Whistleblowers: FBI should be disarmed and abolished

FPI / April 11, 2024

The FBI has adopted a "Marxist culture" and should be abolished, said two agents who had their security clearances suspended after speaking to Congress about how the bureau "tagged" conservative parents at school board meetings and pro-life activists as well as its treatment of Jan. 6 protesters.

The whistleblowers, Garret O’Boyle and Steve Friend, spoke Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation.

O'Boyle, who became an FBI special agent in July 2018, said that he went to Congress in October 2021 to detail the FBI’s “threat tag” assigned to concerned parents who spoke up at school board meetings.

“The FBI was stonewalling the Congress when they would ask for information about that threat tag,” he said. “I blew the whistle.”

O’Boyle also recalled interviewing an FBI informant within the pro-life movement, saying his FBI superiors directed him to ask the informant about “how they’re going to attack abortion clinics and things of this nature” in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling which overturned Roe v Wade.

The days after the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion saw attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches. Pro-abortion vandals attacked Catholic churches at least 236 times and pro-life pregnancy centers at least 90 times, according to Catholic Vote.

“The type of recruiting events they have — they have adopted this Marxist culture to permanently change our institutions like the FBI,” O'Boyle said. “Remember, the FBI are the people with the guns and badges who will come after you.”

The FBI suspended O’Boyle without pay in September 2022, and he remains in limbo. The FBI refuses to allow him to take another job until he resigns.

“The FBI rendered us homeless with a 2-week-old baby,” O’Boyle added.

Friend said his wife’s Facebook account disappeared after she reached out to someone at the parental rights group Moms for Liberty.

“My wife’s Facebook account was permanently deleted when she sent a private message to someone with Moms for Liberty,” Friend recounted.

The FBI’s Richmond office cited the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leftist activist group that puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, in a memo last year about “radical-traditional Catholics.” A few months later, the SPLC added Moms for Liberty to that “hate map.”

Honor their memory: The ‘shot heard round the world’

Friend said he joined the FBI in 2014 and worked for seven years on Indian reservations. He then worked on child pornography cases in Florida, where he was told “that wasn’t a priority.” Later, he said, he was put on a joint terrorism task force focused on the protest at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“It was apparent that we were manipulating statistics on those cases,” Friend told The Heritage Foundation audience. He said the FBI planned to send a “tactical team” to arrest a Jan. 6 protester, a significant escalation in Friend’s eyes.

“I came to my supervisor, expressed my concerns,” Friend said. “He activated this process. I had multiple meetings and they facilitated my suspension.”

Friend resigned and joined the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit organization run by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Donald Trump White House. Last year, Friend published a book, “True Blue: My Journey From Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower“.

Friend said of the FBI: “I think it needs to be shattered and scattered. Disarm the FBI … make them unarmed investigators, like they originally were, and force them to partner with local agencies."

Friend urged Americans to press “our federal representatives” so that “it is no longer acceptable for them to say it is worse for us to have a temporary federal government shutdown than to have an armed law enforcement agency that is weaponized against the American people.”

“I think you have to abolish the FBI,” O’Boyle said.

Local police departments often coordinate with police departments in other parts of the country, O’Boyle noted. He conceded that some federal law enforcement agencies may be necessary, such as the Border Patrol, but insisted that the U.S. Marshals Service can take over many of the FBI’s roles.

(View Tuesday's symposium in its entirety here.)

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