OPINION:
Democrats owe the FBI, particularly the seventh floor of its Washington headquarters, a lot.
Not surprisingly, as House Republicans took their first batch of transcribed testimony from FBI whistleblowers, Democrats immediately set out to sabotage them and Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, in the process.
Democrats quickly issued a 300-page report bashing witnesses George Hill, Garret O’Boyle and Steve Friend. Democratic staffers picked scattered transcript testimony and told the Washington media the trio were partisans who disclosed nothing illegal. It worked. Lots of negative press stories soon followed about Mr. Jordan and his House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Jason Foster, former chief investigative counsel for Sen. Charles Grassley, who himself uncovered FBI wrongdoing, told me the Democratic product is riddled with errors. Mr. Foster, founder of the nonprofit Empower Oversight, has been aiding Mr. Hill and Mr. Friend. He told me of the FBI’s reprisal against Mr. Friend.
“You could dedicate your column to detailing the inaccuracies, half-truths, and smears in that report for the next six weeks and still not get through them all,” Mr. Foster told me.
First, let’s recap some history.
Democrats had no better friend in 2016 than the FBI’s seventh-floor headquarters. FBI leaders eagerly accepted a Democratic Party-financed dossier sourced to the Kremlin and used it as gospel to harass the Donald Trump candidacy, transition and presidency. And in the end, after four years of trying, the FBI never confirmed one single anti-Trump claim out of a dozen. But for Democrats, the FBI did its job. It was political harassment.
The targeting has continued into Mr. Trump’s post-presidency. Agents raided his Mar-a-Lago home in a dispute with the National Archives over classified documents.
The FBI raided the homes of pro-lifers, which helped Democrats intensify their pro-abortion message during the November midterm election cycle.
And the FBI’s Washington field office tried to create as many Jan. 6 Capitol investigations as possible — at the wishes of President Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland.
That brings us to Messrs. Hill, O’Boyle and Friend. They filed whistleblower complaints with Mr. Jordan over the FBI’s zeal to find, create and harass Jan. 6-connected Trump supporters.
Mr. Hill is a former supervisory intelligence analyst at the Boston field office. According to Mr. Foster, who sat next to him during his testimony, he testified about a “hysterical” push by the Washington field office to investigate people as U.S. Capitol invaders. The targets included people who merely took a bus to Washington for Mr. Trump’s election protest but for whom there was no evidence they entered restricted Capitol grounds.
He also told of disturbing data mining involving banks so the FBI could find people who made transactions near the Capitol on Jan. 5, 6 and 7.
Steve Friend was a special agent in Florida. He told of the Washington field office usurping from local offices the power to close cases. The soup of the day was SWAT team-style raids instead of inviting a Jan. 6 suspect to come in for questioning on his own. The whole idea from Washington was to juice domestic extremist numbers as high as possible.
Like Mr. Friend, Mr. O’Boyle, formerly assigned to the Wichita Resident Agency in the Kansas City field office, testified to what he considers deceptive case reporting to create phony statistics. For example, he was ordered to divide one domestic terrorism case into four separate ones to jack up the numbers, Fox News reported on March 3.
Quickly after the closed-door testimony, Democrats moved to cancel the trio by issuing a report: “GOP Witnesses: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the State of the Republican Investigations.”
The 300 pages contained snatched and pasted snippets of testimony and offered rank opinions. Anti-Jordan press stories followed. Republicans have not countered by releasing full transcripts.
Now, back to Mr. Foster. I asked him for examples of Democrats’ inaccuracies.
For one, Democrats, led by Rep Jerrold Nadler, stated as fact that the Justice Department inspector general rejected Mr. Friend’s complaints of whistleblower reprisal and FBI investigative misconduct.
Mr. Foster said this statement is false. The IG at first sent a form letter saying the matter should be referred to FBI internal affairs. But since then, the IG office has agreed to interview Mr. Friend and accept documentation.
“It is our understanding that DOJ OIG is continuing to receive and evaluate information related to Friend’s initial underlying disclosures and that DOJ OIG personnel, in fact, plan to interview him on these matters,” Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt said in a March 6 letter to IG Michael E. Horowitz.
Secondly, Mr. Foster said Mr. Friend provided plenty of examples of the FBI manipulating case statistics, contrary to Democrats’ assertions that he provided nothing specific.
Also, Mr. Foster said, Democrats falsely claimed that Mr. Friend is “profiting” from his role as a whistleblower. Mr. Foster told me of the FBI penalizing Mr. Friend, both professionally and financially, after he blew the whistle.
According to Mr. Foster: “Friend was suspended without pay, without due process as soon as he blew the whistle, on the grounds that his security clearance was under review, despite citing zero legitimate security concerns. His wife lost her job shortly after his whistleblowing became public. The FBI denied him permission to take other jobs and illegally withheld his firearms training records necessary to do security work in Florida.
“So, his family had to live on personal savings for 150 days until he finally had to resign. The FBI successfully had him in a financial box with no timely remedy. The fact that he accepted pro bono legal assistance and a small charitable gift just before Christmas, wrote a manuscript about his experiences, and found other work to earn a living does not detract from his credibility in the slightest. … But the Democrat report intentionally misled its readers by leaving out all of that context to unfairly smear him.”
More FBI whistleblowers are expected to appear for subcommittee staff interviews. I expect Democrats to trash them, too. FBI elites are just too crucial as Democratic Party allies to let them down.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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