America's Talking - Whistleblower: FBI Manipulated Jan. 6 Cases to Make Domestic Terrorism Appear Widespread

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

A former FBI agent testified before Congress Thursday saying that the FBI manipulated data to make domestic terrorism linked to Jan. 6 seem like a nationwide phenomenon instead of an isolated incident. The revelation came as part of a hearing held by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government where FBI whistleblowers testified before lawmakers about abuse and politicization of the FBI. They also testified about backlash they received, even losing their jobs as retaliation for refusing to toe the narrative established by FBI leadership. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus powered by the Center Square. I am Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today is the Center Square Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper, who is back from his month-long vacation. I hope you're refreshed and ready to go, Casey. Oh, I'm very refreshed, very ready to go. You know, somehow this month felt like only a week. I guess it just flew by, Dan. Well, that's good to hear. You should be back and ready to work. Yeah, it was nice to get some real treatment back massages. My back's been pretty sore for carrying this podcast for so many weeks in a row. Oh.

Oh. All right. Let's get into it because we do have some news to talk about. We are recording this on Friday, May 19th. Casey, there's been some bombshell news this week related to the allegations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. First, special counsel, John Durham, finished his investigation. into that allegation and the FBI's role in it. In short, the Durham report pretty much fully debunk the allegations that were promoted hard by then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's

campaign. Tell us what's in the Durham report and why Americans should know about it. The big takeaway, and there are a few, and this is that the FBI looks really bad in this report, right? So they basically did not have enough actual verifiable evidence to open up crossfire hurricane, a lot of the things that they did looking into Trump. So that's the first thing it makes clear is they didn't have that evidence. And even worse, they ignored key witnesses, even those who worked on the steel dossier, which has been, you know, totally debunked. They didn't interview Carter Page, which would have really cleared a lot of things up. In fact, there are other agents in the FBI who raised concerns that this was not a good plan, that there was problems. And it's pretty

obvious now that we see the Durham report that they didn't have enough to go on. FBI agents at the time said, hey, we don't have enough to go on, but deputy director McCabe just pushed through. You know, there's a lot of more detailed things. Their FISA applications had a lot of issues. Probably wouldn't have been, they would not have been granted if, if everything, all the evidence had been looked at. There's evidence that a lawyer for the FBI may have actually committed a crime. You know, we'll say allegedly, we don't totally know, but there's a lot of evidence on that. Then when the FBI found out, you know, when it became more broadly known about these errors, The FBI was slow to remedy them or basically didn't do it at all.

So Trump got really, I don't know what the word is, but screwed over on this. And the FBI, at least the leadership, kind of knew they were doing it, it seems. And those who raised concerns about it were just told to be quiet. And now the F. doesn't look so good. Yeah. The Clinton campaign, the Hillary, the campaign of Hillary Clinton in advance of the 2016, pushed what's now known as the infamous Steele dossier, which alleged that Russia had information on Trump that could be used to influence him if he was elected president, which of course he was in 2016.

And the allegations or what the Durham report concluded was that the FBI relied too much on this information provided by Hillary Clinton, which, of course, the campaign is political. And they didn't follow up on other evidence that would have shown that this evidence from the steel dossier just wasn't true. I think Americans can take away from this that maybe some FBI, investigations are more political than they are actually legitimate criminal investigations. Right. And we've seen this several times over, I'd say the last five years, where something is happening like this investigation that seems fishy. And anyone who questions it is mocked, is ridiculed, is called some radical person. In the mainstream media. Absolutely. They were totally complicit and totally got this story wrong and their credibility. If it could get any lower, it will get

lower because of this. People who question these kind of things are mocked and told, how could you question the established agency? So like the credible, you really think you're more credible than the FBI? And so there's always this appeal to authority, right? So, hey, you can't question the FBI. It's the FBI. Turns out the FBI was totally wrong. But we've seen this again and again where the mainstream media in some large federal agency, we saw this with a lot of the information on COVID and vaccines. People who even questioned it were mocked, ridiculed, told to trust the science, to trust the experts, and now as time's gone by, we know that the experts were being pretty deceptive in a lot of cases. So we've seen it with COVID. We've seen it with the FBI. We've seen it

in other times. And so I think a takeaway from the last five years is when people say, just trust the government. You know, you have a few pretty recent examples to point to and say, well, I'm going to keep asking questions. And hopefully the media will start asking tough questions again, too, which is what their job really is. You can lump the Hunter Biden laptop in there, which was sort of politicization in reverse where they said that was Russian disinformation, and of course, that's proven not to be. Or when people said that social media companies were censoring conservatives, and that was kind of waived off as a silly conspiracy theory, turns out that has been totally verified by the Twitter files. There's a lot of examples. Along the same lines, Casey, this week you covered a U.S.

House subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, a hearing that was held this week, where some FBI whistleblowers testify. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, this is an interesting story. I believe we were the first to really have the story and definitely with this angle. But Steve, Steve friend, he testified before this committee. There's actually several former FBI agents who had basically said that they received retaliation from the FBI for being whistleblowers. And so they basically came forward and said, hey, there's some wrongdoing at the FBI. And they were punished. I reached out to the FBI. And of course, you know, FBI spokesperson to was a party line and says, we would never do that, which is what they're going to say. And, you know, maybe, maybe you

some of these guys aren't being totally honest about their expression, but one of the, their experience, but Steve testified, and this just amazed me, he basically said that, and this guy was a SWAT agent for five years, worked in law enforcement, local law enforcement for five years. You know, he's not a guy who worked six weeks and got angry and left. But so he knows what he's talking about. And he said that basically what they did was they took the January 6 cases, all the people who came, you know, and were being investigated for January, January 6.

And instead of treating it like one big case, which he said is what would normally happen, You treat an event like this as one case with several smaller subcases to be looked into. They treated each individual as its individual case and distributed them around the nation, which was really intentional, he says, to make domestic terrorism investigations look rampant and widespread and across the country. And so there's been a lot of concern, especially from libertarians and Republicans, about how federal law enforcement is being weaponized against certain political parties. I mean, you referenced, we talked a little bit about how certain

viewpoints for being silenced. The Department of Homeland Security just opened up this kind of counterterrorism, free speech watch group, right, that's going to be doing this kind of thing. So it's real concerned about it. But he's saying basically that they intentionally manipulated the data to look domestic terrorism, look like this nationwide, widespread problem more than it was, more than just a lot of people, more than an isolated incident. And of course, January 6 is its own issue. And I'm not going to like belittle that. But it's one thing to have an isolated incident of January 6th that needs to be dealt with. It's another thing to change how the data is processed to make it look like there are, you know, dozens and dozens of these kinds of incidents happening

around the country. So the bottom line, Casey, is the FBI has pretty much compromised itself and has a lot of work to do to regain the public's trust that its investigations are legitimate and not political. Exactly. Listeners can keep up with Casey's reporting on this topic and more at thecenter square.com or Casey Harper. I'm Dan McCaleb. Please subscribe and thank you for listening.