Photo: Alamy
An interim staff report from the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has detailed shocking testimony from FBI whistleblowers this week, spotlighting the “serious problems infesting the senior leadership ranks of the FBI.”
“To date, the Committee and Select Subcommittee have received whistleblower testimony from several current and former FBI employees who chose to risk their careers to expose abuses and misconduct in the FBI,” the report stated.
It continued, “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.”
On Thursday, these special agents testified before the committee and Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, reiterating their testimony of experiencing alleged abuse and misconduct from the leadership of the bureau in retaliation for whistleblowing or voicing concerns about FBI procedures.
The report detailed point-by-point summaries of FBI abuse and misallocation of resources. It revealed, “…whistleblower testimony revealed to the Committee and Select Subcommittee that the FBI has abused its authority and egregiously misallocated the resources entrusted to it by American taxpayers.”
Per the report, whistleblower testimony alleged the following:
- The FBI has reclassified/manufactured domestic violence extremism cases to “advance a political narrative that these cases are on the rise,”
- The FBI unlawfully gathered banking information from American citizens after Jan. 6,
- Their internal “Cash Bonus System” creates “perverse incentives” to use law enforcement to financial gain rather than law enforcement needs,
- Politicization has eclipsed the bureau’s dedication to “traditional law enforcement function,”
FBI whistleblower Garrett O’Boyle, for example, was suspended after moving his family across the country. “O’Boyle was subject to FBI retaliation for making protected disclosures to Congress after expressing his concerns up his chain of command with no action being taken,” the report clarified.
During his testimony on Thursday, O’Boyle told the committee that the “smear campaign” that had been waged against him by the FBI was “unsurprising.”
“Too many in the FBI aren’t willing to sacrifice for the hard right over the easy wrong,” he said.
O’Boyle has been suspended without pay.
Yet another whistleblower, Stephen Friend, detailed his credentials in the FBI as an investigator before revealing that he had voiced his concerns to leadership at the bureau over “departures from case management rules” and “the FBI’s use of SWAT” against those accused of non-violent crimes.
“The FBI is incentivized to work against the American people and is in dire need of reform,” he testified.
Friend has also been suspended without pay.
As stated in the House Committee’s report, “The FBI leadership’s trend toward political partisanship in recent years has disturbed the ranks of front-line FBI agents like O’Boyle, Friend, and Hill. In the words of one whistleblower, the current state of the FBI is ‘cancerous’ as the Bureau has ‘let itself become enveloped in this politicization and weaponization.’”