by Tyler O’Neil
Two FBI agents who had their security clearances suspended after speaking to Congress about how law enforcement went after pro-lifers and concerned parents, now warn that the FBI has adopted a “Marxist culture” and called for its abolition.
“The type of recruiting events they have—they have adopted this Marxist culture to permanently change our institutions like the FBI,” Garret O’Boyle, an FBI agent whom House Republicans hailed as a whistleblower, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation. “Remember, the FBI are the people with the guns and badges who will come after you.”
O’Boyle was referring to the FBI’s decision to publicly champion identity politics celebrations such as Arab American Heritage Month and to use race as a factor in hiring.
The @FBI is laser focused on figuring out what to celebrate this April. Solving crimes doesn't appear to be at the top of their priorities.
Defund the FBI. https://t.co/iZDcvDgs3J pic.twitter.com/hspv5UVh2c
— Steve Friend (@RealStevefriend) April 6, 2024
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to discriminate against job applicants based on race or sex.@Weaponization @USEEOC https://t.co/WmGxliHBi9
— Steve Friend (@RealStevefriend) April 6, 2024
O’Boyle, who became an FBI special agent in July 2018, recounted that he went to Congress in October 2021 to speak about the FBI’s “threat tag” assigned to concerned parents who spoke up at school board meetings.
“The FBI was stonewalling the Congress when they would ask for information about that threat tag,” he said. “I blew the whistle.”
O’Boyle also recalled interviewing an FBI informant within the pro-life movement, asking questions in light of the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which a majority of justices overturned the court’s abortion precedent Roe v. Wade. He said his FBI superiors directed him to ask the informant about “how they’re going to attack abortion clinics and things of this nature.”
The days after the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion saw attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches. Pro-abortion vandals attacked Catholic churches at least 236 times and pro-life pregnancy centers at least 90 times, according to Catholic Vote.
O’Boyle said he had driven out to Virginia to take a role at the FBI Academy in Quantico, and his family was in transition.
“I come to Virginia to report, [and] they suspended my security clearance, took my gun, my badge, accused me of leaking information to the media,” O’Boyle recalled.
Yet, he said, he has since heard from another whistleblower that those who accused him of leaking information to reporters knew “that was false from the beginning.”
“The FBI rendered us homeless with a 2-week-old baby,” O’Boyle added.
The FBI suspended O’Boyle without pay in September 2022, and he remains in limbo. The FBI refuses to allow him to take another job until he resigns.
Stephen Friend, another FBI whistleblower, said his wife’s Facebook account disappeared after she reached out to someone at the parental rights group Moms for Liberty.
“My wife’s Facebook account was permanently deleted when she sent a private message to someone with Moms for Liberty,” Friend recounted.
The FBI’s Richmond office notoriously cited the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left activist group that puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, in a memo last year about “radical-traditional Catholics.” A few months later, the SPLC added Moms for Liberty to that “hate map.”
Friend said he joined the FBI in 2014 and worked for seven years on Indian reservations. He then worked on child pornography cases in Florida, where he was told “that wasn’t a priority.” Later, he said, he was put on a joint terrorism task force focused on the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“It was apparent that we were manipulating statistics on those cases,” Friend told The Heritage Foundation audience. He said the FBI planned to send a “tactical team” to arrest a Jan. 6 protester, a significant escalation in Friend’s eyes.
“I came to my supervisor, expressed my concerns,” Friend said. “He activated this process. I had multiple meetings and they facilitated my suspension.”
Both O’Boyle and Friend said the FBI can circumvent laws protecting whistleblowers by suspending security clearances without firing FBI agents.
“Whistleblower protection exists but the FBI has a hack around it, which is they suspend your security clearance,” Friend explained. He said the FBI keeps agents “on unpaid suspension, until they assess whether you’re a threat to national security.”
Although the FBI claimed O’Boyle leaked to the media, Friend said in his case the FBI suspended his security clearance because “I opened the employee handbook improperly.”
“The process is the punishment for so many of us,” he added.
Friend ultimately resigned and joined the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit organization run by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Donald Trump White House. Last year, Friend published a book, “True Blue: My Journey From Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower.”
Speaking at Heritage Tuesday, both FBI whistleblowers called for the end of the FBI.
“I think you have to abolish the FBI,” O’Boyle said.
Local police departments often coordinate with police departments in other parts of the country, O’Boyle noted. He conceded that some federal law enforcement agencies may be necessary, such as the Border Patrol, but insisted that the U.S. Marshals Service can take over many of the FBI’s roles.
“I think it needs to be shattered and scattered,” Friend said of the FBI. “Disarm the FBI … make them unarmed investigators, like they originally were, and force them to partner with local agencies.”
Friend urged Americans to press “our federal representatives” so that “it is no longer acceptable for them to say it is worse for us to have a temporary federal government shutdown than to have an armed law enforcement agency that is weaponized against the American people.”
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Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Photo “Weaponization of Government Symposium ” by The Heritage Foundation.
