- An FBI veteran said his superiors suppressed investigations of Trump, Insider can exclusively reveal.
- “Are we going to do public corruption or not?” the whistleblower said to Insider.
- He said his boss ordered him to stop investigating Giuliani and the Trump White House.
A veteran FBI counterintelligence agent says his supervisor told him to stop investigating Rudy Giuliani and to cut off contact with any sources who reported on corruption by associates of former President Donald Trump, according to a whistleblower complaint obtained by Insider.
Those figures, the statement claims, explicitly included “anyone in the White House and any former or current associates of President Trump.”
Insider has independently obtained a copy of the complaint and verified its authenticity but has not corroborated all of its claims.
“This is a decision point,” he said. “Are we going to do public corruption or not?”
Insider is withholding the name of the whistleblower because he has made claims about retaliation from the FBI, where he remains an employee, and because he is now seeking whistleblower protections from Congress.
“It’s highly unfortunate that this statement wound up being leaked and published,” said Scott Horton, an attorney representing the whistleblower. “We’re in the preliminary stages of a confidential process. I’m unable to make any other comment.”
Insider was able to support the agent’s account of the meeting with a second source who had knowledge of what took place.
But in the August 2022 meeting, he was called onto the carpet to discuss “performance issues and concerns” and was given suggestions for how to improve, the agent’s account provided to lawmakers said. The directions he received included a strict prohibition on filing intelligence reports relating to Giuliani or any other Trump associate.
The agent said the 2022 meeting was the culmination of a yearslong effort to frustrate his investigations into potential wrongdoing by political figures in Trump’s circle, stretching back to Trump’s stint in the White House. He said in January 2022, he filed an internal complaint under the Whistleblower Protection Act alleging “numerous acts of intelligence suppression of my reporting related to foreign influence and the Capital riots, retaliatory acts and defamation of my own character.”
In one case, the statement said, the agent developed information from confidential informants that Giuliani had done paid work for Pavel Fuks, a Ukrainian oligarch and “asset of the Russian intelligence services.” The whistleblower also said he looked into claims that Giuliani had fraudulently raised money from investors to produce a never completed film about Joe Biden in the months before the 2020 election.
“This supervisor had taken issue with my reporting.”
The whistleblower said he didn’t know who the upset supervisor was. But he added: “The conduct of my supervisors and the timing of their actions made plain that reporting concerning Giuliani and a group of people surrounding him with existing or historical ties to the Bureau gave rise to this retaliatory action.” The statement points to Charles McGonigal, the now-indicted former head of FBI counterintelligence in New York, as one possible source of the apparent “suppressive efforts.”
Spokespeople for Giuliani, Fuks, and Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment; nor did attorneys representing Fuks and McGonigal.
The FBI’s national press office declined to comment.
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The statement said the order came from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, a headquarters-based unit established by Director Christopher Wray in 2017 and charged with combating foreign influence.
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It remains unclear how much of the friction described by the whistleblower’s statement stems from left versus right as opposed to field versus headquarters. The month the whistleblower says his bosses ordered him off Trumpworld investigations was a pivotal one for the Bureau’s investigations of the former president. On August 8, their agents executed a search warrant on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, recovering more than 100 records with classified markings that became key evidence in his first federal indictment; a special counsel-led prosecution led to a second Trump indictment in early August over efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Giuliani too was raided by the FBI, in April 2021, although that probe concluded without charges in late 2022.
But the agent said when he tried to talk about what their sources had to say about Giuliani, his boss’s reaction was very different. The supervisor “forcefully interrupted” him and ended his presentation, he wrote.
The whistleblower’s story offers a different perspective from the ones laid out by three other FBI whistleblowers who testified before the GOP-led Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, some of whom have admitted accepting financial support from right-wing groups.
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In the interview with Insider, the new whistleblower said that he had approached the GOP subcommittee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan.
The FBI made a diligent attempt to run the Biden material to the ground,” the whistleblower said. “It wasn’t slow-played. Chairman Jordan should not be using this as an example to show that the FBI is biased against the right.”
Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Jordan, denied the whistleblower’s allegations that the committee was cherry-picking witnesses who claimed to be able to implicate Biden.
“We have had plenty of whistleblowers come forward about issues not relating to the president,” he added. Dye said the committee was still weighing what to do with the information that the whistleblower had given them.
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Even before the emergence of this new whistleblower, there had been ample evidence of individual FBI agents with pro-Trump partisan sympathies. Jared Wise, an FBI supervisor who left the bureau in 2017, now stands accused of joining the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, breaking into the Capitol, and shouting, “kill ’em! Kill ’em!” at rioters as they attacked the Capitol Police line.
Further up the chain of command, bureau leadership — perhaps intimidated by Trump’s “deep state” rhetoric and his treatment of former senior FBI personnel such as James Comey and Peter Strzok — has resisted investigating the former president. A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year passed before the bureau formally opened a probe into connections between the Trump White House and the January 6 violence.
Other reporting by the Post showed that senior FBI officials attempted to push back on plans by Justice Department prosecutors to search Mar-a-Lago without Trump’s permission.
The FBI is ideologically diverse and decentralized, with 35,000 employees spread out across 56 field offices from Anchorage to San Juan. The glimpse of one field office provided by the new whistleblower could be more indicative of a risk-averse bureaucracy struggling to balance its law-enforcement duties with its increasingly fragile public image than a politically motivated cover-up.
The whistleblower recounts how one of his sources, code-named Genius, won the trust of racist extremists whom the bureau investigated for their role in the January 6 violence. Genius was able to do so because he had credibility on the far-right political fringe.
The agent’s decision to make a formal statement to Congress appears to have been a last resort. He said he previously approached the FBI’s internal ombudsman with his concerns. He said in December 2021, he submitted an official whistleblower complaint to the head of his field office. Under federal law, that complaint should have protected him from internal reprisals. But his account said his superiors responded with punishments, disciplining him for errors in paperwork and reassigning him to a new post outside of his longtime area of expertise, one that required a multi-hour commute from his home.
Those experiences, he told Insider, are part of what compelled him to share what he knows with Congress, not to harm the FBI but to improve and correct public misperceptions.
“We aren’t robots. But the bureau itself has integrity. It’s necessary. Despite the scars that I bear, I believe that the majority of my colleagues are doing the right thing.”
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