“They can take them off the payroll, take their badge and gun, sideline them,” said former Senate investigator and whistleblower attorney Jason Foster.
A whistleblower lawyer representing an FBI agent suspended after raising concerns about the treatment of Jan. 6 suspects says the bureau is using its control of security clearances to silence and punish critics.
Jason Foster, a former Senate investigator and head of the Empower Oversight whistleblower group, told Just the News on Monday his group is helping to represent Special Agent Stephen Friend, who last week made a whistleblower complaint to the Office of Special Counsel alleging he was suspended after raising concerns about treatment of Jan. 6 suspects, the use of SWAT teams and alleged manipulation of crime statistics.
Foster said the bureau was able to sideline Friend last week by suspending his security clearance pending a review, essentially leaving the agent in limbo and unable to do his job. Foster was asked whether he knew of any wrongdoing that Friend committed that would warrant suspending his security clearance. “No, absolutely not,” he answered.
“This is a common tactic that we have seen with the FBI,” Foster told the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show. “They’re using it more and more, because they know that there’s less oversight and less scrutiny of a security clearance decision because of the nature of it. It’s harder to do oversight and have any kind of independent scrutiny.
“So rather than just suspending the person on a claim that they didn’t do their job, or that they engaged in some misconduct, they’ll simply suspend their clearance, which means that they can’t do the work that they would normally do, then they can take them off the payroll, take their badge and gun, sideline them, and then hope that, you know, they can just sort of grind them into compliance or get them to quit rather than continue to fight because they don’t have any money.”