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Sept. 22, 2022 - The Dan Bongino Show
56:45
Interview with FBI Whistleblower Kyle Seraphin, Part. 1 (Ep 1857)

In this episode, I talk with the FBI Whistleblower, Special Agent Kyle Seraphin, in a bombshell interview about the inner workings and corruption of the FBI. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of this critical interview. Copyright Bongino Inc All Rights Reserved Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
Folks, today's probably one of the most important shows we've ever done.
If you've been a long-time listener or viewer here on Rumble or wherever you listen to the show, you know we've been focused on the role of the FBI and the DOJ in enforcing the new police and surveillance state.
We came across an interesting break on the Spygate case when a source contacted me years ago.
We've come across a really interesting break here as well.
We're interested in getting you the truth.
We were contacted by a whistleblower from the FBI.
It's someone who has very recent experience with the Bureau and was interested in a comprehensive look at all the scandals going into the FBI.
His name is Kyle Serafin.
He is going to be interviewed on today's show.
This is a two-part show.
We taped this just before, just very recently, just within the last day or so of this, and we're going to break it into two parts.
The reason I chose to break it into two parts is because there was so much information here on so many different topics, between corruption at the FBI, the vaccine mandate, pressure to classify people as domestic terrorists, that we didn't feel we'd do it justice in one episode.
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We're going to dig into this interview.
It is one of the most important ones we have ever done.
You are gonna be held in rapt attention on this, I promise you.
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Thanks folks.
We got one more spot and we're going to take one break in the middle of the show.
So again, we really appreciate your time and your patience.
Thank you.
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Now for our interview with FBI agent Kyle Serafin.
All right, I'm really looking forward to this interview.
Kyle Serafin, FBI agent.
We contacted each other.
We've spoken.
Patriot from what I can tell, a guy very interested in cleaning up the problems at the FBI.
My audience has been focused on this story for a long time.
I really appreciate you coming in.
First of all, why don't you tell the audience how you came to the FBI, how long you were there, where you worked, to provide some background for everyone, establish bona fides.
Sure.
In 2009, I enlisted in the Air Force.
I did three and a half years.
Kind of a long story involved with that, but not really relevant to what our purposes are tonight.
Got out, was a civilian paramedic for a little bit.
So kind of like your street cop days, I got to run around and pick people off the street a little bit.
And I spent some time working in a hospital.
And during that time, I applied for the FBI, kind of fired it off like you do with so many different federal employment options.
And then it just kind of disappears in the ether.
And I got to reach back out in about 2015.
Our hiring process is famously long, like so many other federal agencies.
So I got sent to Quantico in 2016 in the summer, in June, and was immediately assigned to the Washington Field Office.
I did two years working in the counterintelligence division at Washington Field, and then another three years, right about to the three-year mark, working in The, what they call special operations group, which sounds pretty prestigious.
It's the surveillance group.
When we got there, it was kind of a broken toy haven.
And then when we moved forward with it, it ended up being a place that was really a neat place to work where we got to do a lot of interesting casework.
And because of that, I saw probably 20 plus national terrorism cases of all different varieties.
But that was pretty much what we got sent around the world to do or around the country in this case.
To provide that special expertise to field officers.
Yeah.
So it's a real special.
So you get kind of a flavor of what's going on.
You get briefed up on it, you get to see the subject up close, sometimes more than any of the case agents even saw, you know, you're closer to them, you're following them, you're pattering their life, you find out when they're coming and going, when they're waking, when they're sleeping, how they drive, you know, how they look around when they move, you know, what stores they're going into, what kind of people they're talking to, that kind of stuff.
So a lot of photography, a lot of video work, stuff like that.
And then a lot of just handwritten notes and our recollections as we kind of So, you know, without getting into any, obviously anything that's going to put you in a bind or national security secrets, how generally does a counter-terrorism investigation work?
Is it run out of the field?
Let's say, I'll give you an example, maybe a story would be better.
Something happens out of a smaller field office, say a Nashville-type field office or something like that, and they've got a big high-priority counter-terror investigation, they've got a possible cell.
They have to run that then through headquarters first and then experts like yourself in a specific area get sent down.
How does that work?
So, the way it would get briefed up, and I listened to your show the other day, you were talking about the briefers, the admin-type agent.
The minute they get a hold of something like this, it gets briefed up to some supervisory level, they make the mistake of telling it to somebody over at headquarters who's a program manager or above.
Once the division that actually owns that type of investigation, in this case it's gonna be Counterterrorism Division, so CTD, gets their hooks into it, The field agent is kind of being run like an order taker and it's kind of the end of their ability to run that case.
So then they're not the one making that call anymore.
So yes, they'll bring in resources that they want.
If it's going to be a plane, if it's going to be a surveillance team that's going to help do a longer term surveillance, they bring in kind of the folks they want to have it.
And in no way was our team considered really elite or specialized, other than we were physical bodies who had a pulse and we were able to sit in cars for a long time.
And that gets you a lot of really useful information.
Because if you can see somebody at night when the agents are going home, because as you know, feds like to punch the clock between, you know, nine and five.
Like anyone else.
But at that point, they're going to be doing whatever the things happen in the daylight and whatever sort of briefings have to happen and what sort of investigative work and looking at paper.
And then you leave guys like me out there kind of just kind of holding the bag to see what's going to happen.
Sometimes it's really valuable.
A lot of times it's not.
Sometimes it's just containment as much as anything else.
It's like fill in the blank guys might be doing something.
You hit the panic button, call on a team to watch him, and they're just babysitting to make sure this guy doesn't do the thing that they think he might do.
Well, you know, I wanted to focus this two-part series we did with you on really genuinely trying to fix the issues.
I really do care.
I worked with great agents at the FBI.
It's certainly not systemic, but unfortunately, the group of people in power who are screwing the place up have a lot of power to screw it up.
And you'd mentioned something before, and I'd heard from other sources in the Bureau that this is an issue I'd like you to elaborate on.
The idea that you, the field guys, who actually understand the nuts and bolts, the boots on the ground, you know who the sources are, you can shake the trees, you've got people and you've worked bank robbery cases, you know who you can trust and who you can't.
The fact that your word on the ground means almost nothing and a lot of these high profile cases where you'd be most valuable are being run out of headquarters by people who are briefers who may talk a good game but haven't actually done anything.
That's a real problem.
Well, there's a fundamental disconnect between, I think, America's understanding of what the FBI is and then what it is in actuality.
And we kind of touched on it a little bit ago, but everyone looks at this group and they think this is a, you know, self-proclaimed, I would say, premier law enforcement organization in America.
But the FBI views itself more as an intelligence agency.
And when you deal with an intelligence agency, You get intelligence analysts and you get intelligence people.
And intelligence people have a totally different mindset than a criminal investigative group.
And so, you know, my experience and part of the reason why I ended up on a surveillance team was because I couldn't grasp the idea of grabbing knowledge for the sake of knowledge that was non-operational.
We never had any, we had no instinct or ability to pursue it.
In fact, the squad that I worked on, if we found a case that got to a level where there was some criminality involved, it probably got moved over to another squad that did that exclusively.
So all of our job was background.
And so, in some ways, I had sort of an external seat, because my ability to get my hands on to a lot of the things that I joined the Bureau to do, it never materialized.
But I got to see it from the outside as a support agent.
You know, we really have two kind of cast, well, we have three kind of cast of agents.
You've got your administrative agents that are interested in supervisory roles and moving up and some of them I have no beef with and some of them are terrible.
A lot of them are probably terrible, right?
And then you've got your case agents and these people are your hound dogs.
They just run down stories.
They want to know what the interest is.
They're getting paper and they're, you know, they're building cases.
And then you have people that kind of do all the other, whether that's surveillance or SWAT or medical support for the arrest warrants and things like that or, you know, evidence recovery teams and kind of all the peripheral pieces that make that agency work.
That's pretty shocking what you just said.
your pool of KJs is just pretty narrow.
And I feel like it's narrowing in a lot of ways because some of these things are not about,
it's not about getting the case done anymore.
That's pretty shocking what you just said.
I mean, I want everybody to listen to that and make sure that you all digested that,
kind of got your arms around it.
That the FBI, you know, we all grew up with the G-Man movies,
you know, "Silence of the Lambs,"
"Chasing the Serial Killer," whatever it may be.
I mean, I was under the perception that the FBI was a law enforcement entity first at that, you know, bank robberies, financial crimes, crimes across state borders.
You're telling me they're moving away from that to an intelligence gathering, almost exclusively enterprise right now?
Am I reading that right?
I just think that's the focus.
I think that's the primary thought process.
And if you look at who gets elevated into leadership, it's very often people that come out of that background.
And so many of them have never touched a criminal case.
And it also leads to weird issues when you try to move them into a realm where they don't have any background in a criminal case.
It's not familiar to them.
It's not territory they know.
What they know is FISAs and NSLs, a national security letter, which is like a secret subpoena.
They have access to doing different tools and they feel entitled to that information
because half the time that information is just to clear people. And it's like we're gonna we're
gonna vet you because we heard something we're gonna just find out about it but then we'll just
leave you in a case for a long long time years maybe because I can still gather information. So this
could be happening to people who don't know it? It is happening to people who
don't know it.
That's definitely the case.
Wow.
And so it's a great example.
So I joined counterintelligence 2016.
I get there at the end of the year, you know, my first real full year is 2017.
And I get a half dozen cases and they're all, you know, dogs with fleas kind of deal, you know, internal old school agents talking about it.
And so you go, here's your dogs, you know, and you read them and they've been open for six, seven, eight years.
And in no way am I going to talk about the specifics of them, but they were all cases that after I read hundreds of pages, you know, and somebody would, the key was, is they seemed like they were placeholders.
And it's like, you have to look busy.
So let's have eight cases assigned to you.
Okay.
It's an administrative process.
And so every one of those cases better get a piece of paper.
I better write something about it.
I either reviewed some kind of deal or I asked somebody about it, or I went to go talk to a source about it, whatever it may be, put that in every 90 days.
Every 90 days there's new paper in your file.
It's called papering the file.
As long as you're papering the file, you're good to go.
So these cases just exist to meet an administrative burden.
But I read them over and I don't have any instinct for that.
Like I used to have patients in an ER.
If you got patients, I want no patients.
I need to have beds open so that when people come in, right?
Yeah.
So operational kind of necessity.
So you read through it, you go, I don't see anything else to do here.
Like, we've exhausted literally everything I could think to do.
We've done all of the administrative process we could do in the background.
We have all of the information that we would want to know about this guy.
And also, it doesn't appear that anybody here did anything.
Why don't we just go talk to him?
You know, I know everything I know.
I can keep it in my back pocket.
We'd go do a ruse interview.
It's pretty common.
You get knocked on by the door and someone from the FBI comes to talk to you.
They're probably not talking to you about what they're talking to you about.
That's pretty standard.
So I'll go and conduct an informational interview.
It's like, hey, here's what I'm about.
I'm going to get close enough to the topic that we can have a reasonable conversation about it.
You're forthright and honest with me.
I'm telling you what I can tell you without disclosing why I'm there.
Yeah.
And that was it.
And then I closed the case.
It's like, there's nothing here.
There's nothing here and there never was anything here for years.
And it was always obvious for the first person to read, like you open the, you read the opening case and you just go, I can't believe that anyone opened this.
Why did this happen?
Give me an example.
Like what would open a case?
I mean, say I go on to a, but let's say for example, I'm a movie producer and I go on my phone there and I put in my search engine, Because I'm doing a scene in a movie on a bomb.
How to make a pipe bomb.
Is that the kind of thing where I could pop on some list somewhere and find myself in this perpetual case that never gets closed because someone wants to paper a file?
Probably not.
Unless somebody were to see it and report it.
So it would have to probably come from an outside entity.
But even that, how to make a bomb, that's touching on sort of what we would call the allegation or information that there may be a crime happening.
It's more subtle than that.
If you're a Hollywood filmmaker, if that's what you want to be, for our hypothetical, you went to grad school with a guy who is now making propaganda films in Russia, and he's working on behalf of some state agency.
And somebody's tied him to an intelligence agency, whether he's working for them full-time or whether he's co-opted to, you know, do some messaging or do some introductions, right?
He can schmooze some people in Hollywood, whatever.
But you knew him back then, and you guys went to grad school.
Let's say the FBI outs him, figures out who he is, and they throw him out.
PNG'd.
This guy is no longer allowed to come back to America.
You're out.
Okay?
Well, we know that you knew him.
You're in a circle of contacts and we're working our way through the big circle in the spiral.
There you are.
You're hit here on the third ring.
Okay, so... So we know that Bongino knew this guy at some point.
Great.
So, we gotta come find out, like, what did you know about him?
And were you doing Russian propaganda?
And are you co-opted by the Russians?
Like, are you involved in this?
Just because you knew.
Yeah, you knew him, of course you... So you guys probably had breakfast once or twice, and maybe, you know, shared notes, or you wrote a term paper together, or whatever.
You published something, it doesn't matter.
You did grad school, so you're friends, obviously.
You're on Facebook together.
You're connected through Facebook or LinkedIn, take your pick, like, it doesn't matter.
Some sort of social media connection.
Well, there's two points of contact.
That's good enough.
Let's find out what you're about.
So we'll dig into you.
We look in, are you receiving money?
Are there transfers coming in from some offshore account or something like that?
Well, of course they're not, right?
We're looking to see, are there any surreptitious sort of communications?
Are you passing?
Oh, they're not there.
All the normal channels get dry.
So eventually I might just come talk to you.
But you're entirely unaware, to be clear, this is happening.
This is not in any way adversarial.
Will your attorney get some, Notification.
All of this stuff is being accumulated in a data file.
This is an intelligence investigation.
It has nothing to do with crime.
Right.
There's no allegation that there was crime.
You could be the victim of being exploited.
You could be a positive contact that you're a springboard for something else.
So none of these things have to touch criminality at all.
And that's the misconception.
Criminality is what law enforcement is looking for.
We're looking for information in this case, right?
So it has nothing to do with whether or not you did anything wrong or if there's even an allegation that you did anything wrong.
You see how that would make a lot of Americans uncomfortable?
It's terrifying.
It's the most uncomfortable thing to know about once you realize where it is.
It's one of the reasons why I asked to get out of there because I didn't want to be involved in that.
And here's the fun thing about the way that it works as a Fed.
And you know, there's a lot of guys out there that are making a paycheck.
They're making a promotion every year.
They're building their families.
They're doing whatever it is.
They're establishing roots and footholds in the place they're in.
And there's only two ways you can go with that.
You either move to the point where you go, this is absolutely disgusting and I'm not going to be part of it and you bail.
And there's a lot of really good people that have left the FBI in a very, you know, short window, pre 10 years, I would say, probably even before that.
And then there's the guys that make it 10 years and they look around and they go, I'm on the backside of the hill to 20.
I can retire in 20 years.
It's about a pension, a pension's 50, 60 grand a year, plus some additional top-off benefits from Social Security, plus you got the medical.
I got kids, I got a mortgage, I got things going on.
We called it the golden handcuff.
That's it.
It's hard to get away.
Everybody's got the same term in this case.
Yeah.
And then you're in.
And then it's like, I just got it, you know, the number of guys, and we can get into kind of a little more specific about how my kind of falling out happens, but, you know, the number of guys that said, I don't agree with what's going on here, but I got three years to retire.
It's heartbreaking.
It also kind of tells me that it's a universal problem.
It's probably a universal problem in federal employment, but it's specifically dangerous in the FBI because of the power that it has.
This is about you, not about me, and I certainly want to talk about why you and I are here, but I think you and I are simpatico in this.
I mean, you decided to take a principled decision, which is going to cause you some short-term pain.
But do you understand why a guy like me who walked away after 12 years, I mean, I'm halfway done.
Now you're on the back end.
Yeah, I just finished the presidential protections event, by far the hardest part of your career.
I'm in the Baltimore field office living the life.
I got a nice commute home, a parking spot.
That's why I just, I don't accept the argument that you're certainly not making, but others do that, hey, it's about a job and a pension.
I get it.
People have kids.
I'm not stupid.
But sooner or later, I mean, it really has to be about the country.
I mean, this is the most powerful law enforcement entity on the globe.
I'm just stunned more people are like yourself, aren't standing up saying, I'm not going to be a part of that.
So that's true.
And I agree.
I think there are more people than you think.
So I'm here to kind of represent some of that.
And I have contact with a lot of them.
I'll kind of give you the story of how I am.
So officially speaking, I'm Schrodinger's agent right now.
Okay.
Like the cat that's shot in the box.
I'm alive and I'm dead at the same time.
I work for the FBI and I don't at the same time.
So what does that mean?
I was indefinitely suspended on June 1st.
There was a conclusive filing that said, we've agreed with our own decision to suspend you.
And so we reaffirm our proposition to remove you from our payroll.
And that happened on June 1st.
So how did I get to that point, right?
At that point, I was just shy of six years.
In October of last year, I got an email that wasn't designed for me, it wasn't meant for me, it didn't really matter one way or another, but I hear two guys talking in the hallway, and they say, hey, did you see this email?
I said, I don't think so, because I don't know what you're talking about.
It gets forwarded along to me.
That email turns out to be the email that went to Jim Jordan's office, and it said the EDU threat text.
Congressman from Ohio.
Correct.
And so, you know, I've got this email, I'm reading it, and I follow the news like a freak, because I used to live in DC, and now I live in New Mexico.
So, I'm reading this, and I know what the Attorney General has said, and I know that he says he's not gonna use, they use the words, Patriot Act tools.
This is about the parents and the school board.
Correct.
The EDU threat tag we're talking about?
Exactly.
And so he had used the term, he said, I'm not going to use, you know, they asked the question.
I think he did.
He was responding in a negative.
But would you use the, you know, Patriot Act tools, which I took to mean counterterrorism resources.
They're interchangeable if you don't know what you're talking about, kind of thing.
Most people wouldn't distinguish that, right?
So he says, would you use those tools against, you know, do you see using those with parents who are protesting?
It's like, absolutely not.
And we get this email.
And the FBI has actually argued to themselves, to the DOJ, that what I did is not a whistleblower activity.
Their attorneys have stated it.
They said nobody would, one, call it a memo when it was clearly an email, which is a really strange sort of minute detail.
And then they kind of get into this granularity of it.
It doesn't call for any investigations.
And if you read the text of it, plainly it doesn't.
But it's delivered.
What does the memo say?
If you're not investigating parents speaking out of school boards under the EDU threat tag, what were they asking the FBI to do?
Go, you know, roast marshmallows with them?
I mean, it doesn't make sense.
Sure, yeah, it's a fundamental disconnect between people who are support in the Bureau and that ground-level case agent.
And if you spend any time as a case agent, even if it's only for a couple of weeks, you know that when directors and information has come down, it comes down from headquarters, and this is the policy, this is how we're going to do it, and this is what this tool is.
You're going to tag, what are you going to tag with EDU Threat?
Investigations!
That's the only thing you can tag.
That's what goes on there.
It's either going to be an assessment, it's going to be a preliminary or a full investigation, but you're going to be tagging the work that you are doing, which is investigative.
So there's no other way around that.
That's not an option.
And so they can dance with the words about it.
But essentially, they're asking to tag these inbound threats.
And we don't have time for that kind of threats.
I mean, we really don't.
In the real FBI, there's not time for threats from some guy who's yelling at a school board.
I mean, we barely can take on what's called interstate threat cases.
Right.
And it has to touch an interstate metric.
Mostly, this is a state and local issue.
And they bring it up.
It has to have a federal nexus.
And it's like, why are we putting any resources towards it?
You'd have to really, really convince me.
And, you know, nobody has to convince me because I'm just, you know, a GS-13 at the bottom of the ladder.
But it's very difficult to convince me, I would say, that this is a real problem that exists all over the country.
Right.
Worthy of FBI research.
But then you get back to where this, you know, this national organization of school boards puts out their piece there, and I'm going to miss the acronym.
But, you know, there was political pressure involved, and then they went to do it.
And that's when you start doing political hatchet jobs.
And I didn't sign up for that.
And nobody I know signed up for that either.
Like, I just, it's just, that's not what people want to get involved in.
Yeah.
So that EDU thread tag was in fact real.
That really happened and you were really being asked.
We're going to get to that in a second.
Let me just take a quick break.
We'll be right back with you folks in just a second.
Stay tuned, don't go away.
Folks, thanks for your patience.
We're just going to take one break for this show.
We're going to read both spots.
We again, appreciate your patience.
The sponsors help keep the show free.
So we appreciate it for you.
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Now back to our interview with FBI whistleblower, Kyle Serwer.
Welcome back with Kyle.
So we were talking before the break there.
This EDU threat tag for these parents was very real.
The FBI had an issue with you, I guess, speaking out about this, that you weren't going to take part in this.
But it's clear, I'm guessing from what you're saying, that somebody wanted the FBI to investigate this.
It's the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
They weren't Intel cases, correct?
They weren't CT-based cases.
They are.
Wow.
So if you look at the bottom of the email, it's signed by two people.
It's signed by the Assistant Director of the Criminal Division and the Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division.
Wow.
So parents from school boards.
So when you get a CT case to the point where there's a crime to, then they prosecute it, right?
It's one of the few.
There's not a lot of espionage cases running around, not for lack of work on it.
I think that people are digging into it as well as they can.
But Sure.
Those are pretty rare.
I mean, they're pretty rare apples that people are out there trying to pick.
And I think that's good.
We want those people out there hunting that.
You don't want espionage happening against this country.
Counterterrorism cases oftentimes are interested in the threat
and the potential that someone will develop into an operational asset of some kind
that will engage in some political ideology and violence.
But, you know, those are fairly fluid.
And that's why those two are involved together.
But the idea that you're going to look at some dad, you know, who owns guns and so, of course, it gets more than that, because the group that I've kind of helped coordinate, who have looked into these problems, they've They've gone out there and they've said, Hey, we pulled some of these tags and we looked at these investigations and they've made it to the house judiciary committee.
So they have the receipts on this.
Like there are investigations that were opened, whether they were preliminary or they were assessments where they were done.
This happened.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's not a fairy tale.
Right.
So the Guardian system is the one, the eGuardian is sort of the thing.
We call them Guardian leads.
They come into your office and somebody somewhere has identified that this person, person A, has gotten involved in something that, you know, tipped the meter for somebody.
And so they called it into either the national hotline or to a local police department and they elevated it up.
One way or another, it ends up on your desk as an agent doing that.
And then it's like, okay, you got to either go out and interview the guy.
You got to surveil him.
You got to decide how legit it is.
You got to send it up to headquarters and open a full investigation.
Speaking out of school board.
Not necessarily, right?
So hopefully what they're doing is they're throwing these things away.
They're doing a little bit of background research.
They're determining this is not a federal case and they're throwing it out.
But that person never knew that maybe he had all of his financials pulled.
Maybe he's got, you know, there are resources.
Like you mentioned before.
Every time you open up one of these tools.
All of that stuff.
Yeah, you open up certain, you know, toolboxes as you progress through that investigative process.
So certain tools are available to you on a national security side under counterterrorism tools.
And there's other ones that are criminal.
As you know, when you're doing criminal work, there's very specific rules on there.
You have to show probable cause and so on.
Of course.
It's a very different animal when you're doing, you know, the bar is different because it's not meant for public consumption.
It's not meant for court.
And then they probably have to retrace their steps once they actually find something that is criminal to be able to build it.
So, because otherwise you disclose the sources of mess.
This is the whole purpose of the intelligence group.
But you can't unwind that watch.
Like once, for instance, you just said, You'd probably have to rebuild the case because you didn't go through the proper criminal procedures and it's essentially different, sometimes parallel pathways.
But in order to go rebuild the case, you've already got the building blocks already there.
You already know the content.
You can't just forget it.
Sure.
Yeah, yeah.
They know what it is.
So if you have a file open on the CT side, a counter-terrorist side, for showing up at a school board meeting and saying something, may have been, you know, may not have been an appropriate thing to say, but it certainly isn't a terroristic threat.
Right.
You could have this big body of information available for you and something else creeps up later, they already have the leads to make a criminal prosecution for you easier is where I'm going with that.
The building blocks are already there.
Sure.
I say this on my show a lot.
You know, the difference between our country and say, you know, a communist socialist country and these totalitarian regimes is there's a personal and a public self.
The idea that the personal self, when you go in your house, And you closed the doors yours.
I mean, we do things at our house we don't want people to see.
You know, we're going on dates with our wives, you know, we're in their bathrooms, whatever.
Sure.
You know, the idea that you could have this file on you about what you're surfing online and not criminal, maybe untoward, maybe nasty, but the fact that this may happen because you showed up at a meeting and said something is really horrifying.
It's scary, yeah.
I mean, it's how the agency views itself.
And the other thing is this.
I think a lot of people try to go in there.
I hope they do.
They're trying to shut it down when something comes up like that.
It's like, hey, this thing come across.
These leads don't come in and nobody gets excited about them.
Nobody's thrilled about catching one of these things.
You get a Guardian case.
It's some wacko in the middle of nowhere.
It's a 17-year-old kid who said, if you don't do this thing, I'm going to do fill-in-the-blank threat in another state.
And he doesn't even own a car.
And all he's got is the internet to just pop off.
He's a keyboard warrior that's angry.
And he's full of hormones or whatever.
We all have 17-year-old rage.
Yeah, you want to shut that down as soon as possible.
But some of them have been charged, you know, like not in this EDU threat that I'm aware of, but there are people that pop up on these Guardian leads that are just garbage.
And then we're out there because, I don't know, maybe an AUSA needs an easy win and it's an easy interstate threat because it's... The Assistant United States Attorney.
Correct, yeah.
So the U.S.
Attorney's Office Functional Unit is the AUSA, the Assistant U.S.
Attorney.
That's your line of prosecutors.
Right.
So, sure, I mean...
You know, it's funny because our systems are very, it's opaque to a lot of people looking from the outside.
You know, the FBI does the investigation.
Somebody else is prosecuting it.
Everybody has their own agenda.
The FBI's got their thing they're trying to do.
They're trying to build their cases.
They're trying to get their statistics, their statistical accomplishments or stats, which is kind of your gold star, your atta boys.
And then I assume that the attorney's office have the same issues.
They've got to get X number of reputations.
They've got to get wins.
They've got to get pleas.
No one wants to lose a case.
Nobody wants to lose it.
But here's the thing, and this is what I used to... Because they're trying to get high profile law firm jobs after that.
No one wants a case prosecution rate of 20%.
Correct.
So they're looking to pad their stats.
Yeah.
I mean, there's probably three different types.
There's people who had no other options and they got, you know, they fell into the job and they love it and they do a great job.
Fantastic.
There's some people that just fall into the job.
They become typical government employees and, you know, they just kind of plod along and get promoted.
And then there's the ones you're talking about.
And, you know, those are the ones you want to work with, honestly, because they're aggressive and they do the right thing and they get out there and they get after it and they want to be out there and they want to go make some money as either a defense attorney or work in some kind of civil litigation or whatever and cash a bigger check.
I got no problem with that.
Like, get your experience where you can get it.
And that's what we got to do.
So, yeah, so we get this threat tag, and from what I understand, it's worth noting, there were two people that disclosed that email.
Where are you working when this happens, when you get the threat tag?
I'm in New Mexico.
You're in New Mexico, okay.
So there are two people that disclosed it.
I went to my congresswoman, which is what we're told we can do.
I literally had just finished the FBI's whistleblower training.
We get online virtual training like every other company and it just, you know, it bogs down on you.
So this is the one where it's like, it's like, oh, that was useful.
That was two weeks ago.
And now I know.
So I got this email in my hands and I go in there and I say, I'd like to make a protective disclosure.
Well, she's a freshman congresswoman.
And they have never heard of anything like this.
And so her staff in this particular office is just looking around like, who is this guy?
What is he doing?
They bring in their law enforcement contact who turns out to be like a friend of mine now.
He's like a lifelong buddy because he's just a really good person.
And I'll mention him by first name.
Gene like looks at me and he just goes, you know, what are you doing here?
You know, we don't...
We don't understand what you're trying to do.
And I said, well, I have a right to petition Congress under 5 U.S.C.
7211.
And he's like, I don't know what that is.
I got this email here for you, and I want you guys to have it.
I'm trying to disclose this as a problem.
And so I'm in good faith alleging that a rule has been broken that a, um, of policy or a violation of law has happened under our whistleblower statutes.
And so I'm just bringing this to your attention and I don't know what you're going to do with it.
I just know it looks really wrong to me and we shouldn't be doing that with FBI resources.
That, that feels like what I swore not to do.
Right.
Targeting these parents.
Correct.
I mean, that could be me.
You know, I've got kids.
I'm a parent.
I could get hot at a school board meeting.
I imagine if people started saying some wild stuff and started getting on to, you know, things that they have no business telling small children about.
Yeah, that could get me going.
I could see that.
So I could see myself in that for sure.
And I think all of us probably can empathize with that situation, right?
So yeah, so I bring it to them, and we have a long conversation.
They write down a lot of notes.
You know, they're really trying to figure out the whole process because it's all new to them.
And, you know, God love them.
They did a great job in getting it where it needed to go.
I guess there were two copies of it, and they got a second copy of it, and the one that was published was not mine, which that's fine.
It makes no difference to me.
But the word got out shortly thereafter, right?
I think it was in mid-November.
Yeah, it's when we started seeing it on TV.
A couple of congressmen had done some appearances.
So that's part one.
The second thing that's happening during that time is in September, we get this notification there's going to be a COVID vaccine mandate.
And what you're going to find, I think, is a lot of the stuff that you talk about on your show.
Wait, so before you get to that, but they find out that you're going to be a whistleblower?
How did they get wind of this?
How does this affect your career?
It's unclear how they knew about that.
And this is why it gets real muddy, because there's no real straight answer.
And that's what they argued.
What they've done in the two different... I'm in three different venues right now where I'm administratively seeking, you know...
Correction.
And the letters I have say, you cannot represent yourself as an FBI agent, but you can't go get another job without asking us either.
You've got to get permission or resign.
Or you can resign and just give up the game.
So that's the position.
That's the Schrodinger's agent situation, right?
You're both, you can either, you're not going to get paid and you have no rights and responsibilities under the job.
But at the same time, like if you want to go do something else, you've got to either give up and resign and let us off the hook, essentially.
And I taught, you know, my attorney's a federal employment lawyer.
He said, I don't know what that means.
I don't know what any of that means.
I don't know what responsibilities are on you.
I have no idea what your exposure is to that.
It's just bizarre.
And it's an only federal government situation.
So we turn this piece in.
Well, at some point my boss comes to me and he goes, you're a whistleblower, right?
Like in a positive.
And if you know, the one thing gets drilled in, I don't know if they do it at FLETC, but they definitely do it at the FBI Academy.
The fastest way to lose your job is lack of candor.
Now, I've read the whistleblower thing, and I don't think anybody can ask me whether I'm a whistleblower or not.
I don't think.
But someone did, and I'm not gonna lie to the guy, and he's an honest human being from everything I can tell.
He seems like a good guy.
So I just said, yeah, I am, you know.
Well, in the meantime, we know from different cases that have hit the media that if somebody prints something off on the file service, I mean, when I hit print, it goes to a centralized file server that, you know, the entire FBI division can monitor.
They can see the name of the email.
Everything you print?
Yeah, sure.
So when you printed this education memo about targeting parents?
100% chance they could look it up.
Whether they did or not, I can't confirm, which is part of their cover story.
It's like, well, we didn't look it up.
It's like, well, we don't know.
And also, to look up and find out whether or not they had those records was too burdensome, and it was too expensive for the FBI to do, per their filing in court.
So, I don't know.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't.
But somebody came to me with a question that I wasn't prepared for.
I answered it in the affirmative.
And then our lead counsel out of the division office called up the headquarters and asked somebody, what do I do with this guy who's both not getting the COVID shot?
So I have a religious exemption that I've claimed, and I'm not going to get it.
I still haven't gotten it.
I refuse.
And for reasons that we can flesh out even more.
Sure.
The second piece of it was, and then he's also a whistleblower.
What do we do with him?
And it goes to a guy who's been in the bureau for over 25 years.
The question does.
And he sends it to me.
Well, because nobody has any idea that during the time that this mandate went out for the COVID shots, I immediately saw that we needed the ability to share information, the people that were in that situation.
And I asked the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association called FLEOA.
Yeah, FLEOA, right.
I sent a notification in there, and that's 50,000 strong federal agents, 1811s of all varieties, whether it's OIG or IRS or everything, right?
So Secret Service is in there.
Yeah.
And I asked them, and I got no reply to it, but I said, you know, we need to poll the membership and find out how many people are not going to get this vaccine under any circumstances, or under what circumstances they would.
So you have a position to represent us.
Because if it's 10%, if it's 5,000 federal agents, that's a lot of people.
That's a lot of training.
Right?
That's $100,000 of just clearances.
They claim it's $100,000 for a top-secret clearance.
So that's, you know, good point.
Times what?
$5,000?
That's an incredible amount of money.
And it's months and months, if not years of time to make up.
That's a big deal.
That's a strong part for us to push back with in a unified voice saying, this is not right.
Let's wait until the courts figure it out.
Because that's what was eventually going to happen.
And there are ongoing court cases.
So, you know, I reach out there and I start gathering.
I got nothing.
I got nowhere to start.
I just start word of mouth with people that I knew in Washington, people that I know in other offices that I traveled around with.
I get these people.
I end up rounding up 300 FBI employees.
They're not all agents.
They're support.
They're everyone from, you know, evidence technicians to nurses to, you know, secretaries and then agents as well and some supervisors as well.
We had some GS-15s in there, some GS-14s.
And we get this group.
And then we get word that the FBI has basically got about 3,000 people that are not going to do the COVID shots.
So I've got 10% of those people in a pool.
It's a big chunk of them.
And we're talking all the time, right?
Encrypted apps, sharing information.
Hey, this is what's happening in this field office.
It's different than in this field office.
Hey, this person just said this that's in leadership.
Well, they're implementing it differently down here.
So Miami is different than Chicago.
Chicago is different than New York.
New York's doing something totally different than what's going on in Albuquerque.
So everybody's doing their own thing.
Everyone's reading the rules.
They're testing.
They're not testing.
They're jamming you up for a testing, whether or not what your status was, or whether you put in a religious thing.
They're getting people out the door.
They pushed out some probationary agents.
I spoke to a couple of them recently.
And I'm going to respect their privacy and not bring them back into the fray.
But they left the Bureau.
In their first year or two, because they were told in no uncertain terms, we can fire you for no reason.
You will be fired over this, even though there's an injunction and we don't need a reason to get rid of you and we will.
So just do what you're told and take the shot.
What the heck is a shot?
You have to get shots when you travel.
It's like, well, I'm not traveling, I'm going to work.
Those shots are tested.
This was a new vaccine.
Correct.
I mean, it's really apples and oranges.
I know you get that.
Sure.
You know, for them to say, I mean, I, yeah.
When I went overseas, we took yellow fever.
You had the yellow car.
You've seen the yellow car a thousand times.
I mean, I've got it all filled out.
Right.
And even though I wasn't excited about it, these things at least had a long profile and you can read ups and downs.
Right.
This thing had never been tested.
Correct.
And more importantly, we're not in the military.
This is a civilian service.
So you sign away certain privileges when you join the military.
Like it's like, you don't really have, you can maybe object.
Maybe there's some principles.
Most people at 17, 18, 19 years old, they don't know.
They put their arm up, they get what's in there.
And that's when they move on with their life.
And generally speaking, that's fine.
But this is a new animal, as we said.
And so, and for me, you know, COVID was over in October of 2020.
I got it.
You know, my spouse was pregnant.
I had two little babies.
They were all fine.
We didn't know.
Nobody knew what the story was going to be at that point in time.
There was no other option.
Came out the other side of, you know, a couple days of feeling lousy and kind of was out of breath for a little bit.
And that was the end of it.
And that's probably because we have a fitness standard and we're relatively healthy and we're in the working age.
All the things that made it, that we know now, you know, my diet's not terrible and my fitness levels are okay.
Yeah.
That was the end of it for me.
It's like, well, I don't want to take this.
And my wife and I attended the pro-life march.
We heard President Trump speak.
It's been a real big thing in our house of late, particularly after having children.
You just get involved in that sort of thing.
And it's like, this changes the game for me.
So the FBI started changing the story on what they wanted people to do for their even religious accommodations.
They said, how long have you had this belief?
You know, how do we know that it's real?
And there was six questions that kind of, they changed it.
I think somebody told me it changed eight times in 60 days, the types of questions, the format.
There was one thing for a religious exemption if you wanted to get out of the flu shot.
All right.
But there was a different one for the COVID shots and it was much longer form, which is bizarre.
It doesn't make any sense to us.
And so we're all sharing this information.
Right.
And so that's the real piece of it.
So the folks that come out of a lot of what you're seeing, these whistleblowers coming forward, And the numbers are, they are what Representative Jordan says they are, I'm sure, and they're probably higher.
Yeah, his number was around 40.
You think it's higher than that?
FBI whistleblowers?
That's probably right, but it's being sourced by other people, right?
Because we don't all know all the things at all the times.
And that's where it gets really wild.
So who am I?
I'm a guy with five, six years in the Bureau.
I've been in two field offices and I've traveled around and touched a little bit of 20 of them.
But I talked to 300 plus people, almost 400 people now, Daily.
Or I go through intermediaries, because I'm trying to protect their identities as well.
Like, I assume that somebody will come after me for this.
I don't know what it's going to involve.
Are you worried about that?
I had two chiefs of staff from different Congress people call me up and tell me to reconsider doing this.
And they said, you should assume that people will come after you, whether it's social media or they'll come after your family, as far as like in a In a political way, right?
Not physical violence per se.
But, you know, I've had my friends call up and, you know, federal agents, they're kind of an irrespective group or they will say the thing that he's doing.
So I had buddies call me up and they said, hey, man, are you sleeping with your weapon?
You know, you got to watch out for the Clinton death squads.
So there's that silliness to it where you just go like, are you going to get Arkansas over this sort of thing?
I bring it up for a reason, though.
Sure.
When I resigned my position and I told them I was going to go run for a Senate as a Republican, I mean, people just thought I was crazy.
I just remember they, you want to talk to the ombudsman before you go?
I mean, they thought it was nuts.
You know, you give them two weeks notice and no one even thought to, like, say, leave the office early.
It just wasn't, it was a different political time.
It was back in 2011.
Sounds like eons ago, right?
But the reason I respect what you're doing is you're doing this at a totally different time.
We've had FBI raids at Mar-a-Lago, unprecedented things happening, investigations of Flynn, Donald Trump, all the deputies on his detail.
You know, this stuff is real.
Stuff that would have sounded like wacko, you know, Star Trek conspiracy theories 10 years ago, I do worry about it.
I was talking to my wife about you last night.
I said, I'm genuinely worried that this guy's got a lot of guts doing this.
I have that kind of feeling.
I'd like to be a meathead more, but I'm not.
I have a lot of goofy, nerdy things.
Somebody showed me a nerdy joke one time.
I'm like, that's really nerdy.
He's like, but you get it.
So I know it's there.
So I have this kind of sense that it's the Obi-Wan scene, where it's like, you strike me down.
All you're going to do is you're going to prove exactly what I'm saying.
That's true.
So anyone who wants to, if they want to come after me, and there's a possibility that happens.
I don't feel like there's a lot of scrupulous human beings that are operating.
But I don't think it's also a cabal of, you know, cigar-smoking human beings, like, sitting in a dark room like I saw in the X-Files, which would have been really cool.
But it's not that, right?
It's a bunch of people that have this petty idea that they're going to add a few thousand dollars to their pension by getting the next step up in the SES grade or in the GS, you know, pool.
They're going to top out as a 15-10 or whatever it may be.
Like, that's the real motivation.
I have a really, really close colleague who is one of the greatest people in the FBI.
I think if you shut down the FBI and you left him work, it'd be good.
I would just fund him out of my pocket if I could.
I just think the work he does is so important.
And he's done Source Network, and he built up basically the entire FBI reporting structure for Afghanistan.
And he used to work for Peter Strzok.
That was his direct supervisor.
And above him was Andy McCabe.
So the names that are out there in the world, you know, they're still, they were on my cases.
Like they were, they were the ones that were the supervisors that signed on the openings of some of these weird cases that I got.
What were their reputations like in the Bureau?
Were they the briefers I talk about on my show?
Guys who are really good at briefing headquarters, but really poor putting boots on the ground, actually doing criminal work?
So I didn't meet them, I didn't know them.
This is second-hand information, but the information I got was exactly that.
We call them blue flamers in the FBI.
Blue flamer is the afterburner, right?
It's the whoosh, and they shoot up.
So the trajectory of someone like that is they show up at a field office, they're there for two and a half years, that gives them three full years in the FBI, and this has changed since, but during that era, they could do stuff like that, I think.
And they definitely did, some of my supervisors have been that.
Three years of casework.
So they probably just figured out what was going on in their squad, their operational unit.
Right.
Off the headquarters, six, seven years, program management, unit chief, section chief, running things from, you know, the far way away, not touching the case, thinking that whatever they're doing is very important, I'm sure.
And then, Then they come back.
Now they're a supervisor.
They're a desk supervisor.
They've never done the work, but they're going to tell people how to do it.
But luckily, the people who do the work are pretty good at doing the work.
And they just rubber stamp it.
And that goes on.
They're there for two years.
They've got to spend two years on the desk.
Now you get that GS-15, that ASAC job, or they're going to go to a section chief somewhere.
So they're going to go bump up.
And then, you know, once you're in that sort of sphere, once you're at a 15, You're either going to make it or you're not going to make it to the senior executive level.
That's your special agent in charge and your assistant director.
So you heard this about Stroke and McCabe, because at my source, you know, the initial Spygate stuff, which I hope we can get to, but said the same thing.
That's where I got the term briefer.
He said, you got to understand that the FBI is different.
You know, in the Secret Service, you had to work between eight and 10 years in a field office if you wanted to go to the president's detail.
By then, I mean, even a mediocre agent's worked a minimum of probably five to ten reasonably good-sized cases.
I mean, even in a big field office, far more.
What the hell do you learn in two to three years to be managing cases like yours out in the field?
Well, and the question is this, are these people that are unbelievable intellects that just grasp the process and they're savants?
Exactly.
Right?
Or are they people that understand that you've got to check the box and then you can move on and you can get the next pay grade?
So I can't speak for all of them.
I wouldn't do that.
That's not right.
But I know that I've met plenty of them that were not unbelievable agents because they didn't understand my cases.
It's like, why is this open?
I don't even know how to read your case from what I could tell.
They had never even gone through the details of it.
And it didn't make sense that they would close it because that's, well, that's your, you got to pay for your file.
That's why it's open.
So you mentioned something before.
I want to get to the domestic violent extremist issue that creeped up today, ironically.
But while we're on that topic of Stroke and McCabe, you had said before it was probably someone trying to check a box.
You know, I've made this claim before as well.
Don't always attribute, you know, to malice what you can attribute to kind of pure stupidity in the government.
There are a lot of great people there, but a lot of people are just dumb.
I tell the story of, when I did a trip to Afghanistan, they told me, don't say anything, no one's supposed to know, it's deep six, Obama's going there.
Right.
I'm not in the car five minutes, a guy calls me, hey, I heard you're going to Afghanistan.
Bro, we weren't supposed to say anything.
Right.
So we'd stroke in McCabe, I have no doubt their political inclinations were to the left, but this may have been more of a, Let me get my name out there and look like I cracked this big case wide open thing?
Yeah, I can't say.
I mean, I can't say specifically.
It sounds right.
It's like none of these guys, when I asked, I said, were these guys, you know, political activists?
And the answer was more like, no, they were more opportunists.
That was, you know, for people that work for them.
Right.
You know, that's what I got from them.
And it's like, okay, the funny thing is the institutional knowledge of the FBI, especially for stuff in the last five or six years, it's all still there.
You know, and I worked with a lot of guys that were on the edge of retirement.
I worked a guy, one of the guys that worked with, he was on the Hanson investigation.
He was one of the, you know, he was the first young guy.
He was the, the kind of the vetting team because he didn't know anybody and he didn't know anything else.
And that was one of his first big things.
And we would just laugh about him sitting in the room and he would tell us the crazy stories.
Those are cool war stories.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was a big case.
deal, right? And then I've heard guys that were on the bug sweep teams that were running the
operations against the other, the possible other penetrations that were not Robert Hansen, but
they thought it might have been because they didn't know obviously who it was. They just knew
there was a penetration and they didn't know exactly where it was. So, you know, I've met tons
of people in that little office that just have been there for a long time.
The institutional knowledge is in the hallways, it's in the skiffs, it's all over the place.
And when people sit and have lunch, what do they do?
The first thing you do if you sit down with any other two people in the bureau, any other two agents, they bitch about the management, you know, they complain about the structure, and they complain about how it's not like it used to be.
This is not what we signed up with.
You said something interesting about opportunists and I would guess some of the listeners are probably going to say, ah, I'm calling, you know, BS on this.
You know, they clearly had a political war going on on Trump.
And from what I get from you, that's not what you're saying.
You're not saying there wasn't a political war going on here.
You're saying the political war may have been waged by others and they may have been in effect, useful idiots.
Like they saw an opportunity to, yeah, I'll dive in this political war.
What the hell?
If I can get some kind of career advancement too.
There's so many cases that get run, I think, just because people have decided it's a good case.
When someone tells you it's a good case, you've got to run that case.
That's the job.
It's like, hey, that's a really good case.
You're thinking, like, I don't think it is that good of a case.
It actually seems like there may not be anything on it.
If it briefs well, as my buddy likes to always say, if it briefs well, you might as well.
So, and there's a real strong concept.
It's like, how do we end up doing this thing that makes no sense?
How do we end up sitting here at two in the morning, you know, in Northern Virginia, watching this guy who's been on his feet for the last 12 hours?
Like, he's going to go to sleep.
He's not a meth head.
He's going to sleep.
Right.
Why am I sitting here in the dark babysitting a car where nobody's at?
Well, it briefs well, right?
It's so well, we got our guys on it.
He's contained.
He can't move.
You know, if he moves, we'll know about it.
Got, you know, we're ready.
Briefs well, that's it.
What do you do?
Do you think, uh, close out part one here, but, um, Do you think that had the opportunist angle, that you have people in positions of power running the most powerful law enforcement entity anywhere in the world, the guns and the badges at the top, that that opportunist attitude may have had a lot to do with this push we've seen with this new whistleblower came out, I saw his report today, to categorize cases as domestic violent extremism, that someone at the top who could have shut this down and said, listen, this is clearly a political request,
Okay, the data and the facts on the ground will guide themselves.
If we see white supremacists who are terrorists, it's in our interest too to stop it with the FBI.
Sure.
But you pushing it from the top creates a perverse set of incentives where you tell me this is the priority, it almost creates a de facto quota.
Biden and Garland say we need white supremacists, domestic violent extremists, you know, and we learned in the Salem witch trials.
You're looking for a witch.
You're going to find one, even if there's no witch.
Do you think that the opportunists just didn't have the guts to stand up and say something?
That's what could have led to this?
I think this country broke on January 6th in so many different ways.
It's a turning point.
The FBI has bought in 100% to the hype of January 6th.
They have said it's the biggest investigation they've ever done, bigger than 9-11.
To me, that's incredible.
I got the leads that came out of those cases, okay?
The days afterwards, I was actually on leave on the day of, and I had friends that were gonna go down there.
Current agents, active duty, you know, guys that were carrying the badge and the gun, they were gonna go down to the rallies, and for just logistical reasons, didn't make it.
They were able to retire safely, probably just because of that mishap.
Because otherwise, they would have been under investigation, as far as I could tell.
And I know that there are friends in my group- Even though they were exercising their First Amendment right.
I know two guys that have been suspended without pay, their security clearance revoked for showing up to listen to the President of the United States speak.
No criminal activity whatsoever?
None.
And the allegation is absurd that they were engaging in some sort of like obstruction of the federal proceeding, or that they had, you know, stopped a police officer in the performance of his duties.
They didn't even see any police officers.
They saw Secret Service guys at the obelisks, or at the Ellipse rather, when they went through the magnetometers.
That was it.
And these are people I trust.
I mean, I've looked them in the eye.
I've sized them up.
We talked about it.
I said, are you sure you didn't get in anything else?
They said the minute the tear gas started coming up and we saw vans of Antifa guys coming out and guys in black clothes.
I went like, this is not what we're part of here.
We're going to go home.
We've seen the circus.
It's definitely weird, but they were on the edge of it like eating a sandwich when the doors were breached, supposedly.
And they were out.
And so, these are good people.
These are good human beings that signed up.
And they've been named to the director.
They've been redacted in public when Representative Jordan put his pieces out.
You know, the FBI is aware who these people are and they know what they did to them.
And they did the same thing to me and a number of others.
January 6th broke a lot of people, I think.
I think a lot of people inside the federal government after January 6th, things were completely different.
That's right.
Let's take a break.
We're going to pick this up again in part two.
I want to start with this here.
So we'll pick this up again.
Stay tuned, folks.
You'll see part two tomorrow.
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