The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is seeking testimony from FBI whistleblowers to attempt to get around the Biden administration’s “stonewalling” on providing information about the investigations into former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.
The new revelation about congressional oversight on the classified documents saga is just the latest example of how Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has used whistleblowers to shed light on issues inside the FBI.
JORDAN LOOKS TO FBI WHISTLEBLOWERS ON BIDEN CLASSIFIED DOCS
Jordan and other Republicans have previously revealed that FBI whistleblowers have alleged serious flaws in how the bureau has conducted major investigations, including those related to Hunter Biden, the Capitol riot, and parental protests at school board meetings.
Here are some ways whistleblowers have played a pivotal role in delivering more information on the above issues.
‘Politicization’ of institutions
House Judiciary Republicans led by Jordan released a report just ahead of the 2022 midterm elections on the “politicization” of the Justice Department and FBI. The 50-page report included numerous whistleblower claims and likely provides a road map for how Jordan’s Judiciary Committee and the newly formed Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will approach their investigations.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken. The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy,” the November report by Jordan stated, arguing that Garland and Wray “have weaponized federal law enforcement to target the Administration’s political opponents and protect political allies.”
“Over the last year, a multitude of whistleblowers have approached Judiciary Committee Republicans with allegations of political bias by the FBI’s senior leadership and misuses of the agency’s federal law-enforcement powers,” the GOP report said.
The FBI defended itself at the time.
“The FBI has testified to Congress and responded to letters from legislators on numerous occasions to provide an accurate accounting of how we do our work,” an FBI spokesperson told the Washington Examiner in response to Jordan’s report last year, adding, “Put quite simply: We follow the facts without regard for politics.”
Hunter Biden
The Jordan report concluded that “the FBI downplayed and sought to reduce the spread of the serious allegations of wrongdoing leveled against Hunter Biden.”
“Mounting evidence from the last two years shows that Hunter Biden, son of President Biden, has received preferential treatment from federal law enforcement, who seem to have turned a blind eye to the potential national security threats presented by his business dealings with Chinese, Russian, and other foreign nationals,” Republicans contended. “Other evidence suggests that the FBI may have even colluded with social media platform Facebook to suppress information on these allegations from the public in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.”
Whistleblowers also said Timothy Thibault, the former FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office who left the bureau in late August, “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” in October 2020, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The disclosures were revealed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
The whistleblowers also alleged that FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, who had been deeply involved in the Trump-Russia investigation beforehand, “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease” in 2020.
Grassley said the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden may now be hobbled because of these actions. Wray said he found these whistleblower allegations “deeply troubling” when asked about them in August. The Republican added that “protected disclosures” by whistleblowers revealed that “the FBI has within its possession significant, impactful, and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct” by Hunter Biden and James Biden, Hunter’s uncle and Joe’s brother.
The whistleblower allegations relate to the duo’s dealings with the Chinese government-linked energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy. They also relate to the younger Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas giant Burisma Holdings. Grassley said his staff “reviewed the unclassified records” supporting the whistleblower claims. This evidence was forwarded to Wray, Garland, and U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who is investigating Hunter Biden.
DOJ REJECTS JORDAN’S BIDEN CLASSIFIED DOCS REQUESTS BY CITING SPECIAL COUNSEL
Capitol riot
The Jordan report also argued that “the FBI is artificially inflating and manipulating domestic violent extremism statistics for political purposes” — including those related to the Capitol riot.
“At a time when the Biden Administration maintains that DVE is the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States, the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially creating the Administration’s political narrative,” the Jordan report concluded. “Whistleblower disclosures made by multiple FBI employees from different field offices indicate that the Biden Administration’s narrative is misleading.” Jordan said whistleblowers have pointed to Thibault as one of those involved in this alleged effort. The bureau has defended its handling of domestic terrorism cases.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security did reveal in October that a “significant” part of the massive rise in domestic terrorism investigations between 2020 and 2021 was related to the DOJ’s investigation into the Capitol riot. The bureau and the DHS revealed the FBI was conducting approximately 1,400 pending domestic terrorism investigations as of the end of fiscal 2020, and that jumped to roughly 2,700 domestic terrorism investigations by the end of fiscal 2021.
The Justice Department said this week that more than 950 people have been arrested in relation to the Capitol riot in the two years since, including more than 284 defendants charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.
The Jordan report also concluded that “the FBI appears to not be aggressively investigating pipe bombs placed by political party headquarters … while prioritizing other January 6, 2021-related investigations.”
The person who planted pipe bombs the night before outside both the Republican and Democratic national committee headquarters in Washington remains at large. The FBI announced this January that the bureau was offering a combined reward of up to $490,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the pipe bomber.
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Parent protests
The Jordan report also charged that the DOJ and the FBI were “using counterterrorism resources to target parents resisting a far-left educational curriculum.”
Garland’s controversial October 2021 school boards directive was put out just a few days after the National School Boards Association argued to Biden that “the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and called upon the DOJ to review whether the Patriot Act “in regards to domestic terrorism” could be deployed. The NSBA letter was subsequently withdrawn, and the NSBA apologized amid an outcry from its state associations.
Garland wouldn’t distance himself from his memo during Senate testimony in October 2021, arguing the NSBA’s follow-up apology “does not change the association’s concern about violence and threats of violence.”
An email provided to Jordan by an FBI whistleblower indicated the FBI was using some counterterrorism tools to carry out Garland’s directive. The email, signed by Timothy Langan, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, said the Counterterrorism Division had created a “threat tag” for FBI officials to use. The email directed bureau agents to tag threats as “EDUOFFICIALS” and to “attempt to identify” the motivation behind the threat and whether there are “federal violations that can be investigated and charged.”
“The FBI has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now,” an FBI spokesperson told the Washington Examiner at the time.
