Whistleblower Says FBI Acts ‘Like a Cop Trying to Hit a Quota’
A former FBI agent who blew the whistle on the bureau’s handling of the January 6 Capitol protests has blamed the FBI’s actions on rules that have it acting “like a cop trying to hit a quota.”
During a Thursday appearance on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” former FBI special agent Steve Friend pointed to the bureau’s “integrated program management protocols” — which were implemented a decade ago — have led to the FBI setting “quotas for itself to meet.”
“And in order to meet those, they have to gin up the numbers in any way possible to justify the funding that it receives from Congress,” Friend added, citing the fact that the number of domestic terrorism cases has quadrupled at the FBI over the past ten years.
The FBI whistleblower also noted that all senior executives at the bureau receive financial compensation and bonuses for hitting these quotas.
Friend added that President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray are all given talking points.
“They can say the FBI is the aggregator of all criminal statistics for this country,” he said. “It’s respected; its image is still untarnished for a large swath of the country. And they can say that the FBI can back these stats up.”
Friend testified in a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday alongside three other whistleblowers. The mainstream media has attempted to label Friend a “traitor” or discredit him by claiming he is not a true whistleblower.
“Well, I’ll put my patriotism bona fide days up against just about anybody,” he told Newsmax. “I worked on Indian reservations for seven years and arrested 150 violent criminals.”
Friend went on to note that he had then taken a transfer to work on cases involving the exploitation of children before he was “volun-told to work on Jan. 6 cases.”
Initially, Friend says that he was not concerned that the FBI was acting in a politically charged manner, but he began noticing that the FBI was “manipulating statistics for financial reasons but also infringing on individual rights.”
“I know that the Democrats and the media have labeled me that way,” he added, referring to the smears against him. “But I guess you get all the flak when you’re over the target.”
Friend and the other whistleblowers who testified on Thursday also revealed that the FBI had taken actions to punish them for speaking out about the abuses of power, including making it extremely difficult or impossible to find work. One whistleblower even said that the FBI had transferred him across the country, forcing him to sell his home and move his family, only to suspend him almost immediately after he arrived and keep his possessions from him for months, including his family’s clothes.
Friend suggested in the interview with Newsmax that the best way to solve the problem and reform the FBI is to eliminate the bureau entirely.
“I think we need to take a step back and realize that the country existed before the FBI and it can exist after the FBI,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that we’re going to do away with federal law enforcement. There are plenty of other agencies that do a great job. And at least in my experience, I worked with a lot of local detectives and police officers who were very qualified as investigators.”
