Multiple whistleblowers from within the FBI will testify Thursday against the agency’s leadership, describing what they’ve characterized as abuses of power.
Newsmax will carry the Hearings live starting at 9 a.m. EDT Thursday.
An 8 a.m. news conference previewing the hearing is also scheduled.
The House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is preparing to host suspended FBI special agents Garret O’Boyle and Steve Friend.
Former FBI State Operations Specialist Marcus Allen and Tristan Leavitt, president of the pro-whistleblower group Empower Oversight, are also slated to attend the hearing, according to a news release from the judiciary panel.
The hearing, organized by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, will reportedly dig into accusations that the FBI has harassed conservatives and inflated domestic terrorism statistics.
The hearing plans were first reported Monday by the Daily Mail.
In a late development on Wednesday, the FBI moved to revoke the security clearances of three agents who either took part in the Capitol breach or later voiced views on it that raised questions about their “allegiance to the United States, the New York Times reported. Two of them are slated to testify on Thursday — Friend and Allen — with the bureau letter about the stripped clearances to congressional leaders coming just a day ahead of that hearing.
The third man named in the letter was Brett Gloss. All three have been suspended by the FBI as the bureau reviews their cases, the Times said.
Raising issues
Sources told the Mail that the officials set to testify took specific issue with the agency’s insistence they prioritize investigations against Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach demonstrators, even putting those ahead of cases involving sex crimes against children.
Sources contend that that’s just one example of the FBI disregarding standard investigative procedures related to Jan. 6 suspects.
Some lawmakers, and even high-profile politicians like former President Donald Trump, have long maintained that the bureau’s pursuit of Capitol riot participants has been reckless and deeply flawed. Recently, Trump went so far as to say he’d consider full pardons for many Jan. 6 participants.
“I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he has said. “I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons, full pardons.”
Whistleblower claims
“The manipulative case-file practice creates false and misleading crime statistics, constituting false official federal statements,” one of those set to testify on Thursday, Friend, wrote about the extremism statistics in an affidavit. “Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from an isolated incident at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.”
Jordan’s scheduling of the hearing comes after Republicans in the Judiciary Committee during the last Congress released a 1,000-page report detailing allegations of FBI and Justice Department politicization.
That information eventually fueled Judiciary’s new subcommittee, which has notably hosted Twitter Files reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger thus far.
Many have alleged that the Biden administration pressed social media platforms like Twitter to silence the accounts of critics on the political right.
Just this week, the release of the Durham report, probing federal investigators’ work on claims Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia, stirred more concerns about the FBI. The exhaustive report concluded that the FBI had pursued the matter based on biased claims from Trump critics, with little regard for rules of evidence. Many Republican lawmakers have pointed to the report as further evidence that the bureau has been weaponized against the right.