Recently, we received our 1500th submission to the Great Hoover Hunt project, which aims to catalog all of the handwritten notes from longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover in the Bureau’s files. To commemorate the occasion, we put together a collection of some of Hoover’s choicest bureaucratic broadsides, ready to be copy-pasted into your office’s Slack debate over who forgot to pick up more toner.

Back in 2016, MuckRock celebrated our 100th article in our ongoing project to release the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on prominent figures with an interactive timeline of the FBI’s history. Now, over a 100 articles and thousands of pages later, we’re launching a new and improved version of the timeline, making it easier than ever to explore who and what the Bureau was investigating, and when they were doing it.

Actress Ethel Merman and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a friendship spanning from 1938 until Hoover death in 1972. But personal insights aside, was there any benefits to being among the Bureau’s BFFs? According to the singer’s personal FBI file, to be rich in friends isn’t always enough to keep you in riches.

When J. Edgar Hoover forced William “Bill” Sullivan, the Bureau’s domestic intelligence chief, into retirement he set into motion a chain reaction which nearly forced him into retirement as well.

J. Edgar Hoover received a slew of accolades over his long career, but not all elicited the FBI Director’s enthusiastic response.

An incident from the height of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign as FBI Director illustrate the lengths the Bureau would go to squash rumors surrounding Hoover’s sexuality - and the dire consequences for those found spreading those rumors.

In August 1970, J. Edgar Hoover discovered an apparent plan of the Soviet Union’s to buy an apartment building - and he knew they had to be stopped. The building, Highview Towers, was located next to the site of the future Soviet Embassy and was the only building in the area that would enable to the government to conduct surveillance operations. The result was a last-second rush by the Nixon Administration to purchase the building.

When we last looked at J. Edgar Hoover’s personal files, the newly-minted FBI Director was America’s criminal justice wunderkind, settling into his role as Number One G-Man amid nearly universal acclaim. Almost half a century later, the file shows a very different Hoover, neither wunder nor kind - a paranoid recluse scouring the tabloids for bad press while fighting the constant threat of forced retirement.

While the meeting between Nixon and the King is the stuff of legend, hidden within Elvis’ FBI file is a lesser known but equally bizarre epilogue. While in Washington visiting the president, Elvis Presley repeatedly tried - and failed - to gain an audience with the man he called “the greatest living American,” J. Edgar Hoover.

On the anniversary of the death of the infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, MuckRock takes a look through his earliest files and finds that Hoover was a apparently a pretty swell guy … at least according to Hoover.