Top Democrats in the House are concerned about testimony given by a man named Garret O’Boyle, who has a history with the FBI and was consulted in recent public proceedings by Republicans as an ostensible whistleblower with details about agency bias.
Republican sources don’t make central the substance of what he actually alleges, meaning there’s a lot of talk about politicization this and weaponization that without immediate explanations of what these allegations even mean. Democrats believe O’Boyle may have lied to Congress in claiming he didn’t leak material, even though a top FBI official outlined in apparently largely conclusive terms that he was the one determined to be evidently responsible for unauthorized disclosures, with material going to the far-right organization Project Veritas.
Those circumstances led to O’Boyle’s suspension, according to that same top official. The information came from Jennifer Moore, who at the FBI is an executive assistant director for human resources issues. “In addition to the [Project Veritas] interview, Moore said, the bureau’s investigation revealed that O’Boyle had also removed sensitive information from FBI computers and provided it to Project Veritas without authorization,” according to NBC, with affected information including details of an active criminal investigation.
Sharing such details could seriously jeopardize critical investigative work, whether through alerting targets to steps that investigators were taking or endangering witnesses whose involvement was established by the unauthorized disclosures.
The Democrats putting O’Boyle under scrutiny in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for an investigation to determine whether the purported whistleblower committed perjury were Rep. Jerry Nadler (N.Y.) and Stacey Plaskett, the latter of whom is a delegate to the U.S. House from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
O’Boyle explicitly asserted that he never made media disclosures before his agency suspension. In opening statements given at a public hearing of a committee that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) leads to examine so-called weaponization of the federal government, O’Boyle provided no significant explanation of the substance of what he was alleging the agency had done before his “whistleblowing,” though he did make note of claimed impacts on his family from an abrupt transfer followed by a sudden suspension.
At issue for some other claimed whistleblowers has been the agency’s treatment of Capitol riot defendants, including one who had documented his possession, at least at one time, of a high-powered firearm — a fact that didn’t stop another of the whistleblowers from clamoring against the federal decision to use substantial resources in arresting that individual.
