Did ABSCAM target Black officials?

The FBI’s history with Black leaders is not a theory. COINTELPRO targeted Martin Luther King Jr. and others, and that history is documented in the Church Committee reports. So when Black elected officials in the 1980s said they were investigated more often than white ones, many listened. [1]

In 1988 Hirsch Friedman, an Atlanta lawyer who had worked as an FBI informant, signed an affidavit saying agents had told him of an unwritten policy, which he called “Fruehmenschen,” of routinely investigating Black officials on the assumption that they were unfit to govern. Representative Mervyn Dymally of California placed it in the Congressional Record. A 1998 peer-reviewed study discusses it in detail. [1]

ABSCAM also raised a different ethnic objection. Critics, including former Senator James Abourezk, argued that the robed-sheikh fiction played on ugly stereotypes about Arabs. The FBI replied that the name came from Abdul Enterprises and denied any racial motive. [2]

The seven members of Congress convicted were Williams, Myers, Lederer, Thompson, Murphy, Jenrette and Kelly. All were white. [1][3]

The Senate committee examined how every target was chosen, through middlemen and approvals, and its report does not suggest race played a part. We found no record that a Black member of Congress was approved for a bribe meeting. [2]

So the claim, as applied to ABSCAM, does not fit the record. That does not answer the broader question about the 1980s, which this site rates separately and leaves unproven.