Jim Jordan’s first FBI whistleblowers face scrutiny from skeptical Democrats
By Annie Grayer and Alayna Treene, CNN
In his quest to prove the federal government has been “weaponized” against conservatives, Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has touted the allegations of what he claims are “dozens” of whistleblowers who have come to his office with stories of discrimination and bias.
While little is known about them, Jordan’s reliance on these whistleblowers is already emerging as an early flashpoint, with Democrats raising questions about their legitimacy as actual whistleblowers and the relevance of their testimony.
Three of Jordan’s witnesses have come in for private interviews with committee staff so far. None of them appear to have had their claims validated by government entities that grant federal whistleblower protection, sources familiar with their testimony said. One who alleged there was FBI wrongdoing had their claims rejected. Another is retired and it’s unclear whether he has first-hand knowledge of the violations he alleges. The third has not revealed his direct disclosures or FBI suspension notice to House Democrats, according to transcripts reviewed by CNN.
Separately, several other supposed whistleblowers who have not come in for interviews were suspended from the FBI for being at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to multiple sources familiar with the committee’s work. This is a point Jordan has not shied away from, using the accounts of “several whistleblowers” in a May 2022 letter to accuse the FBI of “retaliating against employees” for engaging in “protected First Amendment activity on January 6.” Jordan added in the letter that he had been told none of these whistleblowers were inside the US Capitol, charged with any crime or contacted by law enforcement about their actions.
For more than a year, Jordan has made whistleblower allegations a central part of his campaign to uncover what he claims is political bias inside the federal government, including drafting a 1,000-page report last year that leans heavily on claims by government employees alleging political interference by both the Justice Department and the FBI.
That report and the groundswell of support among House Republicans helped lead to the creation of an entire subcommittee Jordan now leads, the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which is helming the whistleblower interviews.
Democrats on Jordan’s weaponization subcommittee, already skeptical of its premise, are frustrated that many of the materials regarding these individuals have not been shared. While Democratic members and their staff have interviewed some of these people behind closed doors alongside their GOP counterparts, what they have learned so far has not been encouraging, Democrats told CNN.
“Who knows whether he has dozens. Who are these people? Why haven’t we been given a list? What kind of credibility do they have?” Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, who serves on the subcommittee, told CNN.
GOP Rep. Kelly Armstrong, who serves on Jordan’s weaponization subcommittee, accused Democrats of discrediting the whistleblowers before having a chance to hear them out.
“Discounting whistleblowers before the Democrats know what the witnesses have to offer says a lot more about their agenda than it does about the validity of the whistleblowers,” Armstrong told CNN.
“Procedural mistakes should splatter like paint. It’s messy but the results should be random. In my four years here every mistake DOJ has made has benefited one side and harmed the other. That’s a hell of a coincidence,” Armstrong told CNN.
A senior GOP staffer told CNN that Jordan plans to share whistleblower information only if the individual agrees to go on the record. “If they’re willing to go on the record, if they’re willing to sit for transcribed interviews, that’s the point where we provide their name and attorney to our Democrats. And that’s pretty standard,” the senior GOP staffer said.
Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Jordan, said in a statement to CNN, “It is beyond disappointing, but sadly not surprising, that Democrats would leak cherry-picked excerpts of testimony to attack the brave whistleblowers who risked their careers to speak out on abuses at the Justice Department and FBI.”
‘An elephant gun to kill a mouse’: A suspended FBI agent’s concerns with a SWAT arrest
Some of Jordan’s whistleblowers who have been suspended from the FBI have formed a “little bit of a network,” the senior Republican aide told CNN. One whistleblower told CNN that some of them communicate over a group text chain and that many initially connected through a community of unvaccinated employees.
Right-wing opinions about the January 6 attack appear to be a consistent throughline among the three individuals that have come forward so far.
One of them is Steve Friend, a former FBI agent working out of Florida who was suspended in August 2022 for objecting to using a SWAT team to arrest a subject for what Friend described as “misdemeanor offenses.”
Friend, who was interviewed by Republican and Democratic subcommittee staff earlier this month, was not part of the SWAT team but was asked to help with the case and refused, he told CNN in an interview.
The men arrested on the date Friend listed in his disclosures were members of a Florida-based organization known as the “Guardians of Freedom,” which adheres to the ideology of the “Three Percenters” and were illegally at the Capitol on January 6, according to the FBI.
The one individual charged with a misdemeanor of that group from Florida was at the Capitol on January 6 wearing a black gas mask, a tactical vest and a military-type helmet and goggles, according to court documents reviewed by CNN. One witness interviewed for the case claimed that the defendant had an AR-style rifle with him as well.
Following his subcommittee interview, Friend told CNN he was suspended, in part, for raising concerns that the FBI was using “unnecessary force.”
“I compared it to using an elephant gun to kill a mouse,” Friend, who officially resigned from the FBI on the day of his interview with committee staff, told CNN.
Friend also told CNN that his concern with using a SWAT team would contribute to the illusion that “half the country are potentially domestic terrorists” and therefore prevent people from participating “in a political dialogue.”
Friend admitted in the subcommittee interview that owning a gun or being accused of a felony crime were reasons for FBI management to consider using a SWAT team, according to transcripts reviewed by CNN.
After Friend was suspended for refusing to help in the case, he filed a whistleblower complaint to the Justice Department inspector general on September 21, 2022. He also filed a claim with the US Office of Special Counsel, the function of which is to protect federal employees making whistleblower complaints.
Friend’s claim was eventually rejected by both entities.
“We cannot find with a substantial likelihood that the agency has violated a law, rule, or regulation or has abused its authority. Therefore, we will take no further action on this matter,” the November 10, 2022, OSC report read, according to a copy reviewed by CNN.
On December 2, 2022, the DOJ inspector general declined to open an investigation into the claims Friend raised. Friend is still waiting for the OIG to render a decision about his claims that the FBI retaliated against him.
US law creates specific requirements for those who say they have been retaliated against for their claims. An individual must make a disclosure to the special counsel, to an inspector general or to Congress that provides evidence of any violation of “any rule, law or regulation” or “gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.”
Friend is now a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a policy shop run by former Trump administration officials.
“Steve Friend bravely blew the whistle on FBI overreach and is devoted to ending the abuses of federal law enforcement,” Rachel Semmel, a spokesperson for the group, told CNN. “We are proud to have him working with us at Center for Renewing America.”
FBI spokesperson Christina Pullen told CNN, “Employees who don’t carry out their responsibilities are held accountable through an objective administrative process. The FBI is required to follow established policies and procedures, to include a thorough investigation, when suspending or revoking a security clearance. FBI employees who report evidence of wrongdoing through a protected disclosure are protected from retaliation.”
‘Insurrection my a$$’: A retired FBI agent’s allegations
Judiciary committee staff have also interviewed a former FBI analyst who retired in October 2021 named George Hill, who supervised intelligence analysts that provided support to less than a dozen cases related to January 6.
In his interview with the subcommittee Hill criticized a bank that he says shared with the FBI records of people who were in DC on January 6, according to transcripts reviewed by CNN. When pressed, Hill said he simply saw a record listed in Sentinel, the FBI’s case management system, and that he did not open it, according to the transcript.
As part of its investigation into the January 6 attack at the Capitol, the FBI collected financial, communications and other business records of people investigated for possible crimes related to the Capitol riot. It’s a routine investigative tool used to help investigators and prosecutors gather evidence. Bank transactions could be used to show travel and location of suspected rioters, and could be used to establish the purchase of weapons used in the attacks on police protecting the Capitol.
Hill also raised concerns about a request that he says the Washington, DC, FBI field office made to the Boston field office to open preliminary investigations into two buses of people that traveled into DC on January 6. In his interview with the committee, Hill said he was told about the request, sources familiar with his testimony told CNN. Hill said there were concerns about violating people’s First Amendment protected activity, the transcript read.
Pullen said in a statement to CNN, “the FBI’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny the existence of investigations, however, the FBI will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity,” when asked about the claim of an investigation being opened into those buses.
Hill has previously raised some of his claims on a podcast and in an interview with “Just the News.”
Hill’s interview covered tweets he made concerning the January 6 attack, a number of which have since been deleted, according to the transcript reviewed by CNN.
On December 28, 2022, for example, Hill tweeted, “insurrection my a$$. It was a set up and sadly, there’s no shortage of idiots willing to take the bait.” The comment was retweeting a post that read “patriots were the ONLY ones trying to STOP the Fake Insurrection violence being committed by Implanted Antifa (Pelosi’s buddies).”
Hill claimed he had a First Amendment right to make this statement when asked about it during his subcommittee interview, according to the transcript reviewed by CNN.
In response to CNN, Empower Oversight, which represented Hill during his committee interview, said, “All of these questions were asked and answered at the committee interview with Mr. Hill. We would encourage you to wait until the full, official transcript is available before reporting based on selective, partisan leaks.”
A suspended FBI agent with “confidential” claims
The third whistleblower interviewed by the subcommittee is suspended FBI agent Garret O’Boyle, who says he was suspended for making an unauthorized media disclosure. During his interview with subcommittee staff, O’Boyle, who worked out of the FBI’s Wichita field office, would not elaborate on the claim or provide his suspension notice. When asked about his allegations against the FBI, O’Boyle said they were confidential and that he would not turn them over to House Democrats, according to sources familiar with his testimony.
During the interview, O’Boyle’s attorney Jesse Binnall told committee staff that O’Boyle’s allegations were “confidential by statute” and that he had advised his client “to not disclose exactly what was disclosed,” according to a transcript reviewed by CNN.
In response to questions from CNN, Binnall said, “The confidential information he provided to Congress was done so with discretion, as provided for by law. He did not release that information to Democrats on the committee because he knew that they would leak it to the media.”
Binnall, a former Trump campaign attorney, told CNN that O’Boyle “is a whistleblower on extremely serious government misconduct and unlawful retaliation. He provided that information to people who would take it seriously.”
In his Twitter bio, O’Boyle lists himself as a “Congressional Whistleblower.”
In his interview with the subcommittee, O’Boyle claimed that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade last year, the FBI shifted a threat tag that addressed threats to Supreme Court justices to focus on abortion-rights opponents, according to the transcript reviewed by CNN. When pressed by Democrats, O’Boyle said he did not know that the FBI had arrested two individuals associated with attacks on pregnancy centers set up by abortion-rights opponents, but he was aware that it had offered a $25,000 reward for information regarding these pregnancy centers being vandalized, the transcript read.
O’Boyle also said he had a domestic terrorism case that the FBI instructed him to treat as four different cases, a move O’Boyle claimed was made in order to inflate the number of domestic terrorism cases, according to the transcript.
In a statement to CNN, the FBI said, “we do not conduct investigations based on a person’s political or social views” and added that threat tags are “merely a statistical tool to track information for review and reporting.” In response to O’Boyle’s claim about treating four cases as one, the FBI said “any assertion that the FBI manipulates statistics on domestic terrorism cases is categorically false.”
O’Boyle told subcommittee staff that the Washington, DC, office had pressured him to take steps on a case pertaining to January 6, and that they had backed off when he said he didn’t want to, sources familiar with his testimony told CNN.
O’Boyle also claimed during his subcommittee interview that former Trump national security and defense official Kash Patel had been helping with his legal fees, according to the transcript reviewed by CNN. Patel remains a close associate of former President Donald Trump. He was the former president’s representative to the National Archives and has testified before a federal grand jury investigating the handling of records taken to the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort.
After O’Boyle said Patel was paying his legal fees, Binnall told the subcommittee that unbeknownst to his client he was working pro bono, according to the transcript.
Patel is also helping the other whistleblower Friend, who testified to the subcommittee that Patel gifted him $5,000 in November 2022 after learning about his claims. Friend also said Patel connected him to the Center for Renewing America. Patel is listed as a senior fellow for national security and intelligence on the group’s website.
Reached for comment by CNN, Patel’s spokesperson said his foundation does not publicly disclose the names of people they help financially.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
