FBI officials reportedly suspended or revoked the security clearances of agents who spoke up against “politicized rot” at the bureau.
In an interim report, the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed testimony from whistleblower FBI agents on the “abuses and misconduct in the FBI.” The report was first obtained by Fox News.
“The disclosures from these FBI employees highlight egregious abuse, misallocation of law enforcement resources and misconduct with the leadership ranks of the FBI,” the report says.
The whistleblowers accused the FBI of “retaliatory conduct” taken against the agents after they made “protected disclosures about what they believed in good faith to be wrong conduct.”
Two whistleblowers who say they were retaliated against appeared on Capitol Hill Thursday morning to testify to the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Former FBI special agent Steve Friend and FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen both told the committee that the FBI retaliated unjustly against them.
“It appears that I was retaliated against because I forwarded information to my superiors and others that questioned the official narrative of the events of January 6. As a result, I was accused of promoting conspiratorial views and unreliable information. Because I did this, the FBI questioned my allegiance to the United States,” Allen told the committee. He said he has been suspended from the FBI for the past year.
Marcus Allen bravely served our country overseas in the armed services and has been suspended without pay for OVER a year by the FBI for "disloyalty."
Listen to his powerful testimony ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/5fR0VTk5zb
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2023
The committee report said that Allen was suspended for conducting an open-source investigation of the January 6 riot as part of his job. Allen found and shared news articles and videos of the riot as part of his duties conducting case-related research.
“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,’” the report states.
The report said that Friend was suspended after he made protected whistleblower disclosures about the FBI’s handling of Domestic Violent Extremism (DVE) cases related to January 6. It added that the bureau manipulated DVE data connected to January 6 to make domestic extremism seem widespread instead of originating with a single event.
“According to whistleblower information, the FBI has manipulated the manner in which it categorized January 6-related investigations to create a misleading narrative that domestic terrorism is organically surging around the country,” the report says, according to The Washington Examiner. “Ordinarily, the FBI characterizes and labels cases according to the originating field office, with leads ‘cut’ to other field offices for specific assistance in that geographic location. With January 6 cases, however, the FBI has not followed its ordinary procedure, which would have resulted in the (Washington Field Office) leading the investigation and categorizing the investigations as WFO cases.”
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The FBI told lawmakers that the actions were taken against Allen because he “espoused alternative theories to coworkers verbally and in emails and instant messages sent on the FBI systems, in apparent attempts to hinder investigative activity,” according to a letter from the bureau and obtained by Fox News.
Friend, the FBI said, “refused to participate in the execution of a court authorized, search and arrest of a criminal subject.” The bureau also said that he also gave unapproved interviews to media and refused to attend a Security Awareness Briefing required after he “downloaded documents from FBI computer systems to an unauthorized removable flash drive.”