Was ABSCAM a political hit?

In the mid-1970s the FBI had been battered: the Church Committee had exposed its domestic spying, and Watergate had shown what political use of law enforcement looked like. Under Directors Clarence Kelley and then William Webster, appointed in 1978, the Bureau shifted toward white-collar crime and public corruption, and undercover work was the tool. The Senate committee counted 53 FBI undercover operations in 1977 and 463 in 1981. [1]

Critics say ABSCAM was the showcase. It went after Congress, the institution that had just investigated the FBI, with a script written to reach Congress, and its results were leaked before indictment, convicting members in the press first. [1][2]

Then the timing: the leaks came in February 1980, an election year, and three of the convicted members lost that November.

The leaks were bad. Names, including those of people never charged, reached the press in early February 1980. The committee found they injured innocent people, Pressler among them, and that they did not come from any single deficiency that could easily be fixed. [1][2]

But it also found “no evidence that these leaks were politically motivated.” It found that no one attending a bribe meeting had been targeted before a middleman raised the name, and that no lead had been dropped for an improper purpose. [1]

The partisan direction argues against a hit, too: a Democratic administration’s Justice Department ran it against mostly Democratic targets, and its agents asked for Republicans. [3]

The fairest reading is that ABSCAM was not a political hit in the partisan sense, but it was an institution under pressure to produce, run with too little supervision, and its leaks did damage that no verdict could undo.