An FBI whistleblower has reported to the Office of Special Counsel that he believes the bureau and Justice Department are violating the constitutional rights of Jan. 6 defendants, falsifying statistics on domestic extremism and misusing SWAT teams to make misdemeanor arrests, according to a copy of the complaint reviewed by Just the News.
Special Agent Stephen M. Friend, who works for the FBI in Florida and serves as a SWAT team member, told the main federal whistleblower office in Washington he had an “exemplary” work record since he joined the bureau in 2014 and even won awards but was suspended in recent days after he began raising concerns about the FBI’s and DOJ’s conduct in the Jan. 6 investigation
“I believed the investigations were inconsistent with FBI procedure and resulted in the violation of citizens’ Sixth and Eighth Amendment rights,” Friend wrote. “I added that many of my colleagues expressed similar concerns to me but had not vocalized their objections to FBI Executive Management.”
The FBI national press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent on Friday.
Friend said one of his many concerns is that the FBI is using SWAT teams to arrest Jan. 6 defendants facing misdemeanor charges, violating the bureau’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide and creating a potentially unsafe encounter.
“I responded that it was inappropriate to use an FBI SWAT team to arrest a subject for misdemeanor offenses and opined that the subject would likely face extended detainment and biased jury pools in Washington D.C.,” Friend wrote in his whistleblower complaint. “I suggested alternatives such as the issuance of a court summons or utilizing surveillance groups to determine an optimal, safe time for a local sheriff deputy to contact the subjects and advise them about the existence of the arrest warrant.”
The agent said when he suggested alternatives for arresting suspects in minor Jan. 6 cases one of his bosses “told me that FBI executive management considered all potential alternatives and determined the SWAT takedown was the appropriate course of action.”
Friend said he believes the Jan. 6 investigation has involved “overzealous charging by the DOJ and biased jury pools in Washington D.C.” and that the heavy-handed tactics smacked of prior FBI mistakes like the Ruby Ridge tragedy in the 1990s.
Friend also confirmed allegations first raised by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, that the FBI field office in Washington D.C. was opening Jan. 6 cases in other field offices across the country, creating a false data trail suggesting a nationwide problem with domestic violent extremism when in fact the cases all stemmed from the Capitol riot in the nation’s capital.
Friend said he was assigned 36 Jan. 6 investigations for Florida alone and that one consequence of the data manipulation is that agents in field offices across the country are being listed as affiants for search and arrest warrants for subjects they actually had not investigated.
“There are active criminal investigations of J6 subjects in which I am listed as the ‘Case Agent,’ but have not done any investigative work,” Friend wrote in the complaint. “Additionally, my supervisor has not approved any paperwork within the file. J6 Task Force members are serving as Affiants on search and arrest warrant affidavits for subjects whom I have never investigated or even interviewed but am listed as a Case Agent.”
Another consequence, Friend said, is that agents are being told to deprioritize other investigations of serious crimes like child sex exploitation.
“I was also told that child sexual abuse material investigations were no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies,” he wrote.
In an interview Friday, Jordan confirmed his office has had contact with Friend and that he expressed concerns about the deployment of FBI SWAT teams for misdemeanor cases.
……”You had Joe Biden’s Justice Department raid the home of a former president, take the phone of a sitting member of Congress, call half the country fascists and extremists,” he added.
The FBI retaliated by suspending his security clearance thus putting him in limbo.
Former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division Terry Turchie slams the use of SWAT teams to terrorize people accused of misdemeanors:
The man who led the FBI Unabomber task force — which ultimately arrested violent suspected terrorist Theodore Kaczynski without deploying a tactical team — is now decrying the use of SWAT teams to arrest Jan. 6 defendants for misdemeanors and warning of the politicization of the bureau.
The FBI doesn’t use SWAT teams for misdemeanors and has rarely used them to arrest nonviolent offenders, said Terry Turchie, former deputy assistant director of the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, in an interview with Just the News.
Certain criteria must be met to use SWAT, such as the subject of an arrest warrant having a history of violent behavior and owning a firearm, Turchie explained.
FBI whistleblower Stephen Friend says the bureau suspended him from his job recently for raising a range of concerns about the FBI’s and DOJ’s conduct in the Jan. 6 investigation, including the bureau’s use of SWAT teams to arrest Jan. 6 defendants facing misdemeanor charges, thus violating, he alleges, the bureau’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide and creating potentially unsafe encounters.
Turchie shares Friend’s concern about the use of SWAT teams in these cases.
“The more you escalate the use of force, the more you take a chance of having possible injuries in some catastrophic failure of agents and civilians alike,” he said.
In his experience, there were even violent cases where SWAT wasn’t used in order “to keep the temperature down,” Turchie added.
Turchie, who led the Unabomber task force, explained how the arrest of Kaczynski occurred without the use of tactical teams.
FBI agents went to Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana to execute a search warrant. While arrests aren’t typically made when executing a search warrant, this “instance was different because we were looking for someone who was unidentified and committing violent acts for 18 years,” Turchie recalled.
While they didn’t use SWAT or HRT teams to arrest Kaczynski, they did pick specific FBI agents from the San Francisco field division who were on a SWAT team, he recounted. However, they were nearby just “to seal off the geographical area around the cabin so he couldn’t escape,” not to make the arrest, he said.
……”This was a very, very violent terrorist, and he was becoming more unstable,” Turchie said. “Even there, we didn’t use the SWAT team for the arrest.”
Turchie said that using SWAT for the Jan. 6 misdemeanor arrests is sending a message that’s designed to scare people.
The message from the FBI, he said, is: “You don’t speak up and get involved with the wrong political side, or we’ll teach you a lesson.”
Turchie warned of the increasing politicization of the FBI, citing the deployment of SWAT teams to arrest nonviolent people like former Trump adviser Roger Stone and pro-life activist Mark Houck.
The FBI wasn’t political when he left in 2001, shortly before 9/11, Turchie recalled. Recently, however, “easy cases” such as Trump-Russia and Hillary Clinton’s emails were “messed up” because the FBI “politicized” them, he said, which “should’ve never happened.”
Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Danik told “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show on Monday that declining public trust in the FBI is “a disaster” for agents trying to do their jobs.
……Just the News interviewed nine retired FBI agents over two days, nearly all of whom said they had never heard of the FBI working on misdemeanor cases. A couple of them even noted that they would have been laughed at by the U.S. Attorney’s Office if they had brought them a misdemeanor case.
All of the retired agents were concerned about the use of SWAT teams to make arrests of the Jan. 6 defendants. Many expressed concern over the politicization of the bureau by FBI headquarters while noting that FBI field agents are good at their jobs.
The FBI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Whistleblowers have come forward to say how Christopher Wray has lost control of the agency, that the same FBI boss who shut down the probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop also pressured agents to inflate the number of “domestic extremists”, and how the agency suppresses evidence of Biden family crimes.
The corrupt FBI sewer rats have committed egregious crimes against civil liberties to intimidate and suppress dissent. Since 6 January, FBI gestapo targeted an innocent man for attending President Trump’s 6 January rally, raided the wrong home in Alaska looking for Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, arrested a man for standing inside the capitol and waving a Trump banner, confiscated a Lego set from an “insurrectionist” and asked that citizens turn in their “extremist friends and relatives“.
Jill Sanborn of the FBI testified that the FBI has not been able to find one single person inside the capitol building carrying a firearm. The supposed “armed insurrection” had no firearms involved except for the armed capitol cop who murdered Ashli Babbitt. The FBI conceded the protest was not an organized plot to “overthrow the election”, but the goons have pushed the lie anyway.
Jan 6 protesters are being held without due process in Biden’s gulag while Antifa and BLM thugs walk free. They have been beaten and isolated by the guards. Lawyers for one, a man called Ryan Samsel, say he was beaten so badly he has a skull fracture and is now blind in one eye.
One of them died awaiting trial.
The FBI framed the 6 January MAGA protesters by inserting undercover agents and informants in the crowd to encourage violence. It backfired, but that’s not stopping the Feds from persecuting people who simply wandered the hallways, stood outside the building, and peacefully protested. The FBI’s role was intended to be subversive and to gather as much intelligence on the participants as possible.
Why aren’t Tim Gionet, Luke Phillip Robinson and Ray Epps in solitary confinement with the rest of the political prisoners in their gulag?
The FBI and DOJ are rounding up dissidents and engaging in political persecutions. The Dems have turned the government into a machine that rivals the Stasi. Look what they’ve done to people who protest the corrupt status quo and refuse to obey the regime. The FBI thugs raided the home of gubernatorial Candidate Ryan Kelley for just standing outside the capitol on January 6.
This is the kind of shit that happens in communist dictatorships and Banana Republics.
If there was any real justice, every fucking Antifa and BLM thug along with the entire Dem Party and the DNC-owned gang of judges and prosecutors would be strung up.
The Dems and their government reprobates are a real threat to civil liberties and our republic.
The FBI has a lengthy history of corruption. The bureau needs to be dismantled from the top down. The criminal malfeasants in the agency should be indicted and prosecuted. We know that won’t happen because agencies weaponized by Dem regimes trample all over the Constitution while Congress does nothing.
All FBI whistleblowers should testify before congress and hand Christopher Wray’s ass to them on a silver platter.