Testifying before Congress on Thursday, a former FBI agent said the FBI manipulated data to make domestic terrorism related to Jan. 6 appear to be a nationwide phenomenon rather than an isolated incident.
The revelation came as part of a hearing held by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, where FBI whistleblowers testified to lawmakers about FBI abuses and politicization. They also testified about the backlash they received, even losing their jobs in retaliation for refusing to follow the FBI leadership’s story.
RELATED: Trump Defends ‘Patriot’ Ashli Babbitt at City Hall, Slams Officer Who Killed Her as a ‘Thug’
Steve Friend, a former FBI special agent who served five years on an FBI SWAT team and five years before that with the Georgia local police, made the allegation that his former agency artificially inflated domestic terrorism records.
“Normally you would investigate January 6 as one case with many topics, but instead it was decided to open a separate case for each individual,” he said at the hearing. “And instead of researching them on paper from the Washington field office, distributing them and distributing them to the field offices across the country, and whether the person lived in that area.”
“In fact,” he added. “It seemed like there were domestic terrorism cases and activities going on around the 56 field offices, when in fact the cases were all coming from Washington, D.C., and Washington had a task force responsible for determining all those cases.”
Friend said this is part of a trend for the federal law enforcement agency, adding that the FBI’s National Security Branch has “shifted counterterrorism from legitimate foreign actors to political adversaries within our borders.”
RELATED: Report: QAnon Shaman Released From Jail Following Tucker Carlson’s Release of Jan. 6 Tapes Showing Him Being Escorted Through the Capitol by Police
The FBI has come under heavy fire in recent years for politicization in favor of Democratic interests. More evidence has emerged that the FBI may have played a bigger role in instigating the events of January 6 than previously thought.
A Government Accountability Office report released in February found that the FBI and Capitol Police knew about threats before Jan. 6, but were not doing enough about them.
The FBI has also been exposed for collaborating with social media companies to censor Americans online, most notably by urging social media companies to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 election between President Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump.
Representatives of social media companies say the FBI told them the story was Russian disinformation.
That story has since been verified and is not misinformation, but not before the FBI’s decisions affected the presidential election.
These and other concerns have brought the federal law enforcement agency under serious scrutiny, particularly by Republican lawmakers like U.S. Representative Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who presided over Thursday’s committee hearing and called the FBI “a politically-focused agency.”
RELATED: The FBI’s response to the Durham report proves Trump was right
An FBI spokesperson told The Center Square that the agency “has not and will not retaliate against individuals who disclose protected whistleblowers.”
“While the crimes at the U.S. Capitol took place in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, the reality is that many of the people who committed acts of violence and other crimes traveled to the nation’s capital that day from multiple jurisdictions across the country.” said the FBI. “The FBI investigates individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and other criminal activities that constitute a federal crime or a threat to national security. We do not conduct research based on an individual’s opinion. We are committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment activity.”
Syndicated with permission from the Center Square.