The FBI agent's bombshell allegations of political bias appeared in a leaked statement made to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Exclusive: A veteran FBI agent told Congress that investigations into Giuliani and other Trump allies were suppressed
Mattathias SchwartzAug 9, 2023, 4:19 PM EDT
The entrance of a building with US flags outside it.
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC.
Alex Brandon/AP
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.
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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.
The agent, who served 14 years as a special agent for the bureau, including a long stint in Russia-focussed counterintelligence, claimed in a 22-page statement that his bosses interfered with his work in "a highly suspicious suppression of investigations and intelligence-gathering" aimed at protecting "certain politically active figures and possibly also FBI agents" who were connected to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Those figures, the statement claims, explicitly included "anyone in the White House and any former or current associates of President Trump."
The statement, which was prepared for staffers of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was apparently leaked and posted in mid-July to a Substack newsletter. Insider has independently obtained a copy of the complaint and verified its authenticity but has not corroborated all of its claims.
In an interview with Insider, the whistleblower said he was motivated by a desire to improve the FBI, which he says is "essential, as imperfect as it is," because of its sweeping power to hold "policymakers accountable, whether they're on the left or the right."
"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."
The whistleblower told Insider that he was finally ordered to stop investigating Giuliani and the rest of the Trump White House in August 2022, after months of what he said were persistent efforts to frustrate his work, at a meeting with three FBI supervisors at a bureau field office. Insider was able to support the agent's account of the meeting with a second source who had knowledge of what took place.
He said the meeting had been called to discuss the 14-year veteran's job performance. As one of the bureau's few Russian-speaking counterintelligence specialists, he maintained a network of overseas sources that had been utilized by agents across the country to investigate everything from money laundering to political corruption, his statement said. He said his work had been recognized with eight consecutive years of "excellent" or "outstanding" performance appraisal reports running from 2010 to 2018,
and he had been tapped to help verify information obtained by investigators working for Robert Mueller during his time as special counsel.
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." (That charge was previously reported by Rolling Stone.) Kateryna Roshuk, a spokesperson for Fuks, noted that Fuks had done business with Giuliani's company — Giuliani Security & Safety — not Giuliani himself. "Mr. Fuks paid GSS (not Giuliani) under the contract the terms of which are confidential, including payment," she wrote. She denied that Giuliani ever lobbied for Fuks or that Fuks had paid him $300,000, allegations referred to in the whistleblower's statement.
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.
The agent's reporting on Giuliani wasn't received well in the bureau's New York field office, his statement said. "In the midst of my reporting involving Giuliani, which had previously been identified by my supervisor as 'high impact,' my management told me they received a call from a supervisor in NYFO, who they did not identify," the statement says. "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 and Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment; nor did attorneys representing Fuks and McGonigal.