BREAKING: At today’s @Weaponization press conference, I showed film from multiple depositions conducted over the past few months of FBI whistleblowers detailing how the agency is targeting and retaliating against those who speak up.
The footage is shocking. 👇 pic.twitter.com/rFJRvLu1yJ
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) May 18, 2023
The FBI has sown more evil than they have rooted out.
They’re targeting everyone from President Trump to their own agents who have blown the whistle on the weaponization of the FBI.
Congress must cut off their federal funding and make significant organizational changes. pic.twitter.com/crt5fXhjBx
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) May 19, 2023
It’s really great this came out.
I’m sure the Republicans in Congress will fix it very quickly.
In case you didn’t notice, I’m being sarcastic.
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.
NEWS: @RepThomasMassie SCORCHES Bank of America and FBI for targeting American gun owners
FBI: “We didn’t ask for the private information.”
MASSIE: “IT DOESN’T MATTER” <— exactly!#SassyWithMassie pic.twitter.com/QfbTzqDnxb
— Cliff Maloney (@CliffMaloneyJr) May 18, 2023
Bank of America gave a list to the FBI of anyone who used BofA credit/debit cards in the DC area between Jan 5-7th, 2021 – regardless of whether they participated in the events of Jan. 6th. pic.twitter.com/C0zBA1AGmy
— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) May 18, 2023
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.”
I’m just sick of hearing about it at this point.
These Republicans do not do anything but whine.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) May 18, 2023
The FBI has retaliated against brave whistleblowers for exposing the abuses they’ve seen at the FBI.
There’s no doubt that retaliation, and Democrat attacks on their character, will chill future whistleblowers. pic.twitter.com/ApAPdrnF3z
— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) May 18, 2023