ANALYSIS – Things at the FBI just seem to get worse. A new House report shows that FBI special agents and other key employees who exposed the “politicized rot” within the bureau were suspended or had their security clearances revoked.
The interim staff report from the House Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government describes that ‘rot' as the deep partisan politicization of the FBI's leadership and the concerted weaponization of the law enforcement agency against conservatives.
The report, released Thursday morning, also described the FBI's alleged “retaliatory conduct” against the whistleblowers “after making protected disclosures about what they believed in good faith to be wrong conduct.”
The committee's report likened the bureau's actions to “engaging in a ‘purge' of agents who hold conservative beliefs.”
The FBI has responded to the accusations in a letter discussed below.
The bureau's politicized rot spiked after the Capitol Riot in 2021 and the subsequent Democrat effort to highlight the alleged threat of Domestic Violent Extremism (DVE), also known as MAGA Republicans, pro-life Christians and other traditional conservatives.
Among the whistleblowers' key accusations is that the bureau opened improper investigations into a large group of individuals who simply attended the pro-Trump political rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.
They claimed that the bureau had “no specific indication” that 138 of the people “were involved in any way in criminal activity.”
“The only basis for investigating these people was that they shared buses to Washington with two individuals who entered restricted areas of the Capitol that day,” they explained in the report.
But it's more than that.
The committees' report reveals new whistleblower testimony from several current and former FBI employees that exposes other “abuses and misconduct in the FBI.”
The report states that:
Some of these employees—Special Agents Garret O'Boyle and Stephen Friend, Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill, and Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen—have chosen to speak on the record about their experiences. The disclosures from these FBI employees highlight egregious abuse, misallocation of law-enforcement resources, and misconduct with the leadership ranks of the FBI.
It added that, in order to bolster the Democrat narrative that DVE was “organically rising around the country,” the FBI pressured staff to “reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism, and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist.”
Friend specified that the FBI's handling of Jan. 6-related investigations “deviated from standard practice and created a false impression with respect to the threat of DVE nationwide.”
This is something I have argued and written about repeatedly.
The deliberate mishandling of these cases greatly inflated the number of alleged DVE cases in the country and has been used as an excuse to divert massive amounts of federal law enforcement funds and resources to this grossly exaggerated threat.
One of the whistleblowers called the bureau “cancerous” because it has “let itself become enveloped in this politicization and weaponization.”
Allen reportedly had his security clearance suspended for performing case-related research using open-source news articles and videos about the Capitol riot and sending his results to his task force colleagues for “situational awareness.”
Meanwhile, the FBI argued in a letter to the Committee Chairman that the clearance suspensions and other disciplinary actions were taken purely out of security concerns or violations by the FBI employees.
However, among the counter allegations in its letter, the FBI said:
Specifically, the Security Division found Mr. Allen espoused alternative theories to coworkers verbally and in emails and instant messages sent on the FBI systems, in apparent attempts to hinder investigative activity.
The letter noted that despite multiple directives from his supervisor to “stop circulating these materials,” Allen “continued.”
The report states that: “Because these open-source articles questioned the FBI's handling of the violence at the Capitol, the FBI suspended Allen for ‘conspiratorial views in regard to the events of January 6th.”
To come to your own conclusions, I recommend reading the House report and the FBI's letter linked above.
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