(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Another FBI special agent has come forward to blow the whistle on how the bureau is investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill protest—this one claiming that FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate threatened anyone who disagreed with him on the matter.
The whistleblower, whose identity is anonymous at this time, said that Abbate conveyed his threat to all FBI personnel in a video teleconference during February 2021.
According to the whistleblower, the FBI’s deputy director “told the audience that anyone who questions the FBI’s response or his decisions regarding the response to January 6th did not belong in the FBI and should find a different job.”
Abbate also told all special agents in charge that “if they had an employee that did not agree, the SACs could have that employee call [him] personally and he would set them straight.” Special agents in charge, or SACs, are the leaders of the respective FBI field offices around the country.
The whistleblower, a 15-year FBI veteran, said he had observed hundreds of teleconferences with senior FBI officials but had never “seen a direct threat like that any other time.”
In response to the whistleblower allegations, the FBI provided the following statement to Just the News, the publication that broke the story:
“Throughout his 27-plus year career, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate has strongly supported the people and the work of the FBI, treating employees with dignity, compassion, and respect. He continues to proudly serve the American people and the FBI as Deputy Director. Deputy Director Abbate is going nowhere, and any suggestion otherwise is baseless.”
But Empower Oversight, a whistleblower advocacy group, is seeking accountability for Abbate. Empower Oversight is representing the whistleblower, and wrote to the Justice Department Inspector General and Congress about the matter.
“The FBI is not a private club for FBI executives to make in their own image. It is an extremely important agency that is supposed to enforce the law without prejudice,” the group’s president, Tristan Leavitt, said in a letter to the House and Senate judiciary committees.
“Empower Oversight respectfully requests that you work swiftly to independently corroborate this information with other witnesses, publicly document your findings, and hold Deputy Director Abbate accountable.”
The anonymous whistleblower is the latest FBI agent to criticize the bureau’s handling of J6 cases.
Last week, former special agent Stephen Friend published a book on the topic, discussing how J6 cases were directed from the FBI’s offices in Washington D.C., instead of the respective field offices where the investigations were supposed to be taking place.
“This is a radical deviation from FBI DIOG rules … For all intents and purposes, special agents in Washington, DC, were working as case agents in absentia,” he wrote in his book.
Another whistleblower, retired agent George Hill, recently provided a possible motive for Washington DC wanting to control the J6 investigation: Officials wanted to protect the identities of any undercover agents or informants who were involved in breaching the Capitol.
“The [Washington field office] said, ‘We can’t show you those videos unless you can tell us the exact time and place those individuals were in the Capitol’, to which [Boston agent] responded back: ‘Why can’t you just give us access to the 11,000 hours of video?’” Hill said in an interview to the House Weaponization Subcommittee, which was played live during a hearing last month.
According to Hill, the DC office then responded, “Because there may be undercover officers or confidential human sources on those videos, whose identity we’d need to protect.”
Friend and Hill are joined by FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin, who revealed last month that the pipe bombs planted outside the DNC and RNC the night before J6 were inoperable.
In its letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Empower Oversight said its latest whistleblower “does not know and is not associated” with its other clients.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
