In an explosive House committee hearing on Thursday, several whistleblowers accused the FBI of engaging in a bevy of highly corrupt and partisan activity, including manipulation of statistics, targeting political opponents, and retaliating against whistleblowers seeking to expose the agency’s corruption. The revelations come days after a report from U.S. Attorney John Durham revealed the FBI had no evidence then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Russians when it launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the former president’s 2016 campaign.
While speaking before the House Judiciary Committee, former FBI special agent Steve Friend said he filed protected whistleblower disclosures in August 2022 over concerns he had regarding investigations assigned to his office over the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. More specifically, Friend was concerned the conduction of these inquiries represented a departure from proper “case management rules established in the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” and that such actions “could have undermined potentially righteous prosecutions and may have been part of an effort to inflate the FBI’s statistics on domestic extremism.”
“I also voiced concerns that the FBI’s use of SWAT and large-scale arrest operations to apprehend suspects who were accused of nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors, represented by counsel, and who pledged to cooperate with the federal authorities in the event of criminal charges created an unnecessary risk to FBI personnel and public safety,” Friend said. “At each level of my chain of command, leadership cautioned that despite my exemplary work performance, whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with
