FBI Whistleblowers to Testify on FBI’s Retaliation Methods

Opening statements released late Wednesday for three suspended FBI agents testifying as whistleblowers at Thursday’s hearing of the House Judiciary’s Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reveal their complaints of a pattern of punishment over their concerns about the FBI’s investigations of the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks and other agency investigations.

Newsmax will carry the hearings live, starting at 9 a.m. ET Thursday.

The FBI Wednesday night announced it had revoked the clearances of three agents who had either taken part in the protests on Jan. 6, 2021, or who had expressed views about it that led to questions about their “allegiance to the United States,” reports The New York Times.

The bureau told congressional investigators about the suspensions in a letter written by a top FBI official.

Two of the agents in the announcement, Marcus Allen and Stephen Friend, are to testify in Thursday’s hearing and are listed as being whistleblowers on the House committee’s announcement.

The third agent suspended Wednesday, Brett Gloss is not on the list of witnesses announced by the House committee.

Also testifying are Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight and a former member of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, and FBI special agent Garret O’Boyle.

The website Just the News late Wednesday obtained the opening statements Allen, O’Boyle, and Friend plan to make before the committee.

Allen, an intelligence analyst, claims in his opening statement that the bureau suspended his security clearance after he raised concerns about the testimony FBI Director Christopher Wray gave Congress about the events on Jan. 6.

Wray, in March 2021, gave testimony suggesting that the FBI or law enforcement did not infiltrate groups that had been blamed for the violence at the Capitol.

In his opening remarks, Allen plans to tell the committee that the FBI has not only suspended his clearance but has questioned his loyalty and accused him of holding “conspiratorial views.”

“This outrageous and insulting accusation is based on unsubstantiated accusations that I hold ‘conspiratorial views’ regarding the events of January 6, 2021, and that I allegedly sympathize with criminal conduct. I do not,” Allen’s prepared remarks say.

“Instead, 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.”

He has filed a complaint of retaliation with the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General and will state Thursday that it has been a year since the FBI took away his paycheck. His security clearance revocation was among those just announced Wednesday.

“My family and I have been surviving on early withdrawals from our retirement accounts while the FBI has ignored my request for approval to obtain outside employment during the review of my security clearance,” his remarks say. “We have lost our federal health insurance coverage. There is apparently no end in sight.”

O’Boyle, a special agent, has testified recently that the FBI prioritized investigations into anti-abortion after the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on legal abortion.

In his prepared remarks, O’Boyle plans to testify on the FBI’s treatment of whistleblowers, which he says causes “too many” in the FBI to be reluctant to sacrifice for the “hard right over the easy wrong.”

“They see what becomes of whistleblowers; how the FBI destroys their careers, suspends them under false pretenses, takes their security clearances and pay with no true options for real recourse or remedy,” O’Boyle says in his remarks. “It creates an Orwellian atmosphere that silences opposition and discussion.”

He will also testify that he was forced to accept a new position in another state and that the FBI ordered him to report when his family’s youngest child was only two weeks old.

“Then, on my first day on the new assignment, they suspended me; rendering my family homeless and refused to release our household goods, including our clothes, for weeks,”

Friend, meanwhile, has filed a complaint to the Office of Special Counsel saying he was suspended after he raised concerns about the FBI’s manipulation of crime statistics, the treatment of Jan. 6 defendants, and the agency’s use of SWAT teams.

In his remarks, Friend says that “whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with the FBI at risk.”

“The dangers of federal law enforcement overreach were hammered home to me when I was required to attend trainings at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and MLK Memorial,” his remarks say.

“I cited my oath and training in my conversations with my FBI supervisors. Nevertheless, the FBI weaponized the security clearance processes to facilitate my removal from active duty within one month of my disclosures.”

The FBI, in addition to its unpaid suspension, “initiated a campaign of humiliation and intimidation to punish and pressure me to resign,” Friend plans to testify.

“In violation of HIPPA, individuals at the FBI leaked my private medical information to a reporter at The New York Times. In violation of the Privacy Act, the FBI refused to furnish my training records for several months.”

Further, Friend will testify that the FBI refused his request to find another job, “in an obvious attempt to deprive me of the ability to support my family.”

He adds in his statement that the FBI’s Inspection Division “imposed an illegal gag order in an attempt to prevent me from communicating with my family and attorneys.”

The hearing was organized by Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and comes after the release publication of Special Counsel John Durham’s report that revealed the FBI lacked evidence to open its investigation on former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Committee members plan to examine accusations that the FBI has been harassing conservatives while inflating statistics on domestic terrorism.

The hearing also comes after the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans released a 1,000-page report with the allegations of the politicization of the FBI and Justice Department politicization.