The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO investigation of Ramparts magazine appears to have been sparked by a combination of their exposés on Central Intelligence Agency, their contacts at press outlets like the Soviet-controlled TASS, and their interviews with foreign leaders and officials. The Bureau described these interviews as placing the Ramparts reporters as being “under the guidance of Egyptian propaganda and intelligence personnel” and felt that “the average reader” would see the resulting article as “pro-Nasser, anti-Israel and anti-U.S.” For the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, this perception created an opportunity for the Bureau to sow dissent among Rampart’s staff, subscribers, and donors.

Oliver White Hill is among the country’s most important civil rights attorneys of the 20th century, known for pursuing cases to dismantle segregation in Virginia before and after serving in the army during World War II. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s file on Hill, however, offers its own remarkably skewed, racist, and paranoid view of Hill’s work, in keeping with Director J. Edgar Hoover’s deeply held suspicion of the Civil Rights movement.

Here’s the latest finds from our ongoing crowdsourced efforts to explore Ronald Reagan’s Federal Bureau of Investigation file and hunt down Director J. Edgar Hoover’s handwritten notes.

While a not-insignificant percentage of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities under Director J. Edgar Hoover were driven by personal vendettas, few were as well-known – or as publicly vicious – as Hoover’s feud with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. That clash quite literally came to a head on December 1, 1964, when, at the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, Hoover invited King to FBI headquarters for their first - and only - face to face meeting, captured in a ten-page memo in King’s file.

Over the last year, MuckRock users have filed 13,762 requests, released 2,063,011 pages, and used 7,419 First Class stamps in getting requests out to agencies. We also added five new members to our board, expanded our staff as we brought new three new services into our portfolio, and launched a number of new features. But none of it would have been possible without an amazing community powering out transparency work every day.

In 2018 we were made very proud by our users, partners, and reporters, who all helped to start some terrific investigations and resources. Take a look at some of the ongoing work.

In late December 1977, Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, known to the world as “Charlie,” died in his home in Switzerland. A few months later, his body was stolen from its cemetery plot, kicking off an international corpse hunt that briefly - if dubiously - included the FBI.

Using the Assignment crowdsourcing tool, MuckRock is kicking off a project to catalog all of the handwritten notes left by Hoover himself in the Bureau’s files.

When we last wrote about the Federal Bureau of Investigation file for former head of the American Civil Liberties Union Roger Baldwin, we looked at one of many instances in which Baldwin butted up against Director J. Edgar Hoover on the issue of balancing liberty and security. An earlier section of the file, however, reveals their relationship was relatively tame compared to that of Hoover’s predecessor, who once urged radio stations not to let the “ultra-radicals” at the ACLU broadcast the “rotten propaganda” that they weren’t on the Soviet payroll.

The recently released Federal Bureau of Investigation file for former head of the American Civil Liberties Union Roger Baldwin document numerous times the groups came into conflict with each other. One notable incident, related to the Bureau’s wartime “Postal Censorship” program, led to a testy exchange between Baldwin and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover after the Bureau investigated the writer and pioneering Libertarian Rose Wilder Lane over her comments on a postcard.