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May 30, 2023 - Sean Hannity Show
28:37
Steve Friend and Bill Flynn - May 29th, Hour 3
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Next, our final news roundup and information overload hour.
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So Jim Jordan, House Judiciary Committee, had their hearings today with whistleblowers.
We're going to introduce you to one of them in a minute.
Stephen Friend is his name.
He's also a senior fellow for the Center for Renewing America, and he joined Jim Jordan and House Republicans as a whistleblower, testifying on the issue of retaliation from the FBI and others for simply telling the truth about what is happening in the agency.
And GOP members of the weaponization committee of the Judiciary Select Committee heard the testimony from Stephen and three other whistleblowers.
It was eye-opening.
It was shocking.
It should shock the conscience.
This should not happen in this country, but it did.
Let me play some of the testimony of Steve Friend as he talks about the FBI's campaign of intimidation after he became a whistleblower and how the FBI is working against the American people and how it is in need of drastic reform.
All we've been telling you, listen.
At each level of my chain of command, leadership cautioned that despite my exemplary work performance, whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with the FBI at risk.
Special agents take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution.
The dangers of federal law enforcement overreach were hammered home to me when I was required to attend trainings at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and MLK Memorial.
I cited my oath and training in my conversations with my FBI supervisors.
Nevertheless, the FBI weaponized the security clearance processes to facilitate my removal from active duty within one month of my disclosures.
In addition to an indefinite unpaid suspension, the FBI initiated a campaign of humiliation and intimidation to punish and pressure me to resign.
In violation of HIPAA, individuals at the FBI leaked my private medical information to a reporter at the New York Times.
The FBI denied my request to seek outsound employment in an obvious attempt to deprive me of the ability to support my family.
Finally, the FBI Inspection Division imposed an illegal gag order in an attempt to prevent me from communicating with my family and attorneys.
The FBI is incentivized to work against the American people and in dire need of drastic reform, particularly in these areas.
The integrated program management system incentivizes the use of inappropriate investigatory processes and tools to achieve arbitrary statistical accomplishments.
Mission Creep within the National Security Branch has refocused counterterrorism from legitimate foreign actors to political opponents within our borders.
The FBI weaponizes process crimes and reinterprets laws to initiate pretextual prosecutions and persecute its political enemies.
Bureau intelligence analysis capability increasingly dictates operations, turning the FBI into an intelligence agency with a law enforcement capability.
FBI collusion with big tech to gather intelligence on Americans, censor political speech, and target citizens for malicious prosecution.
A dysfunctional promotion process fosters a revolving door of inexperienced, ambitious FBI supervisors ascending the management ladder within the agency.
FBI informant protocols that are broken and abusive.
The FBI skirts the Whistleblower Protection Act and exploits a security clearance revocation process to expel employees who make legally protected disclosures.
Now, after that, Linda Sanchez, a Democrat, then tries to smear one of the other whistleblowers, in this case, Marcus Allen, for using tweets from a quote bot account.
Thank you.
Mr. Allen, have you ever used Twitter?
Yes or no?
I have utilized Twitter, yes.
Okay, and is your account at Marcus A970-50645?
That is absolutely not my account.
Okay, that's not your account.
Well, on December 5th, 2022, an account under the name Marcus Allen retweeted a tweet that said, That is not my account, ma'am.
You haven't let me finish the question, sir.
You haven't let me finish the question.
And the time is mine.
On December 5th, 2022, an account under the name of Marcus Allen retweeted a tweet that said, quote, Nancy Pelosi staged January 6th.
Retweet if you agree, end quote.
Do you agree with that statement?
Yes or no?
No, ma'am.
That's not my account at all.
All right, joining us now, Stephen Friend.
He testified earlier today, a whistleblower in his own right.
He joined Jim Jordan.
He was before the Judiciary Committee, these blockbuster hearings from earlier today.
And anyway, we appreciate you being with us, Stephen Friend.
Thank you.
Oh, thank you very much for having me, Sean.
Let's talk a little bit about your background.
Tell me about your law enforcement background.
Yeah, I was a police officer in Georgia for a number of years and joined the FBI in 2014.
And one of the things about being a cop and joining the Bureau is they are more inclined to send you to more remote locations and deal with some more obscure crimes.
So I spent my first seven years in the FBI working in northeastern Nebraska on Indian reservations there and dealing with violent crimes.
And that was really impactful to me because I had the opportunity to arrest about 150 violent criminals and hopefully about 200 cases in my time there.
And then in 2021, elected to relocate my family to Daytona Beach, Florida, with the understanding I was going to be working child pornography investigations.
But after a few months there, the new fiscal year rolled around, I was told that those were now going to be deemed a local matter.
And I was going to be focusing on domestic terrorism from here on out.
And at that point, was when I got my first access to the January 6th cases, which I eventually became a whistleblower about.
You know, it's amazing.
And I understand that people thought that Donald Trump did something wrong on January 6th, that that should be investigated.
But what the sad part is, is what they did not investigate.
At the top of the last hour, we had the former Capitol Police Chief sunned on this.
He's one of only 10 Capitol Police chiefs in the history of the country.
And he was devastated in the days leading up to January 6th.
They had actionable intelligence, and they ignored that intelligence.
He saw what was coming, and he begged for National Guard troops.
Then also, the media would have you think that Donald Trump didn't think this could be problematic, but we have four people on January 3rd in a meeting in the Oval Office.
Actually, there were five people in the meeting.
President Trump, Mark Meadows, as chief of staff, Chris Miller, the defense secretary, his chief of staff, Kash Patel, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley.
I have on tape, and I played it earlier in the show, four of the five of them saying that Donald Trump asked if they needed troops on January 6th, and would they be available?
And General Milley, according to the Inspector General report, said something similar that it was definitely discussed.
So that's five out of five people in the days leading up to it.
Now, if somebody wanted an insurrection, I'm not sure they would be looking for guard troops.
Then, of course, we learned from Lester Holt in January of this year.
They finally caught up to us that federal law enforcement had in their possession actionable intelligence that they could have shared with law enforcement.
And in fact, they did not.
And otherwise, all of this would have been prevented.
And that's sad, too.
I mean, what is your reaction when you hear that?
And what were you hearing inside the Bureau at the time when you tried to point things out?
Well, I think the unfortunate part of what January 6th has become such a political football that those issues are being disputed and the veracity of everything is often questioned no matter who you talk to.
But from my perspective, my concern was not even about the facts of that day.
It was how the Bureau is now, after the fact, manipulating statistics concerning January 6th in order to boost its domestic terrorism numbers and further a narrative that domestic terrorism is on the rise around the country.
And I was also very concerned about our use of SWAT teams and large-scale arrest operations to arrest January 6th subjects, regardless of whether or not those charges were righteous or completely farcical.
It didn't matter to me.
I thought that those decisions were putting the public safety at risk.
And I said that as somebody who was on a SWAT team for five years, but these were people who were charged with misdemeanor crimes in many situations.
And even for those who were charged with felonies, they had agreed to cooperate with law enforcement.
And that's just not in keeping with the use of the lowest possible force amount needed to bring somebody into custody of federal law enforcement.
So you were a whistleblower.
You were trying to, the FBI retaliated against you.
They suspended you.
And all you were doing was pointing out that the Bureau was working the numbers on domestic violence extremism cases.
What exactly did you see?
And do you maybe have evidence to back up everything you saw?
Well, I can tell you from my experience of having opened up a couple of hundred cases that the FBI is not following the rules that are spelled out for it in order to manage its cases.
So January 6th righteously should be one case that's run from Washington, D.C.
But instead, the decision was made to open up a separate case for every single person.
And instead of on paper running those from Washington, D.C., wherever the person lived, that office around the country was the on-paper office of origin.
Meanwhile, a task force was stood up in Washington, D.C. that was actually calling the shots and giving directives.
And that was giving the impression to the nation that domestic terrorism is on the rise in Daytona Beach, Florida, where I was, or Sacramento, California, or Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wherever the case was open.
And the president and the attorney general and the FBI director were able to go up and say the stats back us up on domestic terrorism being on the rise and secure funding as we've seen the FBI get a huge surge.
And I think the most disgusting part that I relayed to the committee, and we got into a little today, is senior executives at the FBI get compensation.
They get bonuses because they've been able to hit the metrics that they predetermined for themselves to hit these domestic terrorism numbers.
Oh, so if the numbers are right, they get a nice bonus for themselves.
So there's a financial incentive maybe to fix the books.
That's not the system you need in law enforcement, in my view.
Let me ask you, tell me about the day that you were suspended.
Tell me about what was said to you and how this all came into being.
Well, the day that I was actually suspended in September was pretty uneventful other than just arriving and then being escorted out.
It was the actual lead up to that where I made my protected disclosures where at three separate occasions, I was cautioned against becoming a whistleblower.
I was told that this was going to jeopardize my career.
And in my meeting with two of my system special agents in charge, I was told that my duty was to the FBI, not to the Constitution.
And they alleged that I was insubordinate and refusing to do my job.
My contention to them was, look, I support no to the Constitution, and I believe that what we're doing could be risk to this public safety.
It could be illegal.
And I received training when I was in the FBI Academy about abuse of power.
We went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
We went to the MLK Memorial, and we were taught that only these civil rights atrocities can occur, and genocide can occur when people and members of law enforcement don't step up and ring the alarm bell, when they could be the bad guys, in fact.
And the response to that was that I really needed to do some soul searching and decide if I wanted to be a member of the FBI going forward.
And then they just took their own liberties to suspend you.
I thought we had whistleblower protection laws in this country.
Did we not?
Did I misread that?
We do have them, but the FBI has found a hack, and that is a security clearance.
So you can't work as an FBI agent without a security clearance.
So the FBI contrived ways to suspend security clearances because that is a years and years long process in order to investigate.
And it has to be just based on an allegation of wrongdoing.
In my situation, the FBI said that I improperly accessed the employee handbook, and that was grounds to suspend my security clearance and keep me in an unpaid status.
Meanwhile, I'm still an employee, and I need the FBI's permission to work outside and provide for my family, and I'm limited with outside employment to earning $7,500 a year.
Quick break more with Stephen Friend, a now suspended FBI whistleblower, testifying earlier today before the House Judiciary Committee.
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This is the Sean Hannity Show.
So let me tell you what life was like.
You know, my background, my family, and you've heard me say this before.
I know in my life that I stand on the shoulders of my parents, both of whom grew up very poor.
My dad grew up in Bed Steye in Brooklyn.
My mom grew up in the South Bronx.
They were the children of immigrants from Ireland.
All four of my grandparents, all four of them came from Ireland, and they had no money in their pocket when they got here.
And they had hard lives.
Anytime I like to complain and whine and bitch and moan and groan, you know, I think about their lives and I'm like, I have nothing to complain about here.
It's simply just wrong.
But they worked hard in the hopes that future generations would be able to have better lives than they had.
And they sacrificed their lives for that way.
And by the way, so many of you have similar stories to tell.
Mine is not that unique.
Anyway, so my grandfather on my mother's side came from Ireland.
And his brother also came.
And I will tell you that, so as I was growing up, I mean, when my mom became a prison guard, you know, law enforcement was huge in my family.
So many cousins, relatives, you know, outside my immediate family, you know, were on the NYPD.
My mom was a prison guard.
She worked double shifts pretty much all her life until she died young, I think from overwork, in my opinion, and spent, you know, 25 years of her life in a jail.
I think that would kind of suck 16 hours a day.
And my dad was a family core probation guy, waited tables on the weekend, and they didn't take vacations.
They didn't buy new cars till much later in life because they couldn't afford them.
And they spent all their money on a Catholic education because they believed that that was the ladder to success.
Now, growing up in my family, if you were in law enforcement, you know what?
You were looked at as, wow, you're the American dream.
You made it.
You're on the NYPD.
This is awesome.
Now, my grandfather on my mother's side had a brother who had two sons that made it to the FBI.
And in my family growing up, they were deity.
They were it.
They were the pinnacle of success that they made it to the premier law enforcement agency in the entire world.
One of my cousins has since passed away, but another is alive and he's actually on our newsmaker line right now.
My mother's maiden name was Flynn.
And Billy Flynn is on the line.
Bill, great to have you, my friend.
God bless you.
I'm sorry we miss your brother.
And by the way, your other brother became Jack became a Christian brother, if I'm not mistaken.
And how many years did you serve in the FBI?
28 years, Sean.
You know, it's funny you say that.
Well, I didn't call in with this in mind, but what you just described, I call the Irish-American privilege.
You know, we had the loving parents, work ethic, gave us a moral code and turned us loose.
No checks, no nothing.
That's true.
I was on my own.
You know, since I had my first paper out, I paid for every meal I ever had.
I just, you know, we didn't have meals at six o'clock like a regular family.
You know what?
You know, Sean, I'm in a sweet spot.
I'm two years older than Trump and two years younger than Biden.
Let me tell you something.
Trump is a freaking wonder kid.
He's unbelievable.
I couldn't begin to compete with his stamina.
And the other guy, he is on his way to Dementia City.
This is from my observations from this age.
I'm from what we call, my friends call us, we call ourselves 20th century feds.
Our careers were in the last quarter of the 20th century.
But the thing I'm describing there, that silver spooner thing, I didn't call him with this in mind, but you know what?
Maybe that's the problem with this Ray guy because that's what he is, a silver spooner.
As I recall his background, I think he was born in Manhattan to a well-to-do lawyer father.
He went to prep school in Manhattan and then Yale law.
He gets out, he gets himself a job in a preferred law firm.
No problem there.
He gets out of that.
He does a couple of years in justice, has no FBI experience.
And the next thing you know, he's the director of the FBI.
I mean, to me, I just think this guy was woefully inadequate for the position he was put in.
He had an opportunity to clean house after all the shenanigans of James Comey.
You know, we know James Comey went three separate times with FISA applications.
And Andrew McCabe said without Hillary's dirty dossier, those applications never would have been approved.
And he lied to a court and said that it was verified.
It says at the top of a FISA court application, verified.
And he submitted them every time.
And then we learned this week from the Durham Report that they had no predicate at all to even open this investigation and that they were warned repeatedly.
Early October, before he signed that first application, we know that the FBI had agents fly over the pond to London and meet with Christopher Steele.
They offered him a million dollars if he could corroborate his dossier.
He could not.
But yet they included it as the bulk of information to get that FISA application to destroy Carter Page's life and backdoor into all things Trump world.
How did he never get held accountable for that?
I don't know.
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
This guy put his thumb, put his cinder block on the scale of the last election.
If anything, hopefully the Republicans will have somebody in there in 24 to turn it over.
We'll never get them to go back after Comey and the rest of those dirtbags.
But this guy should be made an example of.
He absolutely affected the election in 2020 by putting by hooking up with the social networks, telling them his Russian pranks coming.
And then, of course, The laptop shows up and then they sit on it two weeks before the election.
Some independent survey said that could have affected the outcome of the election.
Had they known that, had the post not been squashed, you know?
So I would like to see him prosecuted.
That's my goal.
Sorry, this isn't what I really called in for.
I'm just off the top of my head here.
But the idea I called in for was to do with the border, Sean.
I know that the governors of Texas and Florida have been shipping the buses up.
It's well known what happened in New York.
We got Mayor Adams in there springing mercy.
We're not a sanctuary city anymore, etc.
Well, you know, there's a lot of universities in this country, a lot of woke, politically correct universities that have empty dorms during the summer, you know, and a lot of them rent them out.
I would love to see, maybe in particular, let's go after these Catholic and name-only universities.
Let's drop off a couple of loads of these illegal immigrants in their dorms for the summer.
Maybe they could take some of that well-endowed monies that they have.
They must be hugely profitable with their exorbitant tuitions and let them take care of these people for a summer.
And maybe during that summer, they can figure out a more permanent lodging for them in the communities in which they live.
Well, I mean, why don't we enforce the law?
If you enter this country illegally, you don't respect our laws, borders, or sovereignty, you should be sent home.
Even better.
By the way, you know, it's funny.
I want to go back to our own family, if you don't mind.
I bet you and your brothers had no idea that everybody else in the family looked up to you the way we did.
Did you?
No idea at all, Sean.
You know, I was in college.
I was in Manhattan College.
Right.
I was in night school, paying my own way.
I was there at the same time as Rudy Giuliani and James Patterson.
Wow.
You know, it's pretty amazing.
You know, the sad part is, and you and I had private conversations when we were dealing with this whole, you know, Mueller witch hunt and everything else that went on for three long years, Russia hoax.
And I remember telling you, it was painful for me.
It kind of went against my own ingrained DNA because I was brought up to revere people like yourself and people in law enforcement and look up to them and believe in them and trust them.
And the idea that they were abusing power to this level.
Now, again, I make an exception for the good people in the FBI that risk their lives, the good people in law enforcement.
And I always make that caveat because it's not fair to sweep a broad general brush and people like yourself and people like your brother.
And yet, look what has happened here.
I mean, I don't know if you've had a chance to look at this Durham report, but it is devastating.
If anyone has, you know, eyes to read and ears to hear and a heart that's open, you see that this was all a hoax from the beginning with no evidence to even begin an investigation.
And I'm like, how is this happening in this country?
That to me is abuse of power.
That is corruption.
But if our institutions are corrupt, I'll give you another example.
2020, here's the FBI again.
They had Hunter Biden's laptop in December of 2019.
They verified it, John Solomon says, in spring of 2020.
And yet they had FBI agents meeting with big tech companies on a weekly basis, even giving $3.5 million to Twitter and pre-bunking.
Well, you might be a victim of disinformation from a foreign entity, and it may be about Joe or Hunter Biden.
So that story that they knew was coming out because Rudy Giuliani had a copy of that laptop.
They debunk it and then it gets censored and the American people are denied a very important truth about a candidate and his family prior to an election.
That to me is, wow, I can't imagine what would happen to me if I ever tried to, you know, meddle in an election like that.
You know, I was told by someone who was in a position to know that that laptop sat that whole time in a unit down at Quantico.
You know, and I call it dog and pony show land.
They're really good at putting on lots of shows down there.
See, the congressman that was on ahead of me, I agree with him 100%.
Do not fund any new facility for the FBI because that'll be the next little bubble that they dangle out in front of you.
They should be confirmed to that concrete tomb that they are in right now because they hate being there.
And I really feel they shouldn't be rewarded for the way that they've conducted themselves throughout this whole thing.
I'm discussing, and I don't know anybody for the most part, the retirees that I know that have anything but lack of respect for these people.
Every single person that I know, either currently serving or recently retired, tells me the same thing.
It is not the agency they signed up for.
Everything that they're looking into now in the Judiciary Committee about weaponization and how it's been politicized, the FBI, it is all true.
And that to me tells us that we don't have equal justice or application of our laws.
They're not following standard procedures or following through on constitutional rights.
Pretty scary times.
By the way, here it is, you guys had created this great reputation for our family and were looked up to as deity.
And then along comes me and I ruined the whole family reputation.
Are you kidding me?
What proudest can be?
I bragged anybody who listened to me that you're my cousin.
And I say, don't hold it against him.
And by the way, the funny thing is, is probably half of them want to kill you after that, you know?
Well, listen, it's great to hear from you.
And then, you know, 28 years you served our great country.
Your brother was a hero as well.
Well, both your brothers were here.
Your whole family's heroes.
I'll never forget your dad.
I remember your dad.
I think I called him Uncle Dave at the time.
I'm not sure.
But he would smoke a cigarette and he'd pop with every drag.
He used to do that pop.
Remember that?
And I remember your mom, Bridie, loving a gin and tonic.
And I remember I was a bartender at the time and I'd make him for her.
Real quick, my father would be sitting there with a pipe doing that pop thing with the pipe.
And he'd say, sure, Billy, I'm so happy to tell you, I gave up smoking.
Has he popped away on a pipe instead of a cigarette?
I remember him smoking cigarettes.
I don't remember the pipe.
Well, anyway, Bill, thank you, my friend.
God bless you and our entire family.
And I know you agree with me that they had much tougher lives than we did.
And they sacrificed a lot for us.
And I never forget that we stand on their shoulders.
Thanks, Sean.
You're the workhorse of the Conservative Party.
Well, we're trying, my friend.
I'm just trying to follow in your footsteps.
All right, 800-941-Sean, our number, if you want to be a part of the program.
I used to call him and say, it's killing me.
It's killing me.
I don't want to cover this story.
I don't want to be point on exposing what I had grown up to revere, law enforcement, the FBI.
And I was brought up to, I looked at him and his brother, and we were like, you know, we didn't see them often.
And then sometimes you'd see them and they had long hippie hair.
You know, they were dressed, you know, they were obviously clearly infiltrating something.
I obviously, at my age, I had no clue what they were doing.
And, you know, it just was, you know, we looked at them as the pinnacle of success as an immigrant family.
And they made it when they made it to the FBI.
And that was the dream of their parents risking everything coming to this country with no money.
And that's all four of my grandparents.
I only knew one of my grandparents.
I did not know the other three.
And I did know his dad, which was my grandfather's brother.
Anyway, great people.
I'll say that.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
All right.
The hearings of the whistleblowers today.
We got full and complete coverage, including one of the whistleblowers, Janine Pirro.
Kelly Ann joins us tonight.
Lindsey Graham's in New York tonight.
He'll check in with us in studio.
Tommy Laron in studio.
Dagon is in studio.
So we have a lot of fun.
Ronnie Jackson and so much more.
Nine Eastern Hannity, Fox News.
See you tonight.
Back here tomorrow.
Thank you for making this show possible.
This is the best of the best.
This is the Sean Hannity Show.
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