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.”
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.
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