Another whistleblower has alleged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) actively conceals the man-hours dedicated to January 6 investigations to avoid scrutiny from Republicans who are set to take over the U.S. House of Representatives.
As the nation wades into a new era with control of the U.S. Congress divided between a Republican-controlled House and a Democrat-controlled Senate, new allegations have surfaced that the nation’s top law enforcement agency is engaged in deception to protect its future funding.
A whistleblower disclosed to Congress that a top official in the FBI’s counterterrorism unit at its Washington headquarters had pressured the heads of the agency’s field offices nationwide to stop clocking hours accurately when working on January 6 investigations, either by under-reporting hours or by mislabeling them.
Field office supervisors were allegedly told that agents should log those hours in the FBI’s formal system under international terrorism or other investigations rather than January 6 investigations.
The FBI has focused an unprecedented amount of agency resources on the events of January 6. Nearly 1,000 individuals from across the country have been charged with crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, and thousands more have been the subject of investigation.
The Dallas Express reported previously about similar allegations leveled against the FBI by currently-suspended agent Stephen Friend, who claimed that the agency’s Washington headquarters orchestrated a massive manipulation of the January 6 investigations for political purposes.
Central to Friend’s claims was that the FBI farmed out January 6 cases to field offices across the country to give the appearance of a widespread national crisis of “domestic terrorism” investigations.
Friend has since weighed in on these latest whistleblower allegations.
“Well, they’ve made such a big deal about [January 6] stuff that they had everybody working it,” Friend remarked. “Now they’ve gone over the number of hours they had budgeted for domestic terrorism cases, and they’ve come in well under the other cases, like on international terrorism.”
“Now they’re worried that they’re going to go for appropriations, and the Republican Congress is going to say, ‘You guys shouldn’t have funding for international terrorism. There’s clearly not a need. You guys didn’t even devote any time to it,'” he concluded.
Friend told The Washington Times that he was regularly told to work on one thing but put something else into the FBI’s formal time-tracking system.
He said the practice goes well beyond January 6 and is regular practice by the agency.
“This is happening all the time,” he commented.
The recent anonymous whistleblower claimed in their disclosure that urging FBI agents to misreport the focus of their work was akin to “pressuring agents to make false statements in official FBI records.”
“It also allows the FBI director to falsely report to Congress that a smaller amount of total FBI work hours was being dedicated to the January 6 investigation,” the whistleblower said.
The Washington Times reported that the FBI had denied the claims but not provided further information.