The Daily Signal - ‘Politically Captured Agency’: Why A Former FBI Agent Wants to Defund the Bureau

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

FBI agent turned whistleblower Steve Friend discussed his experience in the FBI, why he left, and the weaponization of the FBI against those deemed to be "losers," like pro-lifers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This Black Friday, you've got a whole month to catch all the exclusive offers waiting for you. See your local Nissan dealer or nissan.ca for details. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, August 23rd. I'm Virginia Allen. Today, my colleague Elizabeth Mitchell is sitting down with a friend of the Daily Signal, FBI whistleblower Steve Friend. Steve shares his experience within the FBI and the corruption that he saw within the bureau.

And what exactly his journey was to reaching that point of becoming a whistleblower. You might remember that he joined us here on the Daily Signal podcast last. April, and so we're so pleased to have him back for a deeper dive not only into his story, but where things stand today within the FBI. Stay tuned for Elizabeth Mitchell's conversation with Steve Friend after this. Want the inside scoop on what's happening here at the Heritage Foundation? Check out Herdit Heritage. Herd at Heritage features cutting-edge analysis and thought from leading experts in and across

the conservative movement. And, of course, the Heritage Foundation's premier events and programming. brought straight to you. Check it out at heritage.org slash podcast or in the show notes. I'm here with Stephen Friend. Thank you so much for joining us today. Pleasure to be here. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience in the FBI and why you decided to leave? Well, I joined the FBI in 2014. I was a police officer before that in Savannah, Georgia. And because of that experience, they saw fit to send me to a pretty remote location where I didn't need quite as much oversight as many new agents do. So I served in the Midwest

in northwest Iowa, Sioux City, and then was investigating Indian reservation crimes for about seven years. And then after that amount of time, had a really good run there, was on the SWAT team, arrested about 150 criminals, which is pretty atypical for most FBI agents being that active. Transferred to Florida, due to Daytona Beach, which is part of the Jacksonville Field Office, made that to work on child pornography, human trafficking cases, arrived in the summer of 2021, was officially assigned to work those cases for a few months, but then was reassigned to work on domestic terrorism and told that child pornography was not a priority going forward. We were not going to resource it. We're going to refer that to local law enforcement, and we need to focus on January

6 cases. So officially was on the January 6 cases, but at the same time, there really wasn't a lot of work to do in our office because those were basically sewn up for reasons I would later learn, which were a departure from normal, and continue to work on child pornography because it was off it that it was actually a good violation to concentrate on, actually got an award for it. But then ultimately, in the summer of 2022, orders came down that we were going to be sending a SWAT team to arrest a January 6th subject who we'd interviewed a year and a half prior and had no contact with. They were going to send a SWAT team to his house. And I came forward, I said, look, that's a risk of the public safety. He has no expectation we're going to be coming here.

There's a lot of other ways that we can bring someone into custody. And then also, I had concerns about the way that we were running the cases and manipulating the way that those are on paper to create this illusion that domestic terrorism is a far greater problem than it actually is. What did that switch from prioritizing issues of child exploitation to January 6th? Protesters, what did that show about the way the FBI has changed to you and their priorities? Well, I think like any other bureaucracy, and you have to remember, the B and FBI is for Bureau. It is a bureaucracy. when they are driven by a quota system, the success is in actually growing the bureaucracy.

They actually have a quota system. It's called integrated program management. And every year they decide what their metrics are going to be and how they're going to achieve those metrics. And the demand for domestic terrorism vastly outstrips the actual supply of it that we have in this country, which is why they're being very creative with the way that they go about those cases. And then I think that there's also a larger overall issue, particularly with child pornography.

that people would rather not think about it. It's easier just to leave it in its dark corner and hopefully it gets addressed. They would much rather have the big press conference with all the guns on the table and the big gang takedown than talking about child pornographers. And this is actually a law enforcement problem, I think, nationwide that we need to address in order to fully bring the right resources to it. And from your inside perspective about January 6th, what do the American people and the media believe that maybe differs from what you saw to be true? Yeah, I've heard this comparison. I think it's pretty accurate.

January 6 is the greatest Roershack test ever. Whatever you see is sort of what your preconceived notions are. Being an investigator, being someone who's just about facts, here is my great 30,000 foot view of that day. I think that there were people there who did some bad things, and there were people there who did some dumb things, and there are mechanisms we have as a justice system to bring those people to justice.

I think that there were people there who were caught up in the moment by professional provocateurs and informants who were working for law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, including Department of Homeland Security. I think that there were groups of guys there that saw 2020 as all the civil unrest around the country and went there really thinking, I'm going to give these Antifa hippies the beating that their daddy never gave them. They were there prepared for that, which is never a good thing, but I can almost understand it. And then I think the largest contingency of people there that day were people who were new and novel to the political process.

They were excited about Donald Trump's election in 2016. They had legitimate questions about the 2020 election that were never answered. And then I compared them to the miracle on 34th Street scene where they bring in all the letters from Santa Claus to convince the judge that Santa exists. I think that they really believe that I have a First Amendment right to assemble to petition my Congress redress of my grievances, and I'm going to walk through the Capitol a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, a million strong in order to get that message across so that they pause the certification and then we'll have an audit of the election. And those are the people that I'm most concerned have been caught up in this dragnet as the appetite for domestic terrorism stats exists. What was the final straw for you that made you leave the FBI and become a whistleblower? Well, coming forward initially with my concerns about that arrest was a protected disclosure.

They saw fit to suspend my security clearance within 30 days. This is the hack that the FBI uses to circumvent whistleblower protection. My security clearance was suspended, so I could not come to work and I could not be paid. I could not identify myself as an FBI agent. And I was placed in this purgatory indefinitely suspended forever while they investigated my ability to hold a clearance as a risk to national security. and they claim that the fact that I accessed the employee handbook improperly was the reason for that. And it was going to take years to adjudicate that. So they bleed you white financially to let you leave.

And I put in multiple requests for outside employment. Those were denied. They issued a gag order and told me that I was not allowed to speak about my situation even with an attorney. They leaked my private medical information to the New York Times and told them that I was under investigation for shooting a firearm in my backyard. They did credit checks on me to the day. that I came forward to launch an insider threat investigation of me. And it just became very, it became very apparent to me that my road back was not going to be in my future.

And I eventually resigned in February of 2022 the day that I testified behind closed doors to the weaponization committee under the judiciary. After several years with the FBI, did it surprise you to see the FBI being weaponized? against people with maybe differing point of views like pro-lifers, January 6th, protesters, et cetera. You know, I was very much in my motto as an investigator was I always said paint the fence. And I always sort of viewed the mission of the FBI's this giant fence. And I'm going to paint the section that's in my yard. And I'm going to be very compartmentalizing.

Geographically I was and it was in a very small office. I had to work two violations on Indian reservations, child pornography that are very independent. Nobody really wants to work those. So you're kind of just on your own. own. And then having gone through what I have over the last almost two years at this point, the scales have fallen away from my eyes on what's gone on historically with the FBI. I think it's bearing its ugly head more so now or more publicly because more information's come forward. But if you look historically what the FBI is doing, particularly in the last quarter century, as it's focused on

national security more and more in the aftermath of September 11th and gotten all these different tools and combine them with the metrics, the quota system. There's a long history of the FBI finding vulnerable people of different creeds and races, and they just engage in the same, what I call the playbook. They find a vulnerable person and get them to participate or agree to participate in a scheme that they did not have the ability to carry out the motivation or the means, and then they charge them with providing material support of terrorism to justify their existence. Does the weaponization against President Trump remind you of the bias that you saw at the FBI? I think that he's the poster child for weaponization at this point, and it's not limited to just the FBI.

I mean, you have charges in New York City and in the state of Georgia, but there's certainly, as being a prominent political figure, he has a greater claim to having empathy than any other politician in history where they claim that, oh, I can feel your pain. Well, do you really? Well, he actually is. He's kind of under the microscope. He's in the crosshairs of a weaponized FBI. That's why I'm hoping that if he is to be reelected, that that will galvanize in him an appetite to bring about major reform that is necessary. And we've seen the FBI put a threat tag on parents for protesting at school board meetings. What are your thoughts on that? I did surveillance of parents at school board meetings. I was ordered to go and do that.

So this is true. The fact that Christopher Ray, has testified and lied to Congress that that didn't happen. It did happen to me, and we were sent to do that. And here is the link that hasn't really made its way into the media very well. We were sent there under the guise of doing surveillance of January 6 subjects. And it was very apparent to me that they were marrying January 6 domestic terrorism to school board parents so that they could justify that threat tag because it was a terrorism threat tag. It wasn't a criminal threat tag. And was there, in fact, any connection between the school board parents and January 6th?

No, no. I mean, it was just people that were upset with the curriculum and books that were being found. And look, even if it was someone who was a subject of January 6th, they have not been convicted. And even if they were, they have a right as a parent or even as a citizen. You don't even need kids in the system. If you pay taxes to the county or a resident, you have a right to go to the school board and vocalize your displeasure with what's going on. That's certainly not terrorism.

And being an elected official, being a school board, representative that doesn't create some sort of cone of silence where you're beyond any sort of criticism from the public you are a public servant they are your constituents they're allowed to criticize you and I interviewed a few weeks ago an elderly pro-lifer who was sentenced to jail for protesting at a just sitting in an abortion clinic try to convince women not to get abortions she has a lot of health issues and was really concerned about her health do you think that the FBI should be spending its time on prosecuting people like this and what's going on with the pro-lifers being targeted.

Is this Paula Hoffman? Mm-hmm. She's a hero. And the fact that the Face Act was passed with bipartisan support is a lack of secondary thinking on behalf of the conservatives or the Republican Party. The fact that they thought it would be enforced equally on both sides because there's a second part of the Face Act, the free access to clinic entrance acts, what says that you can't do anything to impede someone's entrance to a crisis pregnancy.

Center or even a House of Worship, and it's been applied about 130 times in the last 30 years, 126 times against pro-life protesters. Now, the FBI has a mandate to investigate federal crime. However, I was told in training very early, I were not going to worry ourselves with small-time crime, misdemeanors, like we're seeing with January 6th. And I could even tell from my position before I departed as a domestic terrorism slash human trafficking agent, I went to crisis pregnancy centers when the Dobbs Jackson decision was leaked because I thought that they could be at risk of a domestic terrorist attack. And I thought that they would also be a resource for potentially women being trafficked and reached out to them and was told when I came back and sort of expected to get a helmet

sticker that I really need to focus on abortion clinics as being targets. And that is to me just picking winners and losers, which is not the job of federal law enforcement. This is the greatest takeaway here. The job of the FBI or anyone in federal law enforcement is their process. You gather the facts. You present them. The person has their day in court. Whether or not they're found guilty or they're acquitted doesn't matter. Victory is in the process. That's the government's job. That's its prime directive. But now what we're seeing is a politically captured agency that is not only interested in the results. They want to get overwhelming results. So they're putting their fingers and entire arms on the scale. Why do you think the FBI is giving such preferential treatment

to pro-abortion groups over pro-life? Well, the FBI has to work in conjunction with the Department of Justice because they're an arm of the DOJ, and you have federal prosecutors that are heavily leaned to the left politically, and they have an appetite, and they have the discretion to bring charges. So they can decline certain charges, they can accept others, and there's no question that, particularly in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ under Kristen Clark, who lied about stabbing her husband in order to get confirmed there to that spot, which is the crown jewel of the Department of Justice, that they want to exact as much revenge against their political enemies as possible because they're extremely unhappy with the Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson.

And what have you been doing since leaving the FBI? I left the FBI in February. I'm now a senior fellow of Domestic Intelligence and Security Services at the Center for Renewing America. So I've been able to bring some information to light there and produce some work products. I also host my own podcast with the American Radicals podcast, which I co-host with Gerrida Boyle, who's another FBI whistleblower.

And I have a weekday television show on Patriot TV called True Blue, which is named after the book that I authored last summer, True Blue, my journey from Beat Cops, a suspended FBI whistleblower. I'm kind of doing the media fantasy camp right now, but hopefully decided, which I want to do when I grow up in the near future. Have you seen the FBI inflict similar harm on other people like yourself?

Yes. And we fortunately had a victory recently, but there is a lot of work to be done here. The victory in the form of Marcus Allen, support operational specialist, who was indefinitely suspended and unpaid for 27 months. He was just reinstated and is going to receive all of his back pay. He has clearance returned to him. But I'd mentioned my co-host on the American. American Radicals podcast, Garrett O' Boyle, who has been unpaid for almost two years now.

And it's over allegations that other whistleblowers have come forward and said that the FBI knew were inaccurate. And they still use that to suspend his clearance to punish him, actually facilitate his move across the country, and then suspend him to leave him homeless and seize his household goods from him. And is there anything that the FBI is looking into now that the public is aware of that our listeners should pay attention to? I think that the term Christian nationalist to me is something that people are tempted to lean into

and say, yes, I'm a Christian, and I believe in this country. I'm comfortable with that label. But what people have to know is it is the same label that was being used for the radical traditional Catholic intelligence report that was brought to light last year. That was called white Christian nationalism, but they've sort of rebooted it, dropped the white, but the same ideology that the FBI is using to investigate, they're taking information and research from organizations like the Public Religion Research Institute, which did a survey that said that 30 to 40 percent of Americans are adherents or sympathizers to Christian nationalism.

And that is across all races. White, black, purple, green, doesn't matter. But those ideas are refracted through white supremacy. Ergo, they can investigate you for your First Amendment protected activity of religious worship. And the last thing is it correlates with support for Donald Trump for president. So now they're going to investigate people under the guise of what the FBI terms racially motivated violent extremism, which is domestic terrorism, for supporting a particular candidate for office who's from one of the major two parties for being an outwardly Christian person. And the other element to this is that the FBI will say that you could potentially be an anti-government, anti-authority violent extremist, which is an acronym Agave, A-G-A-A-A-V-E. And the FBI says that that is someone, and this is all public information.

And Agave is someone who has a perception of government overreach or negligence. And you will qualify as a domestic terrorist who they can investigate. Wow. That's wild. And what is Christian nationalism? And is it really a threat to America? I think it's one of these innocuous terms that you can read into. It's another Rocheque test. But the way that is, it doesn't necessarily mean what people define it to mean.

It's a little bit like the crazy suicide bomber terrorist. It doesn't matter if you believe him when he says, I'm going to blow myself up and go to go to heaven and have 70 virgins. He believes it. So what does the FBI believe? That's what I'm concerned about. And they believe it is someone who has, who goes to regular religious worship ceremonies, which is also parenthetically a one of the issues they looked at for whistleblowers. They said anyone who goes to church regularly could be a whistleblower who needs to be targeted and purged from our ranks. And it's someone who has a right of center political view and perspective on things like they came out during the radical traditional

Catholic intelligence report that said having the belief that there should be a sovereign border, border protection and security, being pro-life, being pro-traditional marriage, being pro-second amendment, those are all indicators of anti-government extremism. Wow. This is really interesting. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It was really an honor to talk to you. Thank you for having.

With that, that's going to do. it for today's episode. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Daily Signal podcast on this Friday morning or maybe afternoon or evening if you're listening later in the day. Also, if you would, take a minute to hit that subscribe button so that you never miss out on new shows from the Daily Signal and share this show with someone who you think might enjoy it. We'll see you back here around 5 p.m. for our top news edition to bring you the headlines of the day before we head into the weekend. And of course, we'll also be bringing you a Friday movie review. Catch the podcast. around 5 p.m.

The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, Mary Margaret O'Lohan, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, John Pop, and Joseph Von Spakovsky. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.