The New Church Committee?

Senator Frank Church is rolling over in his grave. Rep Jim Jordan -- one of the nastiest Trumpies on Capitol Hill -- and his lunatic legislative brigade have formed a Congressional subcommittee to investigate the "weaponization" of federal intelligence agencies and they have the nerve to compare their MAGA operation to the highly respected Church Committee. In 1975, Senator Church of Idaho oversaw a vital investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies that, among things, exposed the CIA's assassination plots against foreign leaders and its domestic spying on American citizens -- as well as the FBI's twisted obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. In sharp contrast, Jordan's subcommittee, which Democratic critics charge is more akin to the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, is determined to protect Trump and January 6-type rebels from the Justice Department.

By the way, current new reports hail the Church Committee, but fail to mention that its most explosive findings at the time had to do with the CIA's assassination program. Senator Richard Schweiker, a moderate Republican (remember those?), was so unnerved by the committee's assassination discoveries that he persuaded Church to let him and young Democratic Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado) form a subcommittee to look into President Kennedy's assassination. What the two senators found out blew their minds, as I related in my book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years -- for which I interviewed both men.

"We don't know what happened, but we do know that (accused assassin Lee Harvey) Oswald had intelligence connections," Schweiker told the press at the time. "Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence." (This CIA connection corresponds with the latest reports about Oswald.)

Unfortunately, Schweiker and Hart were unable to complete their investigative mission about JFK. When Senator Schweiker handed over their file to Robert Tanenbaum, the tough New York City homicide prosecutor who agreed to serve as the deputy chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- the investigative panel that took up where the Church Committee left off -- the senator told him "the CIA was involved in the murder of the president."

When Schweiker told this to Tanenbaum, the prosecutor physically recoiled. "When I heard that," Tanenbaum -- whom I also interviewed -- told me, "every capillary in my body went into electrified shock. This was a United States senator telling me this!"

That night, Tanenbaum and his chief homicide inspector Cliff Fenton pored over Schweiker's file on the Kennedy assassination at a Washington townhouse he had rented. Afterward, standing in the early morning chill on the brick sidewalk outside, the New York homicide cop looked at his boss and said, "We are in way over our heads."

They were. The House Assassinations Committee's investigation of the JFK assassination was also stonewalled and sabotaged.

I tell the whole inside story in Brothers.

Senator Church holds up a CIA poison dart gun while Senator John Tower, Republican of Texas, looks on.