(RightWing.org) – Recent testimony before the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government almost sounded like the plot of a bad action movie. If what several whistleblowers from the FBI said is true, then a script comparing the agency to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo or the Soviet Union’s KGB may not be so far-fetched. After the hearings, one former agent claimed current employees think the agency has become politicized.
Rotting From Within?
The subcommittee published an interim staff report on May 18 that included a notification to “All Justice Department and FBI Employees [in oversized bold red print],” explaining something that should never have needed to be pointed out in the United States, telling them, “[y]ou have a right to speak with Congress.” They probably felt this was necessary because of the recurring stories from these agents who first faced pressure to recant protected statements made to their supervisors and then became victims of economic retaliation.
Federal whistleblower laws generally protect people from losing their jobs when they come forward with complaints, but the FBI has found a loophole; the agency revokes the security clearances needed to actually perform their duties and then puts them on unpaid leave.
One extremely coldhearted example came from former Special Agent Garrett O’Boyle, who was ordered to a new unit “half-way [sic] across the country.” After selling the family home and moving to a new post with a two-week-old baby, he was suspended on his first day at the new office. This left him and his family homeless while the bureau refused to give them access to their personal effects, which were in FBI-controlled storage.
Former agent Nicole Parker resigned from the FBI after she testified before the same committee in February. In an interview with Fox News, she said, “There are current and former FBI employees who feel exactly the same as these whistleblowers… but they do not feel that they’re at liberty to speak up because… they don’t want the target on their back.”
Political Agenda First
According to the committee’s report, now-retired Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill explained that “two people who entered restricted areas of the Capitol” on January 6, 2021, had traveled by bus from Boston with 138 others. Rather than opening an investigation into the individuals allegedly seen on video, he said that the Washington Field Office (WFO) ordered agents in Massachusetts to open investigations “on each and every one of those 140 individuals…”
The Republican report referred back to an earlier document published by the Democrats on the committee dated March 2 that, as they put it, “slandered the integrity [of the agents] in the service of partisan politics.” In their attack on the whistleblowers, the Left said they “put forward a wide range of conspiracy theories, [but] did not present actual evidence,” which was refuted by simply providing the exact words from the testimony earlier provided.
Recently, President Joe Biden and some cabinet members have declared domestic violent extremism (DVE) as the “greatest threat” to the American way of life, but the report alleges “the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially supporting the Administration’s political narrative.” The Republicans leveled an accusation that the upper echelons of the agency influenced field agents to “reclassify” cases as DVE or make them up out of whole cloth in order to artificially inflate statistics released to the public.
Copyright 2023, RightWing.org
