but were pushed back after complaints from many countries. Governments and industry groups in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia warned of trade friction for small farms, and the World Trade Organization has received complaints about the regulations. 

Most companies must now comply by Dec. 30, 2025. 

Small enterprises get until June 30, 2026. 

Potential winners and losers 

The coffee supply chain is complex. Beans are grown by millions of farmers, sold to collectors, then move through processors, exporters, importers and roasters before reaching grocery shelves. Adding the EU rules means more checkpoints, more paperwork and possibly new strategies for sourcing coffee beans. 

Small farms in particular could be vulnerable to losing business when the new rules go into effect. They could lose contracts or market access if they can’t provide the plot-level GPS coordinates and nondeforestation documentation buyers will require. That could prompt buyers to shift toward larger estates or organized co-ops that can provide the documentation. 

If a farm can’t provide precise plot coordinates or pay for mapping services, it could end up being excluded from the world’s largest coffee market. 

Larger coffee growers already using systems that can trace beans back to specific farm plots could gain a competitive edge. 

 

 Farmers check on coffee beans at a small agroforestry operation in Kenya. The coffee bushes were planted among trees that provide shade. World Agroforestry Centre/Joseph Gachoka via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 

  The new regulations also include stricter oversight for countries considered most likely to allow deforestation, which could slow trade from those regions. As a result, buyers may shift to regions with lower deforestation risk. 

Even outside Europe, big buyers are likely to prioritize beans they can trace to nondeforested plots, potentially dropping small farms that can’t provide plot-level proof. That could reduce availability and raise the price of some coffee types and put farms out of business. In some cases, the EU regulations could reroute undocumented coffee beans into markets such as the U.S. 

Helping small farms succeed 

For small farms, succeeding under the new EU rules will depend on access to technical support and low-cost tools for tracing their crop’s origin. Some countries are developing national systems to track deforestation, and they are pushing the EU to invest more in helping them. 

Those small farms that can comply with the rules, often through co-ops, could become attractive low-risk suppliers for large buyers seeking compliant crops. 

The change could also boost demand for sustainability certifications, such as Rainforest Alliance, 4C Common Code or Fairtrade, which certify only products that don’t contribute to deforestation. But even certified farms will still need to provide precise location data. 

Agroforestry’s potential 

Arabica coffee, the most common variety sold globally, naturally evolved as an understory shrub, performing best in cooler tropical uplands with good drainage and often partial shade. That points to a way farmers can reduce deforestation risk while still growing coffee: agroforestry. 

Agroforestry involves planting or conserving shade trees in and around coffee plots to maintain the tree canopy. 

Global forest area by type and distribution in 2020, according to a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization assessment.

In agroforestry systems, shade trees can buffer heat and drought, often reducing evaporation from soil and moderating plants’ water stress. Several field studies show lower evaporative losses and complementary water use between coffee and shade trees. In some contexts, this can lower irrigation needs and reduce fertilizer demand. Practical tools such as World Coffee Research’s Shade Catalog help farmers choose the right tree species for their location and goals. 

Agroforestry is common in Ethiopia, where Arabica originated, and in parts of Central America, thanks to long traditions of growing coffee in shade and specialty demand for the products. 

Under the new EU rules, however, even these farms must prove that no forest was cleared after 2020. 

Why this matters to world wide coffee drinkers 

For coffee drinkers across the planet, the new EU rules promise more sustainable coffee. But they may also mean higher prices if compliance costs are passed down the supply chain to consumers. For coffee lovers elsewhere, changes in global trade flows could shift where beans are sold and at what price. 

As EU buyers bid up beans that can be traced to nondeforested plots, more of those “fully verified” coffees will flow to Europe. U.S. roasters may then face higher prices or tighter supply for traceable lots, while unverified beans are discounted or simply avoided by brands that choose to follow EU standards. 

FRIDAY FUNNIES / WHAT DO YOU THINK, DEAR?

THE FOODIST / HUMBLE CORNER VAULTS INTO WORLDWIDE FAME

[Original PillartoPost.org review]--When Finca opened in early 2024 on the northeast corner of Grim Avenue and North Park Way in San Diego’s North Park neighborhood, it brought huge ambitions to a modest neighborhood corner and became a show piece of epicurean savoir faire, a place where Spanish tapas met California produce, where wine was poured with knowledge but without pretense, and where neighbors felt welcome. 

In less than two years, that corner has vaulted into international view. In the October 2025 issue of Wine Spectator, one of the most widely read wine publications in the world, Finca appeared on the cover as part of the magazine’s annual roundup of “Editors’ Favorite Wine Bars.” 

The honor placed Finca among 38 wine bars worldwide and marked the only San Diego entry on the list. What drew Wine Spectator’s editors to North Park was not flash or exclusivity but a balance of substance and community. The magazine praised Finca’s range of more than 20 wines by the glass and a bottle list of about 165 selections, most priced under $100. 

Equally important was the atmosphere: a restaurant where the food and wine work together, and where the tone stays neighborly even as the ambitions reach higher. “A community-focused establishment centered on good food, wine and company, as any good wine bar should be,” the editors wrote. 

The selection validated what local critics had already been noting. San Diego Magazine described Finca’s menu as bold and inventive, pointing to dishes such as bone marrow with red-pepper jelly and steak tataki with fermented scallop ponzu. 

Eater San Diego highlighted the integrity of the tapas concept, saying it was not staged as a novelty but built into the daily rhythm of the kitchen. Now, with a Wine Spectator cover under its belt, Finca finds itself in a rare category: a neighborhood restaurant with international recognition. 

For longtime residents of North Park, that recognition carries extra weight. “Amazing to see modern North Park shine so brightly. Amazing because the neighborhood in the early 1990s was considered a blighted area by the Feds,” said Thomas Shess, founder and editor of North Park News. 

From its beginnings as a barbershop and repair shop corner to its present identity as a destination for food and wine, the corner of Grim and North Park Way has come a long way. Finca’s rise offers proof that neighborhood spirit and global standards can meet on the same block — and sometimes, even make the cover of a world famous epicurean magazine. 

Finca Restaurant Looking South San Diego Magazine photos.

AMERICANA / NOSTRADAMUS PICKS WORLD SERIES WINNER

 

In the year twice ten and five, the diamond’s crown alights— 

From western sun ‘neath rising shadow, titans clash through nights. 

A city’s heart, for long unseen, shall beat with fire divine— 

The Friars reborn, their banners raised, shall sip the victor’s wine.