➡ The speaker, an FBI agent, discusses his experiences with the agency, highlighting instances where he felt compelled to act against orders he believed were unlawful. He mentions a case where he was prohibited from arresting significant figures in Iranian nuclear and missile programs, which he felt was a mistake. He also talks about a domestic terrorism case where he refused to approve surveillance on individuals due to insufficient evidence. Despite facing backlash and threats of internal investigation for insubordination, he stood by his decisions, believing it was his duty to report malfeasance.

➡ The article discusses the FBI’s practice of inflating case numbers for funding purposes, using a street fight as an example. Despite the local police report indicating no racial bias, the FBI opened a civil rights case, which later turned into three separate domestic terrorism cases due to bureau policy. This practice, known as ‘metrics driven’, is criticized for artificially inflating statistics and potentially encouraging unlawful activities during undercover operations. The article suggests that the FBI should focus more on preventing crimes rather than letting them materialize for the sake of case numbers.

➡ The text discusses concerns about the FBI’s involvement in the January 6th riots, suggesting that the agency had informants present. It criticizes the FBI for arresting people for minor offenses and questions why junior agents were assigned to such a significant case. The text also mentions a lack of accountability within the FBI, citing instances of misconduct and perjury. It ends by calling for reforms and greater accountability within the agency.

➡ The text discusses issues within the FBI, such as promoting individuals with poor performance records and the misuse of power. It highlights the subjective nature of FBI policies, which can lead to manipulation and unfair treatment. The text also criticizes the FBI’s surveillance practices, suggesting they can unfairly target innocent individuals. Lastly, it discusses the controversial practice of ‘reverse targeting’, which is deemed illegal but allegedly commonly practiced within the FBI.

➡ The discussion revolves around the use of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) for surveillance during President Trump’s campaign. It suggests that the investigation was initiated overseas, not directly targeting the campaign, but ended up involving Trump’s associates. The conversation also criticizes the FISA court’s lack of opposition and the use of potentially unreliable news stories as evidence. The speaker hopes for meaningful reform in the FBI to restore its integrity and trust.

Chris I’m Chris Farrell, and this is On Watch. Welcome to On Watch, everybody. It’s the traditional Watch podcast where we go behind the headlines to cover news and information that the old lame legacy media is really not interested in and doesn’t want you to know anything about. We tried to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. Today, we’re going to try to explain the inexplicable. And to do so, we’re going to talk with a whistleblower out of the FBIRetired FBI Agent William Taylor. Bill, welcome to Onwatch. Great, Chris. Thanks for having me this afternoon. I appreciate it.

It’s a great opportunity to be here. It’s very important to us that folks like yourself come forward and tell the real deal. Gave us a story about what was going on in the FBI and what’s going on now. It’s incredibly important, especially in the period or the phase that we’re in right now, where purportedly there’s all sorts of new efforts to clean up the FBI, which in my opinion has been a rat’s nest for a very long time. But just to give our viewers and our listeners a little sense of scope or depth, can you give us the 32nd life story of Bill Taylor? You’re an FBI agent.

What kind of work did you do and where were you? Yeah, sure enough. So I started in late 2020, late 2003, retired late 2023. 20 years as an agent. My first office of assignment was in Newark, the Newark field office. Great work there. I worked in the ocdef, or the international drug cartel typ, for a number of years before transferring over to the counterintelligence program, which is something I had always wanted to work national security. Not having really any family in the Newark area, I took a transfer to FBI headquarters in 2010 to work counterintelligence matters.

My focus was on the Iran program there. I did some interagency details to other government agencies, was a unit chief there during the time period of the JCPOA during the Iran nuclear agreement negotiations. And then for the last part of my career, in my last seven years, I pushed out to a field office in Knoxville, Tennessee, as a supervisor there, where I retired in late 2023. Great. That’s a nice thumbnail sketch summary. So my misspent youth was as an army counterintelligence officer, and we’ll avoid that long discussion, but I identify with your counterintelligence time when you euphemistically refer to other government agencies.

I’m guessing you were detailed as a liaison or in some sort of a joint operation with CIA. And in that regard I’m also familiar because I’m a farm trained counterintelligence guy on top of that. So we have commonality, we speak a common language on a number of points. So you very pointedly, at least on your X posts and the work that you’ve been putting up there, refer to yourself as a whistleblower. Talk us through your experience and how you blew the whistle and who you did it with or to. Yeah, for sure. So my whistleblower activity actually started quite some time ago, a little over 10 years ago in 2015, and it related to the Iran program.

In fact, I had posted my 2015 whistleblower complaints to Director Comey on my ex account where the State Department, Department of Justice and the FBI were interfering unlawfully with US Government FBI investigations and other agency investigations into Iranian proliferation and development of their weapons and nuclear program. We were being obstructed and prohibited from arresting individuals to which we already had indicted, secured arrest warrants, judicial arrest warrants, and, and, and whatnot from, from the judicial system. And they were stepping in, meaning Department of Justice and State Department, to prevent those. And this was occurring at the highest levels in those agencies, from the Attorney General, from Secretary Kerry as well.

Is this because the Obama administration was just hell bent on pushing through the JCPOA or the Iran nuclear deal, depending upon who you want to talk to. They were so set on brokering a deal with Iran, they didn’t give a damn what the actual intelligence threat was. It was at any and all cost. And the ironic thing about this is when we arrested an international figure in particular related to Iran proliferation and their weapons and nuclear program, almost invariably every time it’s a trove of intelligence information that comes with it, whether it’s the devices that we are able to gain access to post arrest, the interview, et cetera, we always get good intelligence related to the program.

So not only were we unable to arrest people, in some cases who were on the terrorist watch list from arresting them when we had lawful arrest warrants, we missed out on the opportunity to inform the policymakers on the very deal that they sought to negotiate with Iran. They were going into it blindly and ostensibly doing favors for the Iranian regime at the same time. And as I outlined in my protected disclosure in 2015, some of them were of the financial benefit to the Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif himself. So this was, this was more than just a policy decision.

This was corruption and it frankly violated the law. What finally Pushed me over to making a protective disclosure was on May 22, the Congress had passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review act of 2015. And then in July, we bungled. We were prohibited from arresting person on the terrorist watch list that those interferences were in direct violation of the 2015 act that Congress passed, which insisted that Congress had the right to review all actions related to Iran and prohibited the administration from interfering with the lawful execution of policy, sanctions, and law. And that’s exactly what the administration was doing.

Even back as early as 2013, or I believe it was 13, President Obama declared, we are still enforcing the law to the fullest extent. And that certainly was far from the truth. And so when I believed that there was a violation of this congressional act, I asked two attorneys in the FBI to take a look. Hey, can you take a look at this congressional act and the things that I’ve alleged and you know, that have happened because we work together with the attorneys regularly. And would you say that the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI have agreed this congressional act? Two attorneys looked at it and they said, yes, I agree with you.

It’s been violated. I said, great, could you put that in writing for me? They’re like, sure. Is something an email be fine. I’m like, absolutely, that’s fine. The next day, I get a phone call. They’re forbidden by their upper management. Yeah, I mean, they see you coming and they’re like, this guy Taylor’s out of control. He’s on his own. He’s on his own crusade. I mean, I’m just imagining the hallway whispering campaign and the office politics. Because the explanation’s gonna be, hey, Bill, you just don’t get it. You don’t understand. You know, we’re making decisions at a level way, way higher than you.

And yeah, you may have found your bad guy, but, you know, this is prosecutorial discretion. This is. This is executive level decision making in international affairs. And just because you caught some Iranian dirt ball doing something, you can’t shift the policy of the United States based on your one prosecution. That’s the line that you got. I guarantee it. You’re clairvoyant. You must have been in the room. I posted my. My whistleblower protected disclosure that I sent to Comey. What I didn’t post was Comey’s response, which was almost word for word what you described. He was very dismissive about it, and he chalked it up as prosecutorial discretion throughout his couple of pages of.

Of response. Right. In my protecting disclosure, I acknowledge that we are Just one cog in the overall policy. But the difference is you’re violating the law. Now, like, I get, like, FBI agents must be politically agnostic when they carry out their duties. I might not agree with the policy of the government, but as long as they’re not doing anything unlawful, it’s my duty to execute my job responsibilities independent of my political beliefs. Give me a, give me a, give me a little flavor of. So we all know you and I have had our own experiences, but there’s guys who are kind of low level dirt balls, but there’s also guys who are really, they’re big fish.

And if you make a bust or if you double them back, it is going to be a big, big deal. It’s stuff that gets briefed in the White House. So there’s all different flavors. I don’t know how far you can go, but can you give us an idea of the bad guys that you were looking at? Were these little minnows or did you have a couple of whales in there? Where were we? There were a lot of. As you. I’ll use your word, there were a lot of whales. The FBI, historically, and you know, I saw this in my days working the counter narcotics.

And the one thing that is somewhat different about the FBI and other organizations is we tend to do networks and we don’t generally seek to take down the small people. We tend to work our way up in networks. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that works out bad, but that’s just sort of how the FBI has made its bread and butter. Well, the whole, the whole idea, the whole idea is you walk it back to get as high as you can. Picking up minnows doesn’t do anything. You need to walk it up the line to get the bigger, the bigger fish.

The individuals that we were prohibited from arresting were some of the more significant figures in both the Iranian nuclear and missile programs at that time and to prohibit us from doing that. So in any proliferation, illicit proliferation network, those are trusted agents. They are, they take years to develop by, say, Iran or any other country. So when you take one of those people out of the equation, they don’t just have somebody else easily that can fill that role. So there’s a huge disruptive effect to arresting and there’s a huge intelligence influx when we arrest them. So prohibiting us from doing that.

And the whole discretion, prosecutorial discretion that Comey had used was, was completely crazy because prosecutorial discretion had long run its course. This is an investigation that was coordinated with the United States Attorney’s office this was an investigation where the U.S. attorney’s office took it to a grand jury and secured an indictment. That’s the time for prosecutorial discretion to be exercised. You are not sitting around discussing case files. This had gone way past the, hey, let’s evaluate where we’re going to go on, I don’t know, whatever the case. Dancing Daisy, some two letter or two word description of a case.

Where are we going to go on this? You’re way beyond that. So you’re all the way down the road at grand jury indictments and you’re ready to pull the trigger on an arrest or at least scoop a guy up, maybe double him, whatever it is, you’re way down the road and they’re still saying, no, don’t do it way down the road. In some cases, we had secured indictments, in some cases years before this. But because these are international figures, they don’t often travel to places where we can arrest or extradite them. Right. So these are things that we had been trying to operationalize in some cases for years.

And when the opportunity came and we were told no, and then when it became a violation of the Congressional act, it was time for me to raise my hand and say something that this, we couldn’t do this. Yeah. So I’m sure that the minute you did what you, and I respect you for doing what you did, because all too often, at least in my experience, I bumped into some of your colleagues who just kind of put their heads down and they’d rather not do anything because they’re opportunists and careerists, really. They just want to hit the 20 year mark and do whatever the hell it takes to get their retirement.

You at least had enough guts to step up and say, wait a minute, this is wrong. So I congratulate you on doing that because there’s not a lot of people with the courage that you have, but once you do this, I mean, there’s no going back. Right. You drew a bullseye on your forehead. Professionally, yeah, for sure. I will say that in 2015, the climate was somewhat different. And this is just my own personal experience, but I don’t really feel like I had excessive retaliation against me in 2015. I definitely think that my career was. If I had career ambitions, which I was at sort of the upper level of where I wanted to go in my career, I wouldn’t have been able to proceed further in my career.

I like how you phrase it. There wasn’t excessive retaliation. So, like, you accept that there’s a certain level of Backlash that you’re going to face, but it was just the regular, normal level of backlash, not the excessive level. That’s right. I was hauled into the assistant director’s office at the time, and he pounded on his desk. His face was beat red. And, you know, being a military guy, I was. I was undressed for 10 solid minutes and chewed up and down one side to the other. Right. You know, like, sure, he’s not supposed to do that, but, you know, that’s when I say I wasn’t significantly, I wasn’t fired.

I didn’t lose my security clearance, but I certainly got my rear end chewed out pretty significantly. And afterwards, my. My immediate boss, who was with me for my. My rear end chewing later said, boy, I’ve never seen him that angry before. I’ve seen him angry a few times, but not like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I get it. Like, I circumvented the chain of command when I. When I went to Comey with my protected disclosure. I understand that. And, you know, that’s why I kind of say, you know, it could be worse. It could have been worse.

And it was worse than moving forward into 2022, 2023. It was worse the next time around when I became a whistleblower. So take us to that point. You’re. So this. This is towards the end of the game. You’re down in Knoxville, you said? That’s right. And what happened there? So Knoxville is one of the smaller offices in the Bureau. It recently merged and is now part of the Nashville field office. And it served as a satellite office, but it was its own office. Now, in 2022, I blew the whistle because we were investigating some folks for domestic terrorism.

And one of my job functions, I have many job functions, but one of them is I was a supervisor of our surveillance team, our surveillance assets. And so this domestic terrorism investigation came. Came up where they wanted to conduct some physical surveillance, not electronic, physical. They want to follow them around, take notes on what they were doing. And so it’s part of my responsibilities. Part of my policy imposed responsibility is to make sure that the surveillance is lawful. And so I looked at the investigation, which was run by our Joint Terrorism Task Force, and I had some serious questions, let’s say, about the predication on the investigation.

In fact, when I looked deeper, there wasn’t sufficient predication. Some of the statements in the predication were false, not true, fabricated, if you will. And so I refused to approve the physical surveillance on these three domestic terror subjects. And when I say domestic terror it probably conjures up some. Some imagery in one’s mind. Let me depart for a quick second to explain. These were three individuals that got into a street fight with a person of a different race, and it was opened up as a civil rights case initially and then migrated to a domestic terrorism. Nobody was seriously injured.

In this street fight between three individuals, it was a total of five individuals, three from one race, two from another. Nobody was seriously injured. But we opened up domestic terrorism investigations on them, which means they get nominated to be Watch listed. A stigma that sticks with them for the rest of their life, potentially. And there’s virtually no way of undoing that. I have. Well, I’ve got a variety of sources on how watch lists have a tendency to spread. And one agency tags you, so another agency tags you. And there’s virtually no undoing that right now. That’s right.

And it’s the FBI’s policy that any domestic terrorist subject is automatically nominated for Watch listing. Everyone. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be placed, but it means that by policy, they will be nominated. And depending on the individual circumstance, that may or may not. So I refused to surveil these individuals. I reached out to our chief division counsel in our local office with my concerns and questions about the predication of the investigation and the fabrications or lack of true predication. And I didn’t get an adequate response where it addressed any of those concerns. And so when I.

When I failed to. To approve the surveillance, my supervisor or a supervisor ordered me to approve it, to which I again said, no, I’m not going to. It’s against the law, and I’m going to file a protected disclosure. I filed protective disclosure before. I mean, it was my duty to. Actually, it’s our statutory responsibility to make protected disclosures when we reasonably believe malfeasance is occurring. So I take that responsibility seriously. And I did that. The next conversation I had with my boss was, we’re going to OPR you. In other words, an internal investigation because of your insubordination.

I was like, what? You can’t do that. First of all, that in itself is illegal. But you know what? Insubordination. I get it. I was given an order and I refused to follow it. I will be happy to stand in judgment about my insubordination and show that this case had no proper predication. Yeah, it was an unlawful order. I mean, it’s real simple. You have no obligation to follow an unlawful order. Interestingly, the FBI’s own policy guide when it comes to Insubordination. It specifically says that failure to follow an order, even though you believed it was unlawful, still is insubordination, for which you can be punished for.

Which seems a little strange that they disregard the law like that, but. So that’s what kicked off what I would say is the real retaliation against me previously getting yelled at. Let me ask you, this is an f. FBI culture question. I guess. So if you’re in a position of responsibility and you make this sort of conscientious declination or you say, you know, I think it’s an unlawful order and I decline to pursue it, and you put it in writing, you have your rationale. Why don’t they either relieve you or reassign you? Why don’t they say, you know what, we understand your.

I mean, because that’s. You argue to the point of decision. And if you can’t follow the order, either resign. I mean, you can resign altogether or you can resign from the position and say, look, put me in charge of fingerprints or whatever it is. I’m not going to be the surveillance chief anymore. Is that just not part of the culture in the FBI? So if you say no, that’s it, you’re done. Yeah, most people don’t say no in the bureau. There is a very strong incentive to. I mean the phrase go along, get along. I mean, that is a well adhered to.

Let me ask you another question. So why the fixation on taking this, what seems like a very muddled fight situation between persons of various races and the details, frankly don’t matter. But. So what’s the objective? What’s the drive to say, aha, we got a domestic terrorist. Why isn’t it just a handful of guys being stupid? How does it become domestic terrorist? And what’s the incentive to get one of those marked up on your score sheet? Yeah, that’s an excellent point. And it’s something that this particular case, which again, we won’t necessarily go into the details in great detail, but this serves as an example to what you’ve heard people in the past talk about how the FBI is metrics driven.

Metrics driven. And this is a perfect example of that. I alluded to the fact that this was a civil rights case first. So this actually, first, this was a local case. Our civil rights squad liaisons with the local PD and gets the police report from the local PD and decides, well, we’re going to open up a civil rights case on this. So they open up a civil rights case. Now, it is important to point out one Thing from the police report, there’s a. There’s a box on the police report that indicates whether racial bias was a motivation in the crime.

In the alleged crime on the police report, it said no in that box by the police. On the police report. But the FBI opened up a civil rights investigation, even though the responding officers evaluated it and said, not a civil rights issue. These are just guys having a fight. Exactly. Now, the lead case agent on the civil rights case was a female, and she was pregnant and was going out on maternity leave. Now, because civil rights has some overlap potentially with domestic terrorism, some of the domestic terrorism squad was assisting her on the investigation. So she goes out on maternity leave for a number of months.

Now, in the bureau, it’s very important what we call Turk. Right. Like the numbers. If you’re on the. If you’re on the jtf, which is funded in one mechanism, you can’t be working a program outside of your assigned purview is frowned upon significantly. Right. So when she goes out on maternity leave, the people are like, well, how? What are we going to do? This squad is the one that’s been helping. They’re the perfect ones. But their boss says, no, I’m not letting you work. And Turk, a civil rights case. You need to be working in Turking domestic terrorism cases.

And so their solution is, well, we’ll just open up domestic terrorism cases. And so the. This is so dishonest. I mean, this is the way worst kind of bean counting nonsense. Complete shell game. Yeah. And so here’s another part of the metrics thing in real life, on the civil rights case, there’s one case, one investigation on three subjects. By FBI policy for domestic terrorism, you have to open a separate investigation on each subject. So that one case, which shouldn’t have been open to begin with, that one case, now blossoms into four cases. Three domestic terrorism cases and a civil rights case.

Right, Right. So the metrics, right now you have suddenly pop up the stats. Domestic terrorists allegedly in the Knoxville area of responsibility. And keep in mind, this was a street fight between a few people. And now you have three domestic terrorists running around Knoxville, apparently. Right. And so it totally fabricates and inflates the number. There’s no legitimate reason to do this. And my experience is so like, when I started working counterintelligence in the late 2000s, there was a fading policy where we also had to have one case for each subject. The reason to do that is funding.

There is no other reason. Yeah. It weights your program. So you can go to Congress and say, we need more money for this program. They don’t do it in other cases. They don’t do it in other programs, like civil rights, for example. Right. And of course, the great irony is you’ll find police departments across the country doing the exact opposite. And so you’ve got a rash of burglaries in a particular neighborhood, and instead of reporting eight different cases, you know, you’ll find the sergeant in charge goes, eh, it’s probably the same guy. So just put down one.

I can’t tell you the number of either deputy sheriffs or other law enforcement guys who have said, you know, we’re totally skewing our numbers. We know that there’s been eight different incidents. And our boss just says it’s probably the same guy, mark it down as one. Because they want to have good numbers. And that’s all. I mean, that’s all that it is. That’s all it is. It’s a shell game. And so you’ve heard the metrics game being talked about over the last couple of years. This is a real life example of just how they do it and why they do it.

It’s completely artificial. And, and in the most specious of cases too. It’s not like these were truly domestic terrorists. We’re not talking about Oklahoma City here. We’re talking about a street fight where nobody was even seriously injured. Don’t get me started on Oklahoma City. I just did a podcast on it. It’s one of my pet rocks. That and twa flight 800. You know, it’s. I won’t get started on that, but I will get started on something that’s sort of within the timeframe. At least when you were getting ready to retire, you would have had a feel for the environment.

The Gretchen Whitmer fednapping case where the FBI deployed like 14 assets to recruit 10 guys. And the supposed ringleader, he’s such a charismatic genius that he’s living in the basement of a vacuum cleaning store with no running water. So this mastermind supposedly is going to grab the governor. I mean, this is another classic case where the FBI goes out, they find low hanging fruit, right? The old joke about you’ve got all the personality disorders and character defects we’re looking for, right? You guys went out and picked the lowest hanging fruit. You identify them, you recruit them, you train them, you equip them, you give them intelligence and targeting, and then you launch them.

And then when they’re five feet from doing the job, you swoop in and say, aha, we caught you. I Mean, this is bad, bad practice the FBI has been doing. And the Gretchen Whitmer case is. Yeah, I mean, you’re probably restricted on what you can say or not say, I don’t know. But I want to get an honest assessment of that kind of mo. That practice is nuts. It can very easily go over the line. I would say undercover operations have been a staple of the FBI for a long time and I participated in some and they can be valuable.

The problem is, and where I think it goes over the line is the difference between when you start to become part of the conspiracy and entice people and encourage them to commit these activities and lead them along and you don’t prevent them from happening. I feel like we have an obligation to be more aggressive about shutting things down. And the policy is let things go as long as possible. And that has led to things like the Whitmer case and others even. I experienced it myself when I had a death threat against me locally. The FBI wanted to let the conspiracy to kill me and 35 other FBI employees materialize a little further so they could get one more recorded phone call so they could get.

See if there was another coconspirator instead of shutting it down. If they would just go to the alleged perpetrators beforehand and, and they could stave these things off without having to go through all of this trouble and expense. There is a place for undercover operations and there’s a very ill defined line that goes over the edge where they start to become part of it and start encouraging it for the sake of stats and numbers and arrests. So what’s your take on January 6th? What was the FBI’s involvement in that? Yeah, I have no special knowledge about it, but it certainly seems like.

It certainly seems, and I think it’s been established that FBI certainly had informants present among the J6 riots. There’s little question and doubt about that. And personally, I don’t necessarily think that that’s all that. That awful. We want to have sources where there’s potential for violence and things like that. The problem becomes the politic, the politicization of it. When I went through the academy, they brought up the notion of arresting people. So technically FBI agents can arrest people for misdemeanors. And every instructor would come up and say, I have never in my entire life, in my entire career seen anybody arrested for a misdemeanor.

But yet here in J6, that seemed to be the go to card was arresting people on misdemeanor. Right. Unlawful parading. Yeah. And I know just from other People just trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody who’s been there. I’ve heard people say, like I showed up to J6 to the Capitol grounds after the barriers were already torn down. And I didn’t know. I’d never really been to the Capitol before. But technically once I passed the demarcation where the barriers were, I was subject and was prosecuted for it. And I had no idea that they, that, that I was in the no go zone there.

It was a big overreach. The FBI called it their biggest case ever. And one of my questions has always been, and I think it’s been raised elsewhere too, is if it was your biggest case ever, why did you assign your most junior agents virtually everywhere across the country? These were investigations run out of local field offices, coordinated at D.C. but they were run in local field offices. And you can look at virtually every complaint in the 1500 or 2000 plus cases and every one of those is sworn out and investigated by a very new junior agent.

And I believe one of the reasons for that is because junior agents a don’t have the experience and don’t know enough to push back against things. They’ll just do as you’re told. I think it’s disturbing that the guy who was the head of the Detroit office, d’, Antuono, I think is his name d’? Antonio? Yeah. Yeah. So he dreams up and implements the Gretchen Whitmer fednapping case and then tippy toes over to Washington field office and is installed there in October. And then in January, oh gee, guess what? It looks like there’s FBI guys involved in the January 6th event.

I mean, this is, I don’t believe in coincidences. You know what I mean? It’s just, it’s too weird. Even the Gretchen Whitmer fednapping case, that is a recycled do over of a 2009 Eric Holder special against a group of guys called the Hutterys. And again, the FBI went out and recruited. I mean, the guys that they picked up were not Rhodes Scholars. Right. These are all guys on kind of the margins of life. Petty criminals, low iq, disgruntled. I mean, they’re the perfect guys to recruit to do stuff, whatever you wanted to do. But 2009, it failed.

It blew up in the FBI’s face. They lost some privacy and false arrest cases. And now you fast forward a few years, it’s like they took the same blueprint for this Gretchen Whitmer thing and then the guy in charge in Detroit ends up over at the Washington field office and Guess what happens on January 6th. I mean, this is over and over again. This is, I mean, when does it stop? I think it’s, I really believe it’s a cultural thing. I think that the FBI, I know there’s a lot of well intentioned good guys and certainly you went into it looking to do the right thing and be a real, you know, model of law enforcement.

But there’s just something perverse going on in the organization and it happens over and over again and there’s never anything that really cleans it up. Tell me I’m wrong. Show me how I’m wrong. I wish you were wrong. There is a lack of accountability in the FBI. And a statistic that I like to cite in support of that is the FBI’s own internal inspect Inspection Division, the one that processes complaints of malfeasance and misconduct on their own website. Internally they talk about they do not not investigate 79% of the complaints that they receive. And so that’s been my experience too.

My Iran in 2015, it was never investigated, it was dismissed. The FBI didn’t investigate it, OIG didn’t investigate it, despite having overwhelming evidence and attorneys agreeing with me. And then again, in the several complaints that I made, protected disclosures I made in 20, 22, 23, not one of them was even investigated. And so when there’s this lack of accountability, one of the things I posted recently was perjury of an FBI ASAC in a trial of a J6 subject. It’s dead to rights. There’s the statement he made about how we’re going to get revenge on this individual.

They don’t do this shit to us, right? And then he gets called to the witness stand by the defense at trial and is asked point blank if he said it. And he said no, Just yeah. I mean this happens over and over again. I mean they should grab you and make you, they should make you the new OPR chief or make you the DOJ oig. Because what they need is they need somebody like you who’s been on the short end of the stick to come back around and be in charge. There needs to be accountability and accountability is non existent.

Accountability in the FBI is a self serving instrument. When they want to hold somebody accountable because they want to remove them from the position for some political reason or room for somebody else, then they’ll find the time. Oh, then they’ll crucify the person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you have people perjuring themselves, when you have people manufacturing predication and it’s reported they refuse to look at it. They turned a blind eye to it every single time. And the lengths, the lengths that are gone to, to excuse and cover up stuff. We did a seven year long investigation of the El Paso office of the FBI.

You talk about a rat’s nest of corruption. It’s unbelievable the garbage we found going on there. And really, I mean, I don’t mean guys who had errors in judgment. I’m talking about dirty, dirty guys, Thugs with badges and guns. And we pushed it hard. I mean real hard. And you know, Senator Grassley, God love him, he kind of chickened out and punted the dojoig. We had some progress there. Some stuff was done to move people around or get rid of them, but there was never any real big like headliner. Kind of the accountability you were talking about just never happened.

Yeah, and unfortunately after I retired, I had a little time on my hands. I go back and start looking historically a little bit at FBI mouthpieces and there’s scandal after scandal and I’m not talking about like the big cointelpros, but you can do a survey over the last hundred years and the record is replete with story after story of misconduct. And then it’s almost like the same protocol over and over. When they get their hands caught in the cookie jar, you’ll have the director or somebody come before Congress, fall on the sword, say they’re sorry, they’re going to make reforms.

And lo and behold, two years later, they’re back to the same malfeasance and dirty tricks that they’ve always, they’ve always executed. And it’s just gotten worse. I’ll give you another quick example. The individual that perjured himself when he first became a sac in 2019, within the first couple of weeks of his position, he’s out at a bar one night and a police officer has an issue with them. And the ASAC apparently has some cross words with the police officer. The officer throws him in the back of a squad car on a weekend night out at a bar.

FBI agents had to be deployed to the scene to rescue him and bail him out. Now, had the FBI had accountability for that individual and his probationary period in his first two weeks on the job as an asac, he would never have been in a position to perjure himself. You know, three, four years later. It’s, it, it’s just infuriating that the FBI neglects accountability and lets people like this, just as one example of an individual persist through it tarnishes the entire organization. Yeah, I mean, important Pro tip. Here’s a clue. If you’re the asac, if you’re an, in fact, not even that, if you’re an FBI agent, you should not be hanging out in bars and getting in confrontations with police officers that result in your arrest.

That’s not good judgment, that’s bad. In case you’re hazy on the whole good, bad thing, that’s bad. Right? Don’t do that. So, I mean, what the hell? Why don’t they just say, look, go ahead and turn, you can resign now or we’ll fire you in two weeks. Take your pick. Right. Why would you even have the guy around? What’s the point? Exactly. What’s the point exactly? You exhume that sort of bad judgment. And this is an individual who’s in the past going around bragging about some of his malfeasance. I don’t, I frankly don’t understand it. People just seem to get protected when they reach certain positions and they’re rewarded for their bad judgment.

Right before he was promoted, even our field office had an inspection. And that’s a normal thing in the FBI. Field offices have a field office wide inspection every several years. And during that inspection, one of the important features is, hey, did, did a squad do their file reviews? Every case? A supervisor is supposed to do file reviews of every case. Well, this asac, when he was a supervisor, I think it was probably an FBI record. He failed to do 89% of his required file reviews. And three months later they promote him for it. I mean, it’s not like a one time thing.

And then he goes on to perjure himself. You know why the FBI just can’t hold people accountable. They’re really shooting themselves in their own feet. And it’s, it’s, it’s a problem for American people because the FBI can frankly predicate an investigation on anybody if they want to. Sure. Yeah. And that’s how they get away with all of their malfeasance. The policies are so subjective. We learned a phrase in the academy and sort of reinforced our entire life was it’s all how you articulate it. Of course, it is completely true. Whether you’re involved in a shooting. It’s all how you articulate the details of what happened, whether or not you’re going to be in trouble or not for your actions, whether it’s opening a new investigation on somebody.

It is all how you articulate it. Which is best expressed in how the FBI does business at the most foundational level, which is you walk in the door and you Say, hi, I’m a special agent. So. And so I’d like to talk to you about whatever and whatever transpires, whatever happens in that interview or that encounter, you walk out the door and at some point you write a 302, which is like an investigative memo for record. And whatever you put in that 302 is reality, period. That’s it. That’s it. Right. Nothing’s recorded, nothing’s videoed. It’s just you maybe have another partner with you.

It’s whatever you cook up together and that becomes. That is like gospel, right? And so like you said, however it’s articulated. So I mean, this is like bad lawyering. So if I threaten you, if I say, if you don’t do this, I want. I’m going to sue you, or I want money or you owe me, that’s a threat. Right? But if my lawyer does it, it’s negotiation. Right. This is the oldest. But I mean, that’s sort of the technique in which the FBI operates. So they approach somebody, they interview them. If they’re cooperative and friendly, you get a good 302.

If you’re not, you get arrested. I mean, it’s just, it’s a level of authority and power that I think a lot of people don’t really appreciate. They don’t understand the weight behind it. Another tactic that they tend to use, which is very questionable, is what I would call guilt by insinuation. You remember that case that I told you about where I refused to approve surveillance? Let me use this as an example. That surveillance actually wasn’t on the subjects of the investigation. That surveillance was targeted at the co workers of the subjects of the investigation. That’s a reach.

That’s a big reach. And I questioned it. And I. And it was my job. I should know the policy, but I was unsure. So I asked the chief division counsel and he said, well, actually, they don’t have to be subjects of an investigation. You just have to have. You just have to have an authorized purpose, which, I mean, talk about a euphemism for nothingness, right? And so you can physically surveil any American for any reason as long as you have a articulable basis, as long as you can articulate why you did it. Now imagine these three people who got into a scuffle in the street.

Their co workers are now being followed. They’re being interviewed. And the whole pretext was, well, we want to make sure that these three co workers, we’re going to go interview them. And so we want to make sure, we understand who they are and where they go. They’re just their pattern of life. And then we’ll go interview them. It’s all guilt by insinuation. You go interview those three co workers and how are they going to view and look at the three subjects in the future? Well, we’re here to interview you about, you know, John Doe, who’s a subject of a domestic terrorism investigation.

I mean, yeah, just think of the application of that and we’ve seen it and maybe you can talk about it when it comes to FISA warrants, right? And the two hop rule where, well, we’re looking at this guy, but he’s talking to him, who’s talking to that guy, right? And the spider web of what can be collected on people, I think the average American has no appreciation for that. They really don’t. So on fisa, I worked in the FISA world a lot and there’s the thing called reverse targeting, right? So that’s, that’s illegal. You’re not allowed to do reverse targeting.

And what that is is you develop probable cause to get a FISA warrant and intercept communications on a named individual and a particular device. Right? You can only go up on that individual, but sometimes you might not have the probable cause to go up on an associate who’s your real target. So instead of going up on your real target for electronic interceptions, you might have probable cause to go up on a secondary target, knowing that you will get the interceptions of your primary target which you don’t have authorization to go up on. That’s illegal. That’s called reverse targeting.

Right. FBI are masters at doing that. And it’s impossible to prove because as long as you have legitimate probable cause on the target that you get a warrant for, it’s called incidental collection. You can surveil and listen to and read the emails and communications of that other individual who’s really your target. And then hopefully you’ll get enough probable cause during the course of that interception to go up on a FISA on your true target. But it’s an illegal practice, but it’s commonly done. The FBI, one of their primary goals when you institute a fisa, is to develop new devices, email accounts, phones that you can get coverage on, and new individuals you can spread your FISA coverage to.

You’re the perfect person to discuss this with. So standby people are going to learn more and more about Russia, Russia, Russia, right? And all the ridiculous efforts that were gone to, to unlawfully target President Trump and the circle of people around him, both as candidate, as President elect and then in his presidency. And one of the things that I’ve tried to point out and talk aboutand you can feel free to chime in, I know this is going to activate one of your counterintelligence alarms when I talk about this. But the trick with Trump, when you look at Papadopoulos and Carter Page, this is one of the oldest, this tricks in the book.

So there’s an executive order called 12, 333. It defines and sort of explains intelligence activities and operations, but there’s a prohibition in it and it’s section 209 and it talks about undisclosed participation in US organizations in the United States. And so our friends at the FBI, under the noble, I’m being very facetious, under the horrible leadership of Comey, they said, how do we target the Trump campaign? We really can’t run a penetration operation against the political party or a presidential candidate. That would be very naughty. We can’t do that. So how do we do it and make it legal? And so you’ll recall Steph Halper, who General Flynn, my friend refers to as that fat slobber.

Steph Halper is over in England and he has Papadopoulos and Carter Page there, and they spin up some unusual, ill defined counterintelligence, foreign counterintelligence event. And they say, oh, my goodness, we have to investigate this. And then they import that from the UK back into the United States. And that’s the predicate to say, well, now we have to investigate everybody in the campaign. Am I right, Bill? That’s how we would do it. And if I was a case agent, which I was not on those cases. Right, but that’s exactly what we would do is I draw, I call it spheres of influence.

And you know, you would, you have your main target and then you look at everybody that they interact with, and then you start investigating every one of those individuals for a myriad of reasons. A, you want to develop a human source out of one of them would be ideal. Two, you want to develop technical coverage, FISA warrants interceptions against them, knowing that they’re going to communicate back to your head subject in your example here, Trump, for example. Right. And the more individuals, going back to what we just said about reverse targeting, the more individuals you can get FISA coverage on in that sphere of influence, the more visibility and communications you’re going to capture.

Going back to your main, true, main subject in this case example, President Trump. Right, right. So, but I’m saying that the predicate, though, is this. Oh, we’re going to have this foreign counterintelligence event or investigation launched in the UK because we have Steph Halper Papadopoulos, Carter Page, they’re running around Cambridge in this summer series that they had of speeches or whatever. And we’re going to say that looks like it’s a counterintelligence problem. And so that’s the predicate. And it happened overseas. So we’re not really targeting a presidential campaign or a political party. This is just something overseas that occurred.

But we have to look at it now that it’s back here. And that really was the premise for kicking open the door and going after everybody around Trump. And that’s the material that ends up in your file, Visa application, as your probable cause to cover. You would say that these people, we know that they communicate using this email address, that email address, this telephone number, that telephone number, and you would quote, unquote, we like to say, dirty up those facilities by demonstrating some potential illicit conversation. Again, the guilt by insinuation to give yourself probable cause to go to the FISA court.

The FISA court is not an oppositional court. There’s only one party, the government. No defense. Right. And it’s like, it’s like 10,000 to zero. I mean, every single one gets approved. And you’ll love this, too, because we have to maintain what’s called a Woods file. Every factual assertion in a FISA application to the court has to be documented and supported by a piece of paper that supports your factual assertion. Well, those factual assertions can be news stories, and there’s no saying whether those news stories are actually true or accurate or not. But somebody said it somewhere.

Somebody said it somewhere. It’s. As long as you, the agent, can back up where you made this factual assertion, it doesn’t have to be that it was true. It just has to be that you can show where you came up with that factual assertion. And the media loves to make circular references. And then especially when you have paid for opposition research circulating around like a steel dossier. Exactly. Well, now let me ask you another question. What’s the likelihood that those events took place with Steph Halper, Papadopoulos, Carter Page, the Cambridge Summer Institutes, whatever they were doing there, that those things occurred and that the station chief in London and the Legat in London, that they had no idea that that was going on.

Zero probability that was going. So I just want to drive that home. That garbage went on, that manufactured BS went on with the knowledge and approval of both the Legat, the legal attache, which is the senior FBI guys sitting in the embassy and the chief of station from the CIA. They had to have been briefed on it, they had to have had knowledge of it and they had to have had concurrence as the magic word meaning they agreed to it and said go forth and run your operation because nothing happens like that without their approval. I guess I would also tag onto that that the FBI is allowed to intercept communications in the United States States.

So when people are overseas the FBI doesn’t have authority to intercept those. Except. Except when. Except others might. Right? Exactly right. Bill, this has been a great conversation. Your X posts and your x handle is @retf FBI retired FBI. We will link into the show notes here so folks can find you. I’m going to give you the last word if there’s a point you’d like to make or if you want people to follow you obviously on X. But also if you have a substack or you have some other project or book you’re working on. I’m going to let you wrap it up here.

Go ahead. I appreciate it. I just thank you for the opportunity to come and say speak about this. I haven’t spoken publicly to anybody in the past yet. You know, my main point is like some people call for the abolition of the FBI and I understand that sentiment and sometimes I feel that way myself. I truly do. But the FBI can and does have a valuable role to play in the security of our country and our rights. Though to me the real question is whether the FBI and its personnel can show the responsibility that they need to, to administer that role.

And recently in the past five or 10 years they’ve really not been doing that. And I just, I just hope that we can have meaningful reform finally with the FBI, that we can have the quality people in charge that we need to restore the FBI’s integrity and, and trust that the people need. That’s it. And I just hope that we can do that. And if I can be a part of that, I’m always willing to do so. And folks can follow you at @ret4retired FBI is your X handle. I’m looking over your shoulder, your right shoulder and I see military decorations in a box up there.

I can’t resist because I’m a former army officer in my misspent youth. Can you tell me what that is back there? That was my grandfather. He was a private in the army and he landed on Utah beach on D day as part of the first Engineer Special Brigade. I’m very grateful that he survived his journey in the army on D day. I also have a 9 millimeter Walther pistol back there that he took off a German and was authorized to bring back with them. Certainly one of my personal heroes at 25 years old, 24 years old, he lands on D day, has already been married and has a kid.

And you know, I just hope that our youth today can live up to some of that luster of the greatest generation. I was very proud of my grandfather. That’s fantastic. That’s a great story, a great story to share and you are exactly correct. It’s guys like that who gave us the wonderful country that we need to preserve and protect. So thank you very much and thanks to your grandfather for his incredible service in an unimaginably challenging operating environment. Indeed, indeed. I appreciate your time today and having me look forward to talking with you in the future.

Thanks very much Bill. I’m Chris Farrell on the IT.
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