The FBI has politicized cases regarding Jan. 6 defendants and pro-lifers while retaliating against internal whistleblowers, some of those whistleblowers testified last month to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, according to portions of transcripts reviewed by Just the News.Retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill, who retired last year from the bureau's Boston field office, testified that the Washington Field Office pressured other field offices to investigate citizens for activities protected by the First Amendment.
Hill's own Boston Field Office, he said, pushed back against pressure from Washington to open cases on, first, seven individuals who came up in a sweep of bank records served up by the Bank of America, and then a larger group of 140 Americans guilty of nothing more than riding buses to D.C. to attend former President Trump's Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, 2021.
Washington, Hill believes, applied similar pressure on the Philadelphia Field Office. On a nationwide phone call of all 56 FBI field offices, he testified, then-chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Center Section Steve Jensen asked the Philadelphia Field Office about the status of a lead on three individuals that had been sent by the Washington Field Office.
The Philadelphia office said the individuals had posted on social media about being pro-Second Amendment and anti-abortion, but that it didn't mean they were "insurrectionists seeking to overturn our democracy," Hill recalled.Jensen, according to HIll's testimony, responded, "I don't give a blank, they're all bleeping terrorists, and we're going to round them up."
Former FBI special agent Steve Friend, a former SWAT team member, testified to the panel that after raising concerns about using a SWAT team to arrest a subject of the Jan. 6 investigation, he was ordered off the job for a day.
Friend explained that the Jan. 6 subject was cooperating with the FBI and willing to surrender voluntarily, so he was concerned that the bureau wasn't using the least intrusive methods possible to arrest them.
After speaking with his direct supervisor, he recounted, two assistant special agents in charge of Friend's office met with him and "pushed back on" his concerns, saying that he had a right to raise them, but he also "had to follow through on the orders that I was given to do." Friend told the higher-ups he didn't want to participate in executing the warrant, and that if he was assigned to do so he "would have to consider not going" but "would call ahead if that was going to be the case."
He was not allowed to participate in any operations for executing warrants on Jan. 6 subjects after that, Friend testified. In an email from one of the assistant special agents in charge, he claimed, he was "ordered to not come to work the following day" and told that he would "be considered absent without leave."
The FBI previously gave Just the News a statement regarding Friend. "While we cannot comment on the specifics of personnel matters," the bureau said, "all FBI employees understand they are held to the highest standards because their work is critical to fulfilling our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution of the United States.
"Employees who don't carry out their responsibilities are held accountable through an objective administrative process. FBI employees who report evidence of wrongdoing through a protected disclosure are protected from retaliation. Such reporting supports the FBI's mission and is fully consistent with our core values."
