Mr.
Schiff: Hi, welcome to "FBI 100, A Closer
Look." I'm Neal Schiff of the Bureau's Office
of Public Affairs along with FBI Historian Dr.
John Fox. John, six months after the Bureau of
Investigation was created by Attorney General
Charles Bonaparte, he wrote a letter to President
Teddy Roosevelt. Why?
Dr.
Fox: "Well Neal, Bonaparte had been asked
to come up with the official justification for
why he had created the Bureau of Investigation
in the summer of 1908. What had happened was this:
in the fall when Congress returned to town; Congress
used to get out of Washington, DC, for the summer,
Bonaparte reported in his annual report to Congress
that over the summer he had created a Special
Agent force. It seemed to be working okay and
that they would keep it to see how things went.
That winter Teddy Roosevelt got into an argument
with Congress over a law that Congress had past
earlier in 1908. The law had said that the Executive
Branch of the government could not borrow detectives
from the Secret Service. It was the law that stopped
the Attorney General from using Secret Service
investigators and convinced him that he needed
his own detective force which is why he created
it that summer. So Teddy Roosevelt is a lame duck
President at this point. He gets into an argument
with Congress over Executive power and he got
Congress angry because he said that the reason
why they had passed a law saying that the Executive
Branch couldn't loan out Secret Service investigators
was because Congressmen didn't like being investigated.
And so it was this political battle between a
lame duck president and the Congress. So Roosevelt
asked Bonaparte to justify his actions that summer.
Bonaparte went into a long and detailed letter
about the origins of the Department of Justice;
about how over the years the role of the Attorney
General had changed and how the fact that with
all these new investigative duties that were coming
up, the Department really needed a force of detectives.
So he needed to create one and had done so using
his monies that Congress had appropriated over
the years to investigate crimes."
Mr. Schiff: How did all this make our Justice
system better and actually, as time went on, made
coordination with the Department of Justice smoother
for Special Agents with the Bureau of Investigation,
later to be called the FBI?
Dr.
Fox: "What it did was it centralized all
of the investigative resources of the Department
of Justice. I shouldn't all, but most of the investigative
resources of the Department of Justice and put
them under the direct control of the Attorney
General. So now when a U.S. Attorney needed to
conduct an investigation, he could write into
the Department of Justice, get a detective assigned
to the case, and things were handled in an organized
manner. Of course it was the creation of the FBI.
And the FBI over the years grew into a very important
force for the investigation of crime and the protecting
National Security."
Mr.
Schiff: On
the Internet at www.fbi.gov there's plenty of
FBI history. Check it out. From the FBI's Public
Affairs office, along with Bureau Historian Dr.
John Fox, I'm Neal Schiff with "FBI 100,
A Closer Look."
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