Fact check
Is it true: COINTELPRO: FBI Counter-Intelligence Program?
Yes — this is confirmed.
Documented by the FBI's own memoranda, by the files taken from the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office in 1971, by the Senate Church Committee's April 1976 Book III, and by a 1986 federal court judgment in Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General awarding the party $264,000 for FBI disruption, burglaries and informants. The record has not established that the FBI ordered Fred Hampton's killing, and the Church Committee did not establish who wrote the 1964 letter to Martin Luther King Jr.
The claim
From 1956 to 1971 the FBI ran secret COINTELPRO programs that used infiltration, anonymous letters, planted stories and efforts to set groups against each other to disrupt American political organizations, including civil rights, Black nationalist, socialist, Klan and anti-war groups. Popular versions add that the FBI ordered Fred Hampton's killing and told Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself; the verdict covers the documented programs, not those additions.
Key evidence
Media, PA break-in (1971)
Formal programs ended in April 1971
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