The news sparked an immediate frenzy from establishment figures across media and politics.

Legal and national security "experts" were deployed to the Sunday morning news shows to characterize the move as evidence that Trump intends to politicize the FBI and use it as a weapon against his many political opponents.

The political establishment's concerns about what a Trump FBI could do mirror a lot of what we've heard from the right in recent years as they found themselves in the Bureau's crosshairs.

But almost all of these complaints and warnings have operated under the assumption that—with maybe the exception of a few bad episodes in the 1960s—the FBI has long been an essential crime-fighting force that has only recently become—or threatens to become—corrupted by politics.

In truth, the FBI has always been used as a weapon against political movements and rivals of the established political class. That's the reason it was created.

At the end of the 1800s, left-wing anarchists were attacking heads of state all across Europe. In a few short years, the king of Italy, the prime minister of Spain, the empress of Austria, and the president of France were all assassinated by anarchists. While no communist or anarchist movement had yet to take over a country, the tenacity of these activists and revolutionaries was seriously concerning those in power in the United States.

Then, in 1901, President William McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist while attending a meet-and-greet in Buffalo, New York, which brought his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, into office. It was President Roosevelt who tapped his Attorney General Charles Bonaparte—the grandnephew of Napoleon—to create the FBI.

The AG was required by law to get congressional approval before creating this new "investigative" service of special agents within the Department of Justice. In the spring of 1908, Bonaparte officially requested the money and authority to create the FBI. Congress came back with an emphatic no.

Members of the House saw through the innocuous language of the request and figured out exactly what the president and AG were doing—creating a secret police force that was answerable only to them.