The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW FBI Whistleblower Stephen Friend

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

What does a politicized police force do to a whistleblower? You'll be amazed at the vindictive and vicious dirty tricks they tried. But Stephen Friend kept his integrity and kept out of jail. And now he's written a must-read book, "TRUE BLUE: My Journey from Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower" just released yesterday.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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in talking to whistleblowers. I've talked to John Kiriakou many times about blowing the whistle on CIA torture program, which ultimately bore the fruit of lying us into the war in Iraq. I've talked to Joe Bannister, who was an IRS agent, who was an investigator, part of the criminal investigation unit, carried a gun. And he did that for a number of years. And then he came across some things that people were saying. He said, well, how do I answer this? How do I answer this concern that they've got about the income tax code? The supervisor said, don't talk about that. What? You know, he was, when you look at people who are honestly concerned about the law and about justice, this creates a real conflict

of conscience for them. And of course, many had that same kind of situation presented to them throughout 2020 and 2021 with the mandates and the lockdowns. And do I give up my job? What do I do? I'm violating my religious principles if I take this type of thing. These types of tests are always coming to us. He's now written a book. It came out yesterday, True Blue, My Journey from Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower. And it dropped yesterday. You can find it on amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, all the regular places that you buy books. Again, it is True Blue. The author is Stephen Friend, who joins us right now. Thank you for joining us, sir. Thank you very much for having me today. And thank you for being a whistleblower. I really do appreciate it.

I know that's a difficult thing. I know that it had tremendous consequences for you and for your family, and I want to talk about those. But first, tell us, what was the tipping point? You had worked as an FBI agent for, what was it, 12 years, I think? No, actually, today would have been my nine-year anniversary date of my hiring. I'd worked in law enforcement before that, so I've got about 14 years of law enforcement experience at a state, local, and federal level. So what was it that you saw in this that I can't go along with that, is what you had to say?

Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I didn't really have a moment where I sat down and said, I'm going to become a whistleblower. I just had a concern about the cases that were in my office that were January 6th related. And to take a brief step back on my background, I joined the FBI in 2014. I spent my first seven years on Indian reservations. And the nature of those cases are quickly evolving. You have a huge, tremendous volume of cases. And as a result of that, I became very familiar with the FBI's rulebook for how to work cases

and brought that with me when I eventually transferred to Daytona Beach, Florida, where I am currently. And once I was reassigned to work domestic terrorism cases in my office, I was reassigned from child pornography cases and told that those were no longer going to be resourced. Those were local matter. Correct. What kind of cases were you seeing at the Indian reservations? I mean, it was a lot of drug trafficking and stuff like that and, you know, violent crime,

things like that. Yes, it's violent crime, major offenses. You know, I've worked a lot of aggravated assaults and homicides, sexual assaults, child molestation. You really do the work of a city violent crimes detective on the reservations. And it's an interesting jurisdiction that the FBI has to take on due to some weird federal laws that we currently have on the books. And it basically precludes the tribal police officers from investigating some defendants who aren't Native American and then even from bringing heavy charges against others. So they could only really charge misdemeanors for some fairly significant crimes.

And the FBI has to come in and fill that gap. Wow, that's interesting. So you were a police officer. And then when you started working for the FBI on these Indian reservations, you're still kind of doing police officer type of work that you're doing that. But when you became an FBI agent, did it first put you on child pornography and things like that? Yes, I accepted a transfer in the summer of 2021. And my understanding was it was going to be a position in the office to work on pornography

cases and human trafficking cases, which are sort of a weird kissing cousin to the Indian reservations within the FBI because they're very hard to staff just people don't want to work it it's sort of the violation you can actually beg out of because it's so mentally uh taxing for a lot of folks oh I imagine but it also it also gives you a great opportunity to work with local law enforcement which is what I believe is the prime directive of the FBI. I wanted to work with local detectives, deputies from the sheriff's offices, the police departments, and learn from them and then basically partner with them. And if we could bring something federally, then I was all in to do that. But the end of the fiscal year happens and the decision was made to reallocate resources and manpower, which is another major problem within the FBI. They basically have

a quota system that they try to hit every year. And when I saw the January 6th cases, it was immediately apparent to me that the FBI is not following its rules with those cases. Preston Pysh, M.D.: And I became concerned about, not because I had any sort of political ideology attached to it. I'm not a simp to one side or another, but I'm a law enforcement professional.

And when I go to trial, I want to make sure that my case is buttoned up as properly. And the fact that these cases have been just rubber stamped as they've gone through the District of Columbia doesn't mean anything to me. If my name's at the top, I want to make sure my case is buttoned up. And I knew for a fact that these cases were not in, they were departing from the FBI's rules for how they managed the cases, which was interfering with how we were able to actually do our investigations. We were waiting for directives from Washington, D.C. when we were on paper supposed to be in charge of our own cases. Wow. So it's coming straight from D.C. Your concern is,

like a prosecutor, I don't want to take this case to court because I could lose, right? And you don't want to have a long streak of losses there. But you're concerned about that. And this is coming straight out of the District of Columbia. They're identifying people and, uh, you know, telling you to do what to them? Well, there, the January 6th case should be one case with however many subjects, uh, there are, they're already being investigated, but very early on in the process, a decision was made that they were going to open up a separate case for every single person. And then instead of running those from Washington, D.C., where the incident happened,

they were going to assign those cases to the field, to all the various 56 field offices around the country where the subject lived. So if you lived in Florida and you went to the Capitol that day, the office in Florida would be handling your case. And you could make the case that it is in compliance with the FBI rules. It's a little atypical, but it certainly presents a statistical narrative that domestic terrorism is on the rise significantly because now you have thousands of cases and they're spread around the country as opposed to a one-time four-hour incident at the Capitol, which could be attributed to a Black Swan incident. And I compared it to the September 11th World Trade Center. So if you look at police officers in the line of duty deaths, there's a spike in 2001. And that's because there were a significant number of officers in the towers who died. That doesn't mean that nationwide there was a spike in violence

against police officers. It's a statistical anomaly. And the FBI has now perpetuated that and has brought it the last three fiscal years and argued in front of Congress the need to enhance salary funding. And then on top of that, the bosses in each one of the field offices get bonuses for hitting the quotas because there's a demand for domestic terrorism cases. It is the charge du jour that we are seeing now from the political leadership in Washington. So the FBI, if you ask for it, you shall receive. And because of the quota system, the FBI that's been around for the last 10 years, it's not really a mystery why the number of domestic terrorism cases has quadrupled in the last

10 years. Yeah. It's like any other bureaucracy. They're trying to make a case to grow. Uh, they, they, they succeed by growing their little fiefdom. That means a bigger head count. That means a more responsibility and a higher salary for everybody at the top. If they, if they do that and the big game that they always play is statistics.

And we've seen these types of games played by a lot of different agencies. Uh, the FBI has played these kinds of statistical games to show that you've got to increase their department. But again, they're like every other bureaucracy. And there's a federal bureaucracy of investigation if you look at it that way. We have seen this, Stephen, we've seen in the past. The FBI has, in my opinion, been weaponized against people on the left and conservatives said, that's right. You know, we don't like those people.

Let's go after this. And they kind of bent some of the rules with that stuff in the past, but now the politics has, the pendulum has swung in the other direction and now they're starting to come after people, uh, who are conservative and it really does seem like a politicized issue here. Uh, but before we get into, um, into that, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here. Tell us a little bit about some of the incidents that you had that really bothered you, because you mentioned one of them in particular that you went to interview somebody.

Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, the cases that were in my office were basically investigated, and there wasn't much to do on them, which is is again, they were sitting in Washington, D.C., our own cases. We weren't really in charge of them. So I didn't have a whole lot of investigative work to do. I really had only a couple of things. One was I was tasked to go and interview a gentleman who was said to have been at the Capitol that day and had been inflicting violence against police officers uh the uh the the folks in washington dc had done a work on his workup on his phone gps and that was negative the facial recognition that they had was negative uh and it was an anonymous tip so there was really no way we could actually bring a successful prosecution forward even if the man

were to confess because he could just be a crazy person. But nevertheless, I was told that I didn't have the option to just say it shouldn't be resourced. And I went and contacted that gentleman at his house and wasn't going to waste his time, but it was very direct and said, we're at the Capitol on January 6th. And he responded that he was not because that was the day of his son's funeral. And that is just one case of the collateral damage of this giant dragnet that the FBI has now inflicted on the population. And we see that even with righteous subjects who may have committed crimes on January 6th. And in the case with my office, where I eventually came forward and said, I didn't want to participate, was an individual who's going to be charged with a felony, but had pledged to be cooperative with the FBI. And when he'd spoken to the FBI,

a year and a half had transpired between him being recontacted and they were going to send SWAT to his house to arrest him. And that is, yeah, I'm a SWAT guy. I mean, I was send SWAT to his house to arrest him. Wow. Wow. And that is, yeah, I'm a SWAT guy. I mean, I was on SWAT for five years, but I know that that is not in keeping with the tradition of law enforcement. You should be using the least amount of force necessary. That's an unnecessary risk to the public, to our personnel. And I voiced my concern because I felt like the person in the room the day before Waco

or the day before Ruby Ridge. And we can Monday morning quarterback those incidents into perpetuity and say, well, if I had been there, I would have voiced a concern. Well, I was there for that incident that I foresaw the potential to have another incident like Ruby Ridge or Waco. And I wanted to voice my concern. And take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network

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and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Unfortunately for me, for my professional future with the FBI, at every level, I went to three different levels of management. I was rebuffed and I was told that I had a really great reputation and that I was risking my career by expressing my concerns. And I've always said I had an oath of office to upkeep. I had specific training where at the FBI Academy, they send you to the Holocaust Memorial Museum

and they send you to the MLK Memorial. And the purpose of that is to really hammer home that unless someone throws the flag in law enforcement and law enforcement just puts their head down and follows orders, that can only lead to civil rights atrocities and genocide. And it was my sincere belief that that is what the FBI is on course to do at this point. But again, management didn't share my sentiment

and actually pushed back when I said that I had an oath to upkeep. They told me I had a duty to the FBI and had to follow orders and was being insubordinate. Wow. And we've seen this even with military who were told that they had to take the vaccine. And they said, well, you know, we've got a lot of problems with that. You know, religious liberty, for example, is one of those that I have. And people say, well, you have an obligation to obey orders. I said, no, I have an obligation to defend the Constitution, and that's what I'm doing by defending my rights. You're very right to point out how, you know, Ruby Ridge and Waco blew up because of the excessive use of force, and so

many people died. I wanted to get back, though, to this person that they reported to you that was an anonymous tip or something that somebody had accused them. There were so many people who were flagged because of geofence information, because of the phone companies and Google and all the rest of them turning over people's records if they were anywhere in that area. We had Bank of America go even further, and they gave a list to the FBI, presumably, of anybody who had any financial transactions around the Capitol, but not necessarily buying anything there at the Capitol, but anywhere in Washington, D.C., or in the suburbs of

Virginia or Maryland. I mean, they had a very big net. or in the suburbs of Virginia or Maryland. I mean, they had a very big net. Anybody that bought anything went to the FBI. And presumably the FBI then looked at their political background and looked at whether they owned guns or anything like that. And it was that type of circumstantial stuff that got people caught up. Did you have any situations like that, that, that kind of wild circumstantial geofencing or transactions? And then, oh, by the way, this person's also a conservative, maybe owns a gun.

So let's go visit them. Was that what you were saying too? I know that the individuals in my office saw that, but when it came to my involvement, I was moved over in October of 2021 and all of that, all that background work had already been done. But that is very consistent with everything I've talked about with the other agents who investigated those cases, and not my office, but in a multitude of other offices. And I think it's sort of in line with, we were warned in President Eisenhower's farewell address about

a military industrial complex and a scientific industrial complex there's now an information industrial complex that exists with with the ease of which digital information is shared and there's a collusion that has gone on between the federal government and private industry to share that information and it is uh is circumventing the constitutional protections and and they sort of think they've found a hack but you know nobody's in the room saying well if you're doing the bidding of the government regardless of whether of think they've found a hack. But nobody's in the room saying, well, if you're doing the bidding of the government, regardless of whether or not they've asked you to with the proper service, a proper subpoena or a search warrant, you are in fact an agent of the government. And that needs to be challenged in court. It needs

to be upheld and it needs to be confronted at a legislative level by our elect officials. I'm glad to hear you say that. I've talked for the longest time about, you know, everybody likes to talk about the deep state, the dark state, all the rest of the stuff. It's the deputized state. And we've seen it, as you talk about information, we've seen it with censorship.

They deputize the social media companies, but they also deputize Bank of America to do the search warrants for them. And the pretense that they've got, of course, with it, Stephen, is that they always go back to the rulings where AT&T was spying on people. And they said, well, you know, we want to get this information from them. You got the PIN number stuff, and it's data that belongs to you. So would you like to turn it over to us since, you know, we give you a nice monopoly of all the phone lines and all the rest of the stuff.

Sure. Yeah. We'll turn this over to you. Well, happy to be of help to you. And so that's really kind of, you know, part of, there's a lot of different things that are going on to violate the constitution, due process, search warrants, and all the rest of this stuff to say that, well, this data belongs to the corporation. The corporation is voluntarily complying with us, and we're not actually doing it.

Now we see that there's all these back channels where they're actually telling them who they wanted to come after and all the rest of this stuff. This is very concerning, and I'm glad that you're talking about this because I think as a whistleblower who has seen this kind of stuff happening, you've got a lot of weight and a lot of integrity for standing up to this. Tell us a little bit about how, again, you raised your concern and they said, well, gee, you know, we really would like, you got a great job here and a great work history, would really hate for you to ruin it. I mean, how did they really respond to this? Was that kind of it? And then what happened? Yeah, so the real seminal moment for me was the day before the arrest operations were going to be happening i i was summoned to my headquarters in jacksonville so i drove up there and had a long conversation

with two assistant special agents in charge of my office i expressed all the concerns here that i've i've spoken about uh and uh and said i believe that we could be people's. Oh, did we lose? Okay. Well, shoot. Okay. We're going to try to reestablish contact there. Is it, has it dropped or still connected? Okay.

Drop it and then try to reconnect with him. And we just lost our, our line there. But I do want to ask him about that. And I want to ask him, is he back? Okay. Oh, good. Okay, great. We lost a car. I never lost you there. Sorry. Oh, you didn't. Okay. All right. Good. Well, we froze up on, on our end for some reason. Uh, I'm sorry. You were in the middle of talking about how, um, they responded when you told them that you weren't good with this.

If you can back up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I, I expressed that to them and we had a long conversation about it. During that course, that meeting, several remarks were made to me that were incredibly concerning, especially when I said I have an oath of office, and they said I had a duty to the FBI. One of the bosses in the room said that police officers were killed on january 6th by the by the protesters uh and when i said that that was not actually a factual actually accurate he told me i needed to go and re-examine the facts i i proposed uh alternatives that we could use to bring folks into custody i mean it could just be a phone call to an attorney surrender we could send local law

enforcement we could use surveillance to interdict somebody. I didn't feel that SWAT was necessary, but all those were turned down. And at the end of the meeting, I'm a pretty straight shooter. So I said, fellows, where are we left with this? And I was given the assurance that this was going to be a long process. This is the federal government and things take a really long time. And I went on my merry way. And three hours later, got an email that told me that I was insubordinate and I was ordered to stay home the following day and report myself as AWOL. So I never actually had the opportunity to be insubordinate and not show or something like that. I was ordered to be AW AWOL which I did and was Dr Day's Bay before returning to work and then subsequently had a meeting with

the next level of the chain of command in uh with the special agent in charge wearing which she told me that I was a conspiracy theorist and that I represented a fringe belief and that I needed to do soul searching to determine if i wanted to have a future with the agency and then after that she told me she had already referred me for investigation to the fbi's inspection division and to the security division wow and uh at that point i kind of knew that the uh the writing was on the wall because the FBI has retaliated against whistleblowers using a very nefarious process. And that is the security clearance. Because in order to work at the FBI, you need to have a security clearance. So my security clearance was suspended 30 days after my initial

disclosures that I made to my bosses. And the reason that it was suspended was not because I blew the whistle or raised concerns. It was because they determined I accessed the employee handbook improperly. And therefore, they had to do a full investigation of that and walk me out the building. I was placed in a unpaid yet still employed status, which is a strategy that they use to essentially wait people out and hopefully i hope that due to financial stress that they will resign and then they can attribute any sort of accusations that you make as being the you know the concerns of a of an angry ex-employee and uh and not. But unfortunately for them, I'm pretty stubborn and I'm also pretty financially savvy. I had done a fair amount of saving in preparation to be fired

during the COVID vaccines. I knew that they were developing a registry and I told my wife, look, we're going to have to prepare for a time that I'm going to be looking for a new job. So we had sort of a war chest built up. Didn't anticipate having her lose her job, which did happen a few weeks after my suspension under some suspicious circumstances. Her Facebook account was also shut down immediately. And I was denied my training records, which I would need for outside employment. I put in two requests for outside employment, which you're entitled to do when you're unpaid. And they denied both requests. My medical information was leaked to the New York Times. And they also told the Times that I was accused of shooting a firearm in my backyard. Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest

network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambitions. With over 450 partner organisations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitisation and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. And finally, I received communication from the FBI Inspection Division that attempted to put a gag order on me. And I was told that I was not allowed to speak about anything that was happening as far as the investigation of the allegations against me with anyone, to include my family, friends, attorney, which is an illegal gag order. So this is just a long train of humiliations and abuses that came from the FBI and ultimately culminated where I had an opportunity,

I had a job offer from the Center for Renewing America. They had a fellowship come available that I applied for, submitted samples of my writing, and interviewed for, and was actually offered a position for, and ultimately accepted the day that I testified in a closed deposition for the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. And I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about the organization that you're working for now, but that is absolutely amazing. The fact that um they were the ones who are insubordinate they were insubordinate to the constitution and they told you had a duty to the fbi you got a duty to the constitution uh you are supposed to be subordinate to that and yet you know it doesn't surprise me that they

would call you a conspiracy theorist because of course that's what the fbi coined uh that that phrase you know in terms of jfk assassination but it is truly amazing to see the links that they will go to in order to set up dirty tricks and to again leak what they think is derogatory information about you make accusations about you that aren't true uh take, shut down your wife's social media account to try to gag you with all this stuff. That truly is amazing. But I've seen this before, Steve. When I talked about how I've interviewed whistleblower for the CIA, John Kiriakou, and Joe Bannister

from the IRS, but of course, I also talked to some NSA whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, William Benny. Thomas Drake, when you mentioned the fact that they accused you something about the employee manual, they tried to get Thomas Drake sent to prison because they said that he had taken home documents with him. He denied that he had them. But the documents that they had were things like securities, my friend. It was an opening employee trainer manual. And it was ludicrous what they even considered to be documents that were of concern.

And then the fact that they tried to set him up with those and tried to put him in jail. Did they ever come after you with any kind of criminal charges? I mean, you're mentioning things about, you know, well, he had accusation of shooting a firearm in his backyard and other things like that. Was it even a setup to try to say, we're going to take your security clearance and then wait and see if you latched a hold of something that had a security classification on it? Was that a part of it? They tried to set me up to be charged with a process crime for lying to an investigator. So I had to submit to a compelled interview with the FBI security division. And one thing that you have to know is in the meeting that I had with my two assistant special agents in charge, I wanted to memorialize. And I was law enforcement. I consulted with a – I live in the state of Florida.

It's a two-party consent state. There's a law enforcement exemption to recording conversations. Consulted with state-certified law enforcement beforehand to confirm that I was in the good to do that. I might be outside of the FBI's policy, but policy isn't the law. And I recorded the conversation that I had with them. And when I submitted to this compelled interview with the security division, they asked me point blank, did you record the interview? And I answered honestly, yes, I had. And there was very apparent to me, and it's sort of like one magician trying to impress another magician with a trick. When you're a trained

investigator, a trained interviewer, I kind of knew what they were doing. And the natural follow-up to that question where I had given them some information that there had been some pretty damning statements made during this interview, this meeting that I had with these executives that were trying to compel me to violate my oath of office. You would think the natural follow-up would be, Steve, can we get a copy of that interview? And they never did that. They were hoping that I was going to say no, and then they could cut the search warrant for my house and charge me with lying to a federal investigator uh because it in in going back and having listened to that meeting that i had which i actually have transcribed and it is in my book so anybody who uh who gets a copy will have access to they and then the fbi tried to

get me to redact during the publication process but i'm not going to do that um they it was very clear to me that they were recording the interview as well. They were trying to divorce my ability to come forward as a whistleblower from my orders to submit to participating in those operations. And they repeatedly kept saying, so what you're telling me, Steve, is you're refusing to do your job. And I kept saying, no, I'm doing my job. So I think that they have a recording of it. They know what was said and they weren't concerned about what was said. They were just worried about the exposure that the FBI has because the FBI is their prime directive is protect the image, protect the shield. That is the reputation.

That is all that matters to the FBI. Well, I'll tell you what, their reputation is in the toilet now. It's the things that have happened in the last few years, especially. That must be a very interesting transcript because I can imagine, and that is what I've always said about all this Trump stuff. I said his real jeopardy is going to be a perjury trap, you know, blathering about something and carelessly talking about things. And, uh, and so, you know, that, you know, things like how they come after celebrities like Martha Stewart, you know, they got her for lying to the FBI, not for insider trading.

So this must've been a real mental battle to try to carefully phrase these terms in ways that they could not get you with a perjury trap. It must be a fascinating read. Of course, that transcript is in your book, True Blue, Stephen Friend. I imagine that would be worth the price of the book right there to see that back and forth with you and these interrogators trying to entrap you, you know, any kind of an error that you would make, you know, any kind of factual error. They would come after you as a crime to lock you up.

It's truly amazing. And it is frightening for the rest of us because you know how those rules are and you know how they're operating, but the rest of us don't. We're babes in the woods, right? Somebody is accused of something and our first instinct, if we're innocent, is to say, yeah, I don't mind talking about this. I've got nothing to hide. I'm innocent. And it's that kind of an entrapment that is really a danger

for the average citizen, isn't it? Exactly right. And we've gotten to a point now where the FBI is no longer an objective force for good. They have weaponized the process crimes to go after people. We saw that happen with somebody like Mike Flynn, where James Comey sent agents over to specifically get him to answer a question that lacked candor or could be contrived to have lacked candor in a way. And they could bring charges to force his either criminal charge or at least his firing from the national security advisor. And that is why we'll see these ongoing investigations of somebody like former President Trump where they could just say, you worn an illegal necktie.

And he could say, that's ridiculous. That's not illegal. I'm not going to participate in your witch hunt. And they could say, oh, well, now you've obstructed our investigation. We'll charge you with a process crime. Wow. Yeah. It truly is amazing what has happened.

Now, you are working, since you testified, before we get into what you're doing right now with the Center for Renewing America, let's talk a little bit about the response from Washington, congressional hearings, all the rest of this stuff. I mean, what has been the response, since this is a politicized investigation, what has been the response from Republicans, for example, to any of this, or even from democrats i'm you know the democrats care are they full on with this what are the republicans said if anything uh there was definitely some appetite from some of the republicans on the select committee

on the weaponization of the federal government matt gates and dan bishop both participated in my deposition they both brought questions forward and seemed genuinely interested in not only the information I had as a whistleblower but also other information and concerns that I have which I feel is uh is very vitally important to bring to not just Congress's attention but to the American population's uh attention uh unfortunately the FBI and the Democrat Party and mainstream media have all colluded and attacked the messenger. And here's the thing about being a quote unquote whistleblower. I've been a self-styled whistleblower as I believe what the CNN says I am. It's 5 U.S.C. 2303. I followed it, the letter of the law.

I made a protected disclosure to numerous members of my chain of command, the inspector general, the office of special counsel, and to Congress, both Democrat and Republican. So I've gone through a list of those. Each one of those was a protected activity on my part. I don't have to be right about my concerns. I just have to be reasonable. And it is incumbent on those authorities to take that information and do a appropriate investigation and assessment as to whether or not i'm right and i've continued to say that i i brought that information and they could say steve you're wrong here's why and i would have said okay going back to work now or they could say steve

you're right we're going to fix a problem and, okay, I'm going back to work now. But instead, all of the guns were turned, all the energy and the resources of the FBI and the Democrat party and the media were turned against myself and the other gentlemen that were at the table with me when we testified last month, which in fact can only mean one thing. You get the flack when you're over the target. They are not willing to entertain any of the information we brought forward, which we were prepared to discuss in great length, in great detail. But instead, the members of the minority there were happy to just pontificate for five minutes each and then accused Marcus Allen of tweeting improperly, even though that wasn't his Twitter account, and accused me and gary of oil of being

bought and paid for when we were given a charitable donation several months after being suspended indefinitely without pay and uh and we're accused of doing that by dan goldman who is one of the wealthiest members of congress truly is amazing how many other uh people were there were they other fbi whistleblowers in this testimony or were they from other agencies? Were they all FBI people? How many were there? There were three FBI whistleblowers and Tristan Levitt, who was an attorney for Empower Oversight, who represents me. And that's an organization, 501c3, that represents government whistleblowers. And then they've been defending me as well as Marcus. So he was there to sort of be a subject matter expert and share his knowledge. And he has a wealth of it with Congress. But, you know, it was just just the three FBI personnel, two agents and one support staff. And we were we were able to present some information. I mean, obviously, I wanted to get in the um you know there's the

more salacious information about like you know having gone to school board meetings and and gotten license plates from people um as part of the the fbi's effort to marry school board protesters with domestic terrorists but uh to me my project now at this point is the integrated program management system that the fbi has and has had for 10 years which is the integrated program management system that the FBI has and has had for 10 years, which is the quota system. And that's the ticket book for the traffic cop, where there are quotas for opening a number of cases and using certain tools and getting a certain number of arrests. And in order to keep the budgets flowing, there's games played, like where they will open up thousands of domestic terrorism cases off of January 6th, which is not an adequate and an accurate representation of what

that actually was. And now you have the special agents in charge of all 56 field offices since those cases were spread around the country. They're all collecting bonuses somewhere in the area between $30,000 and $50,000 because those numbers were met. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. I've covered the case of Adrian Schoolcraft, who is a New York City whistleblower for the police. And he had situations like that where they said, you know, hey, it's Halloween. I just want you to round up anybody that you can bring them back and we'll book them and we'll find out what to charge them with later. We don't care. Just bring people in. You know, it got a quota type of system like that.

And, uh, he started recording and, uh, recording other police officers. Once they found out about that, his father was a police officer and he was, uh, again, your, your book is true blue. He was a true blue believer as well. He really believed in being a cop. Uh, they tried to punish him by making him walk a beat and he goes, well, that's good, I think it's a good thing for me to be out there and deter crime and get to know the people in the community. he didn't see that as a punishment

but they eventually came around and and there was he had another recording that was up on the on the wall behind some books that memorialized what happened with that but they caught his went to his apartment the guy who was number two in the New York City Police Department, they arrested him and put him in an insane asylum. His father, who was a retired cop, found the other recording and got him out. But I mean, that's the thing. They turn against people. And when the institution becomes that level of being corrupt, exactly what do you think

we should do with the FBI? I mean, is it to the point where it is salvageable? I don't think it is. I think you need to do away with the FBI entirely. And I know that sounds scary to people, but this country existed before the FBI. It can exist after the FBI. There's a strong argument that I've been making

for the last several months that the FBI is't a constitutional organization. There was no legislation brought forward to originate it. It was actually backdated. And so the FBI was about preserving status quo, not necessarily about protecting the Constitution or the rights of Americans. So in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the FBI, to preserve the status quo, went after communists. And I think Americans assumed that they were the good guys. But then the FBI went after draft dodgers because, you know, and then you can have the

debate over the legitimacy of the Vietnam War. And I think there were still people that thought they were doing good work. But COINTELPRO and infiltrating the Black Panthers. There's some civil rights concerns there. And we can jump all the way into the 21st century where after 9-11 and national security, mission creeps started to occur because our military stomped down the foreign threats significantly.

The FBI had to justify its national security branch existence and budget. So they started to look from counterterrorism abroad to homegrown terrorism. And that's where you saw some entrapment of Muslim Americans. And then when they ran out of those, now they've come after domestic violent extremists, as they call them, which are the conservative Americans. And you look no further than last September, the red speech that President Biden delivered at Independence Hall. He identified Republicans, first it was MAGA

Republicans, then it eventually evolved into Republicans as being anti-government white supremacist. And two of the top priorities for the FBI in counterterrorism are anti-government extremism and ethnic extremism, parenthetically, white supremacy. So you've now got the FBI preserving the status quo for a very radical left that is in charge of our government. So to answer the question about the FBI, I think that you can look to locals. I think very similar to the way we used to elect senators in this country where they came from the state houses we can eliminate the fbi and empower u.s marshals to deputize more we're there to currently do it but more local detectives in sheriff's offices police departments uh and allow those guys who have the local knowledge of what's going on in their town

they know the usual suspects they know the crime that's going on on Main Street. They can pursue criminal cases that at a federal level, local, state, however they see adequate, bring those cases to a U.S. Attorney's Office if it's appropriate. And that will empower the local agencies to essentially staff the federal government and really let federal law enforcement

do what's best for the locals as opposed to what their minders are asking them to do in Washington, D.C. I couldn't agree with you more. I am so happy to hear somebody give an honest assessment of the FBI. And, of course, it goes all the way back to the beginning, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover. He was a master politician. He was a master salesman, if you will.

I mean, he was the one who was behind the FBI series with Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. That's how he built this, this reputation. And of course, since they were coming after, as you pointed out, the communists and people on the left, everybody was concerned about them at that time.

And now they have switched which side that they're on. And now a lot of people who have been applauding them are seeing this, but it's always been that way. And it's always been an unconstitutional agency. Let me ask you, because we talked about the deputized state. What about things like, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been used as a consultant for the FBI in the past, pointing the finger at other people. It gives them plausible deniability. It gives more credibility to these charges, but they work in a kind of public-private partnership type of thing.

Did you see some of that when you were working there? Yes, yes. Even at the FBI Academy, when we had training on terrorism, we had to watch a video provided to us by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where they ranked pro-life activists as higher on the threat level than ISIS. Wow, really? That's amazing. Doesn't surprise me, I guess, but that truly is amazing. Let's talk about what you're doing right now with the Center for Renewing America. You're a senior fellow on domestic intelligence and security service. Tell us a

little bit about the organization first, and then tell us what you're doing there. Well, thank you for that. So Russ Vogt uh the director of the omb under the the trump administration is our president and i found this organization and we are focused on uh confronting woke and weaponized government in any way we can and and my contribution to that is in this domestic intelligence and security sphere so bringing my knowledge about the FBI and the problems within the agency forward and and producing some uh some white papers and also some some policy recommendations and and uh CRA liaises very well with many of the congressmen who stood up against Speaker McCarthy's speakership uh during that that week-long event that we had in January and and brings those concerns forward and has basically

crafted a new budget that should be implemented on day one if power were to change hands. And I'm trying to just provide my insight there as well as advising this select committee on the weaponization of the federal government. So in a cruel twist of irony, I get to investigate the FBI who was investigating me. And they continue to just represent what this group means and speak out. And I've just started to come around to the message of, I'm swinging a hammer at a giant stone and it might not break for the first 999 times, but on the thousandth strike it does. And that doesn't mean that my 1000th swing of the hammer was what did it. It was everything along the way.

And then I'll just continue to hammer away to get this message out there as many people as possible. That's right. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and it's persistence as well. And this is such a dangerous thing with the power, the money, and the technology that is behind the federal government for it to have this massive,ized politicized police force is a very, very dangerous thing for all of us. I mean,

we should learn the lesson from the Stasi and, and they didn't have, uh, you know, but only a fraction of the, of the power and the technology that is currently possessed by modern states. And if they're going to be allowed to act in a lawless way without any restraint whatsoever, uh, then we do have essentially, you know,

a much more powerful Stasi that is there. This truly is, uh, something that is, should be a concern to everybody. And I think it's very important that people read your book. Uh, and I hope that

they get that again. The book is a true blue and, um, Stephen friend is the author. You can find it whenever, wherever books are sold. He doesn't have a separate website to sell that, but you can find Amazon anywhere that you buy your books. Uh, is there anything else that you would like to, uh, in a, in kind of a parting way to, to tell people in America about the dangers of this or anything else you'd like to tell us? Well, yeah, thank you. And thank you for allowing me the opportunity to share the information about the book. It's not intended to be, it's not political in any way, it's just the information being brought forward. And I certainly share your sentiment with this growing intelligence state that is now, the FBI has evolved into an intelligence agency

with a law enforcement capability. If there's any final idea that I just threw out into the ether, everybody wants to say that they're First Amendment absolutist, and the Second Amendment is there to support that. I think we need to start looking at our Third Amendment. And I know that that's the quartering of soldiers and kind of makes an eyebrow raise. But when we look at things like the way that big tech has colluded with government, there's not a whole lot different than a red coat listening on your bedroom wall from the guest room than the cell phone that's next to your night table that you're charging every night. Boy, Stephen, you and I are on the same page. I have said that so many times.

I said, they're living on your computer. It's even worse than sitting on your couch asking you for potato chips. That is so good. We are in 100% agreement on these things, and I'm so glad to hear you saying that. You have so much credibility for walking the walk. Freedom is not free. Somebody has to pay the price for it.

You've paid the price for this. You have kept your integrity. You have been honest and faithful to the walk. Freedom is not free. Somebody has to pay the price for it. You've paid the price for this. You have kept your integrity. You've been honest and faithful to the Constitution. I cannot thank you enough. And certainly, you are spot on in understanding what the real dangers are here, and you have the courage to speak out. I can't thank you enough for doing that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a great day, and God bless you. Thank you. Again, the book is True Blue. The author is Stephen Friend. And I think it would be worth the price of admission just to see the transcripts going back and forth between him and the FBI.

Obviously, he won because he's not in jail. Thank you, Stephen. The Common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common.

That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you'll find at thedavidknightshow.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. thedavidknightshow.com. Thank you.