Report: 30 Former FBI Agents Support Suspended Whistleblower Who Disclosed Agency’s Bias Against Conservatives
One man described Friend as “a model example of what FBI agents nationwide should be.”
Miranda Devine at The New York Post received messages supporting suspended FBI Special Agent Steve Friend, who revealed the agency’s bias against conservatives and exaggerating domestic terrorist threats.
“It’s time to stop the FBI from being the enforcer of a political party’s ideology,” says Ernie Tibaldi, a retired agent from San Francisco. “We need to re-establish the FBI as the apolitical and independent law enforcement entity that it always was.”
He expressed gratitude to Friend “for having the courage to stand up to the corruption that has taken over the leadership of the FBI.”
Many former agents hailed Friend, a SWAT team member in Florida, as a “hero” after he was punished for refusing to participate in what he regarded as unnecessarily heavy-handed SWAT raids over Jan. 6 misdemeanors.
Terry Turchie, a former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, said he didn’t use SWAT when the FBI arrested Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber. He killed three people and 23 others.
Turchie came to Friend’s defense, describing him as “a model example of what FBI agents nationwide should be”:
“Moral courage, leadership in the face of pressure, and true to the Oath of Office FBI agents take to defend the United States Constitution and protect America and its citizens.
“I am beyond proud to offer him my support in the decisions he had to make.”
—
“No real FBI agent would defend the position of using SWAT teams to arrest non-violent senior citizens and others with political opinions not currently tolerated by this administration, compounded by the idea that many of these cases involve misdemeanor criminal charges.
“This activity actually generates tension in communities and increases the potential for tragic results and injuries to FBI agents and citizens.”
Turchie even said: “The FBI has been collapsed into nothing more than a police agency for the Democratic Party. Many of us feel that over the decades [we have seen] the complete compromise of the bureau.”
Ouch!
A former agent echoed Turchie’s sentiments:
Urey Patrick, a supervisory special agent who served in the FBI from 1973 to 1996, says: “The FBI has mutated over the years. [When I joined, it] was an independent investigative agency essentially devoid of political partisanship, subordinate to but not subservient to the DOJ … Since then, it has inexorably devolved into just another supplicant agency doing the bidding of whatever political regime is in control of the DOJ.
“I don’t know if that is irreparable or not, but I do know that, if there is to be a restoration of FBI integrity, honor and calling to duty, it will be only because of men and women like you [Friend]. For what it is worth, I am with you … in any way I can be — as are countless others.”
Friend’s Allegations
The FBI suspended Friend on September 19, who served as an agent and SWAT member for 12 years. They stripped him “of his gun and badge” and escorted him “out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla.”
The FBI declared him “absent without leave last month for refusing to participate in SWAT raids that he believed violated FBI policy and were a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 subjects accused of misdemeanor offenses.”
The left cannot point to Friend’s politics because he did not vote for Trump in 2020:
This American hero, the father of two small children, has blown up his “dream career” because he could not live with his conscience if he continued to be part of what he sees as the unjust persecution of conservative Americans.
“I have an oath to uphold the Constitution,” he told supervisors when he asserted his conscientious objection to joining an Aug. 24 raid on a J6 subject in the Jacksonville, Fla., area. “I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector.”
Friend, who did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, said he told his immediate boss twice that he believed the raid, and the investigative process leading up to it, violated FBI policy and the subject’s right under the Sixth Amendment to a fair trial and Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.
Devine also listed other allegations in Friend’s complaint to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz:
- The Washington, DC, field office is “manipulating” FBI case management protocol and farming out J6 cases to field offices across the country to create the false impression that right-wing domestic violence is a widespread national problem that goes far beyond the “black swan” event of Jan. 6, 2021.
- As a result, he was listed as lead agent in cases he had not investigated and which his supervisor had not signed off on, in violation of FBI policy.
- FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on innocent American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, based on anonymous tips to an FBI hotline or from Facebook spying on their messages. These tips are turned into investigative tools called “guardians,” after the FBI software that collates them.
- The FBI has post-facto designated a grassy area outside the Capitol as a restricted zone, when it was not restricted on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to widen the net of prosecutions.
- The FBI intends to prosecute everyone even peripherally associated with J6 and another wave of J6 subjects are about to be referred to the FBI’s Daytona Beach resident agency “for investigation and arrest.”
- The Jacksonville area was “inundated” with “guardian” notifications and FBI agents were dispatched to conduct surveillance and knock on people’s doors, including people who had not been in Washington, DC, on Jan. 6, 2021, or who had been to the Trump rally that day but did not go inside the Capitol.
WATCH: @mirandadevine & @TuckerCarlson report on FBI Whistleblower Steve Friend’s protected disclosures about FBI misconduct in J6 cases. @EMPOWR_US has been helping him, but now that his identity is public, the retaliation will likely intensify. pic.twitter.com/lY4BTLclqV
— Empower Oversight (@EMPOWR_us) September 22, 2022
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Those standing up for him are retired. We would be well-advised to configure retirement benefits so that government employees did not have to kowtow in order to retain whatever percentage of retirement benefits they have earned.
Give them the freedom not to round up their fellow Americans.
Sounds like some agents are talking about how it used to be. I’ve heard enough from the current leaders to know the FBI is broken.
I wonder, though… did it ever used to be, or was it all Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.?
. . . is broken, and has been for generations.
And we will see those 30 names in the NYTimes, WaPo etc. exactly when?
The leftists have destroyed the FIB, from within and without.
Only ‘former’ agents, huh?
Once again the fabled ‘good men and women’ are nowhere to be found.
They can be found in comic books, bedtime stories and old black and white tv re-runs.
Crooked to the last man as it drives the honest out.
The same process impacts corporations. A new CEO, followed by importation of the CEOs trusted associates. Some of those CEOs are disreputable, within a few years, a company’s culture is a cesspool.
Cops follow their paychecks, not their oaths.
Change my mind.
Sadly, that’s true but doesn’t tell the whole story.
Who has allowed and enabled the culture to deteriorate to the point where the Serpico syndrome rules and doing the “right thing” is punishable?
The GOPe and the left.
Once again, “we the people’ need to attack the problem at the source.
Garland and Wray are both insane. Their political mono-fixation has allowed their minds to embrace the dangerous criminality of Peter Strzok, but to a degree unimagined by the founding fathers as it is unchecked. Neither the courts nor the legislature can reign in any, not a single, Federal Department or agency. Those few judges that dare, are quickly relegated to the judicial sidelines. Congress not only has a majority that embraces a one party state run by a perpetual bureaucracy, but has a minority party run by a crooked scoundrel and a shallow, useless RINO who is working for corporations and bankers.
They’re not insane.
They simply think that the Democrats have successfully rigged elections so that they will never be removed.
Big fingers , that should be a down vote, they really are insane, criminally insane with power
If the FBI is to be restored to its proper role and function, it will take current members to speak out in large numbers all at once.
No. It will require complete abolition of the FBI, with a new force created after a few years gap. A department to investigate crimes without arrest power. Anything they find to be turned over to local authorities or other federal law enforcement agencies as appropriate. Smuggling? CBP. Kidnapping? Marshals Service. Counterfeiting? Secret Service. Etc.
Eliminated and with extreme prejudice.
It would be nice to believe that, but I’m skeptical. I think it far more likely that it was always like this, but more subtle, so that people on the inside could pretend not to see it.
Um, no. It doesn’t matter who’s President or Attorney General; both DOJ and the FBI act as Democrats.
So once again, Trump Derangement Syndrome has revealed the leftist infection in yet another American institution.
Exactly. Because that is where the money is. That is where the most willing politicians reside. And most importantly, that is where the Federal unions and controlling agencies like the IRS and SEC have made their nests.
The way to fix this is for Friend to gather together those supposed (we’re told they exist) active agents who are sympathetic and have them sue the FBI in civilian courts. A publicity campaign will provide exactly that – publicity. Congress will howl, pontificate, do interviews in front of TV cameras in the Rotunda, interviews with Tucker Carlson, and perhaps even have hearings, all of it meaningless. If there’s anything – anything – the country should have learned by now it’s that the government is not capable of fixing itself. Whistleblowers, IGs, special prosecutors, congressional committees, congressional hearings . . . they are all meaningless, useless theater.
Engage some hard nosed lawyers (avoid the beltway) and take named individuals to court, make them defendants. Make it personal.
Don’t come back and tell us it’s all about ‘principles.’ We get lectures about principals and conscience every day. If it’s not personal, it’s meaningless. Cautiously sympathetic, my guess is that this will end up being one more side show that will be replaced by the next one in a few weeks. Many would like to believe it will come to something, it won’t.
Understand, it would be wonderful to see dozens of FBI and DOJ lifers, apparatchiks, and bureaucrats named and standing in the dock, but that will, can, only happen if they are made defendants in a criminal case in a civilian court. Nothing else matters.
> Turchie even said: “The FBI has been collapsed into nothing more than a police agency for the Democratic Party.
I would add one adjective there:
… nothing more than a thought-police agency