House Judiciary report claims ‘broken’ FBI ‘targeting’ conservatives
The FBI is “broken” and is “targeting” agents who hold conservative political beliefs, the House Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government charged in a report released Thursday that cites current and former bureau workers.
Special agents Garret O’Boyle and Stephen Friend, supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill and staff operations specialist Marcus Allen, as well as unnamed whistleblowers, have alleged that America’s top law enforcement agency is beset by “abuse, misallocation of resources and retaliatory conduct,” the Judiciary panel said in a statement.
In the words of one of the whistleblowers, the FBI has become “cancerous” and “let itself become enveloped in this politicization and weaponization.”
The 78-page interim report by the House panels states that O’Boyle and Friend were suspended indefinitely for making protected disclosures to Congress after supervisors ignored concerns they raised about potentially illegal conduct.
O’Boyle was transferred from Kansas to a Virginia field office before being suspended on his first day on the job. He apparently was forced to borrow clothing for his children since his family’s possessions at the time were locked away in an FBI storage facility.
Friend had pushed back against his supervisors for mobilizing an FBI SWAT team to arrest a January 6 protest attendee, even though the subject was cooperating with the bureau.
He informed his supervisors that if a warrant was going to be filed, he “didn’t want to” participate in its execution “and that, if assigned to, I would have to consider not going, but I would call ahead if that was going to be the case.”
The supervisors then “stepped in and took him off the line and sent him home and told him to list himself as AWOL,” according to Friend’s attorney.
Allen reportedly had his security clearance suspended for harboring “conspiratorial views” after he shared open-source news articles with fellow agents that “questioned the FBI’s handling of the violence at the Capitol” on Jan. 6, 2021.
He told committee staff that analyzing such open-source information and passing it along had always been “part of [his] job,” clarifying that he never aligned himself with the people who took part in the Capitol riot nor disparaged the FBI for prosecuting those who assaulted police officers.
According to further interviews not contained in the interim report, Allen expressed to his supervisors in September 2021 that he also shared “concerns that [FBI] Director [Christopher] Wray had been untruthful in his testimony” before Congress earlier that year about the Capitol riot.
He believes his security clearance was taken away after raising those concerns with his supervisors.
In another disclosure, Hill said the FBI’s Washington Field Office demanded the Boston field office investigate 138 protesters who apparently attended the “Save America” rally in DC on January 6, despite evidence that those people had neither entered any restricted areas of the Capitol nor committed any crimes.
The FBI also received information about transactions that protesters made during their time in Washington, DC, from their Bank of America accounts. The financial institution shared the “confidential customer data — voluntarily and without any legal process,” according to the report.
The whistleblowers also have accused FBI leadership of pressuring agents to reclassify many cases as incidents of domestic violent extremism, an effort that is reportedly “manipulating its case categorization system to create the perception that [Domestic Violent Extremism] is organically rising around the country.”
They also cited a “disconcerting aspect of the FBI” involves performance metrics, which reward special agents in charge when their field office conducts a certain number of “Title III wiretaps, or FISAs, or other sophisticated — sophisticated techniques,” O’Boyle said.
He said the incentive “leads to a pervasive culture of not letting the case dictate where the investigation goes.”
In a letter sent Tuesday to the committees, the FBI disputed some of the report’s findings.
Friend had his security clearance revoked because he “refused to participate in the execution of a court authorized, search and arrest of a criminal subject,” the FBI said in its letter, which was obtained by Fox News.
“During his communications with his management about his refusal to participate, he espoused an alternative narrative about the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,” the FBI went on.
“On September 3, 2022, Mr. Friend entered FBI space and downloaded documents from FBI computer systems to an unauthorized removable flash drive. The FBI then required Mr. Friend to attend a Security Awareness Briefing (SAB) regarding his actions, but he refused to do so.”
When speaking with the committee, Friend disputed this and said he did not refuse to attend the briefing but asked for a lawyer to be present and was denied.
He told committee staff that he also couldn’t attend the briefing because he was suspended before it was held.
Friend also “participated in multiple, unapproved media interviews, including an interview with a Russian government news agency,” without the bureau’s authorization, though Friend disputes this and says his comments were lifted from other sources and used by Russia Today (now known as RT) without his knowledge.
The FBI also said Allen had his security clearance revoked for “attempts to hinder investigative activity” by sharing the open-source articles, even after being warned by a supervisor to cease doing so.
“As one example, on September 29, 2021, Mr. Allen sent an email using his FBI email account to multiple colleagues that contained links to websites and urged recipients to ‘exercise extreme caution and discretion in pursuit of any investigative inquiries or leads pertaining to the events of’ January 6,” according to the bureau.
“Another example included an email containing a link to a website that stated, among other things, ‘By now it’s clear that federal law enforcement had some degree of infiltration among the crowds gathered at the Capitol on January 6,’ to which Mr. Allen commented, ‘brings up serious concerns about [US government] participation.’”
The FBI further said Allen “expressed sympathy for persons or organizations that advocate, threaten, or use force or violence, or use any other illegal or unconstitutional means, in an effort to prevent federal government personnel from performing their official duties.”
The report was published three days after special counsel John Durham released his report on his four-year investigation into the FBI’s probe of alleged collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election — in which Durham concluded that the agency’s handling of the case was “seriously flawed.”
Russell Dye, a spokesman for Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), called the FBI letter “a last-minute Hail Mary from the FBI in a desperate attempt to salvage their reputation after John Durham illuminated their election interference and before brave whistleblowers testify about the agency’s politicized behavior and retaliation against anyone who dares speak out.”
