Donald Trump and I are about the same age. (He’s 71; I’m 73.) But we have something else in common, too: The FBI has acknowledged using a confidential informant to approach members of Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential campaign. Nearly 50 years ago, it also used an informant to secretly observe me.
But unlike Trump, I have the FBI document in my hot little hand. He doesn’t. Not yet.
In 1978, I used the Freedom of Information Act to see if the FBI had created a file on me when I was a student at Kent State University, between 1969 and 1973. That was the turbulent time when four students were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen and the call for justice ensued.
My file is dated May 3, 1972, the day after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died, and bears the title “urgent” since it refers to an event scheduled for the next day, May 4, the second anniversary of the shootings.
At the bottom is a space where the name of the “confidential source” has been redacted. It refers to the source as “K-2,” and indicates K-2 has provided “reliable information” in the past.
Here is what K-2 “reports” to the FBI — the awful, terrible, dangerous, un-American thing I had done as an organizer of Kent State students seeking a federal grand jury investigation of the shootings — and I quote: “TWENTYFOUR HOUR VIGIL WHICH WAS SCHEDULED FOR THE WHITE HOUSE AND THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE FOR MAY FOUR, NEXT, HAS BEEN CANCELLED.”
Now get this next sentence, please. It shows what a menace I was, how I deserved to have a “reliable source” following me around at college and reporting on me. “CANCELLATION WAS IN RESPECT FOR RECENT DEATH OF FBI DIRECTOR, J. EDGAR HOOVER.”
Are you kidding me? A bona-fide dangerous radical student activist in the 1970s would never respect Hoover, nor acknowledge the fact that he had died two days before by canceling a student demonstration set to occur at the White House!
But I honored Hoover’s death and canceled the protest, which would have seemed rude under the circumstances. I certainly was the kind of student activist who needed a “source” following him around.
Why in heaven’s name was the FBI using “K-2” to report on me? I’ve always wondered if K-2 was a girl I had taken a fancy to, or one of my professors in grad school. I was a counselor in the Kent State dorms for three years, so maybe it was a fellow counselor.
It gives me the creeps. And I’ll bet it gives President Trump the creeps, too.
I’m not a big shot like he is, so I can’t demand an investigation of the “reliable source.” Here’s what I did instead: After I got my FBI file, I made fun of the whole thing by holding a Freedom of Information Act Party and sent all my invited guests a copy of it.
I offer my experience here to President Trump as he continues to handle his own relationship with the FBI.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.