Major funding for backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys.

Hi podcast listeners, I'm Ed Ayers here with Brian Ballot. Hey there Ed. And Peter Onough.

And Yale historian Beverly Gage too. Kyle, we're doing something a little different today.

We've invited Beverly to do a special midweek podcast. She's a historian who's written about the FBI.

And there just happens to be a big news item that broke last Friday evening involving with Bureau.

We have an important breaking news. The FBI director James Comey is just sent a letter to the eight chairman of the Senate and House Committees

who have been investigating the Hillary Clinton email scandal in which he says there will be a new investigation.

The investigation is the biggest political scandal since Watergate.

It's pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election.

We're hoping to have more of these midweek podcasts responding to major news stories in the coming months.

But don't worry. We'll also be back on Friday with an hour long backstory episode on the history of voting rights in your podcast feed.

So be sure to check that out.

Now let's get to this sticky situation with the FBI and the presidential election.

Bev, your historian who studied the FBI. What is the current flap look like to you through the lens of history?

I guess my main reaction is, oh, I've seen this before in some sense.

FBI interference and elections is almost as old as the FBI itself.

So from the very beginning, the FBI, which started as a tiny little department called the Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department in 1908 and became the FBI in the 1930s.

But even before it was the FBI, it was really enmeshed in politics. Some of its earliest scandals were because agents were sent to rifle through the papers of various senators at the behest of other senators were at the behest of the party.

And they were at the behest of the president who were saying things that people didn't like.

So on the one hand, the FBI is set up to be this very professional and independent bureaucracy.

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