FBI Special Agent Steve Friend, 37, was suspended Monday, “stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla.,” after conscientiously objecting to taking part in the Bureau’s harassment of conservative Americans, the New York Post reported.
Friend says he was punished after he complained to his superiors about having to be involved in J6 investigations that were “violating citizens’ Sixth Amendment rights due to overzealous charging by the DOJ and biased jury pools in Washington, DC.”
The whistleblower alleges that “FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” according to the Post.
Friend, a SWAT team member who was with the FBI for 12 years, made those allegations and more in a bombshell whistleblower complaint filed late Wednesday with the Department of Justice Inspector General’s office.
He is among 20 whistleblowers from the bureau who have reported concerns about the weaponization of the FBI against the Biden administration’s political opponents to Republican members of Congress.
In his complaint, the whistleblower alleges that he was removed from active investigations into child sexual exploitation and human trafficking to work on the January 6 investigation. He said he was told “domestic terrorism was a higher priority” than child pornography. Because of this, Friend believes his child trafficking investigations were damaged.
Among his stunning allegations, Friend says the FBI has retroactively designated a grassy area outside the Capitol (that was not restricted on Jan. 6, 2021) as a restricted zone in order to widen the net of prosecutions. The Whistleblower alleges that the FBI intends to “prosecute everyone even peripherally associated with J6,” according to the Post. He also alleges that the FBI has created fraudulent crime statistics to give the false impression that right-wing domestic terrorism is the greatest threat to America.
The agent was declared absent without leave last month after he refused to participate in a SWAT raid in Jacksonville, Florida that he felt was a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 subjects accused of minor offenses.
Friend, who did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, said he told his immediate boss twice that he believed the raid, and the investigative process leading up to it, violated FBI policy and the subject’s right under the Sixth Amendment to a fair trial and Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.“This American hero, the father of two small children, has blown up his ‘dream career’ because he could not live with his conscience if he continued to be part of what he sees as the unjust persecution of...