The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has an array of surveillance tools at its disposal — but they’ve been weaponized, and Kash Patel will have an opportunity to fix them.
Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency, has an opportunity to reform the bureau and regain the trust of Americans, former agents told the Caller. Trust in the FBI — particularly among Republicans — has plummeted over generations.
From spying on the Trump campaign and relying on a since-debunked dossier to raiding Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and surveilling school board parents, the FBI’s reputation as a “premier law enforcement agency” has suffered.
Former special agent Chris Piehota said outgoing FBI Director Chris Wray bragged about the agency’s reputation directly to him.
Piehota told Wray the FBI’s “two primary currencies with the American people are its credibility and its competence.”
“[Wray] said, the FBI was always seen as highly credible. Its word was inviolable at one point,” Piehota said. “And I think that’s fallen off a bit.”
However, Kash Patel’s nomination is an opportunity for reform, former agents said.
“Kash Patel is the right guy for the job,” Chairman of the House Oversight Committee and Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told the Caller.
“We worked closely with Kash when he was one of Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’s top staff members, and he did an outstanding job,” Jordan stated. “Kash is a great pick to lead the FBI.”
Patel has indicated he’d like the agency to focus on fighting crime rather than surveilling Americans. There are a number of ways former agents said he can do so.
The FBI has multiple ways of acquiring information, from investigations to the collection of signals intelligence, former agents told the Caller. (RELATED: DOJ Inspector General’s Findings Reportedly Show FBI Surveilled Trump Nominee Kash Patel)
“National security is basically authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Piehota, author of Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew, said.
“That is the authoritative document where the FBI derives its ability to conduct surveillance against its investigative targets,” he continued.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens, and Congress voted to reauthorize it in April.
“That’s where you have the infamous FISA court — where if you want to do certain kinds of technical surveillance and operations, the information has to be placed into an affidavit that is approved by about 500 people in between the affiant and the judge who reviews the package and then approves the coverage,” Piehota said.
FISA created the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a federal court that holds private sessions to review potential FISA search warrants. The government is the only party in FISC proceedings.
The law came under scrutiny after it was used to spy on then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. The FBI relied on the now-debunked Steele dossier to claim that former campaign adviser, Carter Page, was a Russian agent.
Working with Devin Nunes, Kash Patel was instrumental in dismantling the Russia Hoax.
He was the author of the famous memo that exposed how the FBI lied in FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page.
He exposed how the bogus Steele Dossier was funded by Hillary’s campaign and used…
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 1, 2024
Former FBI agent and whistleblower Steve Friend told the Caller that he disagreed with Congress’s decision to renew FISA Section 702. He said Patel could rein in FISA powers even if Congress won’t.
“I think the FBI would be well suited to, even though they can get those without a warrant, I think they should voluntarily get warrants for legitimate reasons,” he said. “I think that’s a good practice.”
Other legislation that enables the surveillance of Americans includes President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, which was updated by President Obama. The update gifted the intelligence community sweeping surveillance powers, sources said.
“[12333] authorizes the FBI to get unfettered access [to] raw signals intelligence without any sort of court proceeding,” Friend said.
In 2017, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration expanded the National Security Administration’s (NSA) power to share signals intelligence with other agencies, including emails, phone calls, and messages between people outside the U.S. that “cross domestic network switches,” in addition to satellite transmissions.
Prior to the update, the NSA only passed on relevant information to the other agencies and filtered out the identities of innocent individuals and certain personal information, according to The Times.
The FBI also utilizes National Security Letters (NSL) to obtain information from individuals. Friend told the Caller that a NSL functions similarly to a subpoena.
Prior to the Patriot Act, the FBI was only permitted to use a NSL if it met specific requirements, and they could only be issued by a certain number of senior officials at FBI Headquarters, according to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
The Patriot Act expanded the FBI’s authority by “lowering the threshold standard for issuing them” and increasing the amount of FBI officials allowed to sign the letters. The OIG report found that after the Patriot Act, the agency’s use of NSL’s spiked. The report noted there was “widespread and serious misuse” by the FBI.
Piehota told the Caller that the FBI’s culture changed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which spawned the Patriot Act.
“The FBI was violently shifted from being a law enforcement organization to a primarily domestic security and national security organization,” he said.
FBI whistleblower Steve Friend tells me he’s “incredibly tired of talking about the ‘good men and women of the FBI’” after the other agents responded with “complete silence” when he spoke out about the abuses he saw over the Jan. 6 raids. pic.twitter.com/jTzdExz5Ei
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) November 18, 2022
“It’s a legitimate tool, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not used on cases that in and of themselves should not be open to begin with,” Friend noted.
Patel himself was spied on by the FBI, according to reports, and he previously sued multiple DOJ and FBI officials, including then-FBI Director Wray.
Perhaps more important than the surveillance tools themselves is how they’re used.
Friend told the Caller that his office in Daytona Beach was reassigned from child pornography cases to work on domestic terrorism, specifically January 6.
“So, that’s related to the fact that the FBI and the way that they basically were choosing the staff to hit their metrics on domestic terrorism,” he said. “January 6 was a huge, huge way to do it.”
Mission creep quickly set in — the agency wasn’t just spying on suspected rioters, but parents going to school board meetings.
“We surveilled one particular individual from his house to the school board meeting,” he told the Caller. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Public Safety Alliance Of Nevada Endorses Kash Patel For FBI Director)
The FBI came under increased scrutiny after it was reportedly surveilling parents at school board meetings. Friend was one of the whistleblowers who testified about the weaponization against parents protesting their school boards.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who chose to resign last week rather than be fired by Trump, stated that special agents did not surveille school boards, but Friend challenged Wray’s claim.
“He lied,” Friend tweeted. “The Joint Terrorism Task Force in my office did it.”
The @FBI Director told @JudiciaryGOP that special agents did not conduct surveillance of school boards. He lied. The Joint Terrorism Task Force in my office did it. I testified about the details in May.
— Steve Friend (@RealStevefriend) July 12, 2023
“That’s a leadership problem,” Piehota told the Caller. “FBI agents do not want to surveil parents at school board meetings, right? That’s — it’s culture and leadership.”
Culture and leadership problems start at the top and could be changed under a Patel regime.
“The single biggest thing Kash Patel can do to restore the FBI’s purpose is focus on criminal violations of federal law, and specifically cases that are worthy of the resources it will take to prove them,” former FBI agent and whistleblower Kyle Seraphin told the Caller.
“This will require a dramatic shift away from the cancerous legacy of post 9/11 intelligence work and the disastrous update of executive order 12333 by Barack Obama in 2016,” he added.
The definitions for domestic terrorism have also become increasingly broad, according to Friend.
“So the latest evolution in domestic terrorism is the anti-government, anti-authority, violence, (AGAAVE),” Friend told the Caller.
In 2021, the FBI and the DHS co-wrote a strategic intelligence assessment, he added.
“It says that AGAAVEs are a person with a perception of government overreach or negligence or illegitimacy — which is pretty broad and would constitute, I think, a lot of people who are just generally small government,” Friend said.
After January 6, in June 2021, the Biden-Harris administration released the first ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which stated that “growing perceptions of government overreach” was a factor that could lead to domestic violent extremism (DVE) attacks.
The strategic intelligence assessment was related to the Biden-Harris document, according to Friend.
The FBI and DOJ’s assessment also mentions “abortion-related violent extremists,” and it includes both pro-life and pro-choice beliefs. However, the abortion issue was used to target pro-life activists, one whistleblower told the Caller.
Garret O’Boyle, an FBI whistleblower, was indefinitely suspended without pay from the bureau after he was accused of leaking information to the press.
“I told them that was not the case,” he said. “I’d never gone to the media. I’d only gone to Congress.” He told the Caller he made “protected disclosures” to Rep. Jordan’s office.
O’Boyle even earned an award for his work on a case pertaining to “abortion extremism,” he said.
He investigated a case in Kansas City where a pro-life activist allegedly wanted to hire “gang bangers” to kill abortion doctors and the owner of an abortion clinic.
After eighteen months of investigation, the case did not amount to much, according to O’Boyle. At the time, he didn’t believe the investigations were politicized — but that all changed after one phone call.
He told the Caller there was a pro-life confidential human source (CHS) who helped him with the abortion-extremist case. The FBI needed to do additional vetting because he was a long-term source.
“I got this call from an intelligence analyst at headquarters, and she straight up told me that she was probably working on this background investigation of the CHS because she didn’t agree with his beliefs,” O’Boyle said. (RELATED: MIKE DAVIS: Washington Swamp Fears Kash patel. That’s Why He’s The Perfect FBI Director Pick)
“She was basically trying to force me to shut this source down.”
FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle was transferred across the country only to be suspended on his first day.
The FBI’s actions forced his family to beg and borrow warm coats for their children because the family’s belongings were locked in an FBI-controlled storage facility. pic.twitter.com/T7BseKr0cf
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2023
That was only the beginning of the political bias O’Boyle observed in the FBI. The bureau created a threat tag, THREATSTOSCOTUS2022, after the Supreme Court leak about the Dobbs decision.
“Once you read the guidance, it’s pretty clear that they’re not just concerned with threats to the Supreme Court, they’re concerned with what pro-life people are going to do,” O’Boyle told the Caller. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Data Confirms Conservative Fears Biden Weaponized Justice System)
“That’s basically why I blew the whistle on [the threat tag], because it seemed like it was clearly politicized, because now they were targeting people who just had a pro-life ideology, even though it was pro-choice advocates who were the ones doing the threatening in this instance,” O’Boyle told the Caller.
He previously blew the whistle on the threat tag EDUOFFICIALS, which enabled the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division to open investigations into parents, according to a letter from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
One reform that Patel could implement to combat politicization is to move the FBI headquarters away from D.C., sources told the Caller.
“The bureaucracy is so thick,” O’Boyle said. “And in D.C., it is so heavy handed to the left — that I think the FBI has been corrupted with that type of dogma for a long time.”
Steve Friend agreed. (RELATED: An FBI Agent Refused To Go Along With The Biden Admin’s Anti-‘Extremism’ Agenda — It Cost Him His Career)
“I would love to see a push to put a small number, retain a small number of people at headquarters, to be in a leadership position, push everyone else out to the field where they can actually do the work the American people expect of the premier law enforcement agency,” he said.
“The FBI footprint has gotten so big, and the biggest problem the FBI has, has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.” -Kash Patel
— Shawn Ryan Show (@ShawnRyanShow) September 3, 2024
Patel has advocated for shutting down the FBI’s headquarters and sending its 7,000 employees across the country to catch criminals.
The FBI’s culture, leadership, and operational practices need to be reviewed, according to Piehota.
“The FBI is a very large, powerful organization in our government, and it has to be managed, and it has to be led in a certain fashion, or it could run off the tracks like it has, if you don’t have a firm hand and you don’t have a strong, ethical and principled operating environment,” he told the Caller.
“If Mr. Patel is able to — move through the confirmation process, get everything done, he has a great opportunity to reorient the organization, rededicate them to a certain service mentality, and clean up some of those, that mission creep, that authority creep,” Piehota added.
The FBI needs to be more transparent, according to O’Boyle.
“The January 6 pipe bomber case, I think, is a primary example,” he said. “That case has been ongoing for almost four years, and we have hardly any information about it.”
Two pipe bombs were found at the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees offices prior to January 6, according to FBI officials. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray previously testified about the pipe bombs and evaded questions from Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie.
Patel has called for a “24/7 declassification office” to increase the bureau’s transparency.
SURVEILLANCE NIGHTMARE: FBI Whistleblower Kyle Seraphin dives into the FBI’s big spending on tracking software which could be used to spy on YOUR social media posts. pic.twitter.com/gRJQOjPAYy
— Unfiltered with Dan Bongino (@UnfilteredOnFox) October 30, 2022
“By focusing on actual crimes that have already been committed instead of ‘pre-crime’ that bureau executives are incentivized to create and cultivate, Patel can pivot from the Soviet secret police type reputation agents have developed in the last decade,” Seraphin told the Caller.
“Americans need to see law enforcement not intelligence gathering to believe [the] FBI is more than a political pitbull in 2025,” he said.
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com