Bonaparte quietly builds a federal police force Congress just told him he couldn't have

Seven years after an anarchist shot President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt wanted the federal government able to watch anarchists without waiting on local police or borrowed Treasury agents. Congress had other ideas: on May 27, 1908, it barred the Justice Department from using Secret Service employees for its investigations. On July 26, Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte answered by hiring thirty-four men of his own, using department expense funds, then putting them under a new Bureau of Investigation reporting directly to him. He told Congress about it that December, after the fact…