While American political prisoners are ending their second year in the "American Gulag" on dubious charges, FBI officials in Washington, D.C. instructed field offices to stop agents from documenting hours spent investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, a whistleblower said.
Supervisors in the field offices were told their agents should instead essentially lie on their records, saying they were working on international terrorism and other investigations when clocking hours in the FBI’s time and attendance system, known as WebTA, the Washington Times reported on Dec. 16.
The anonymous whistleblower said FBI brass made the move in order to bolster the bureau’s budget requests to the House of Representatives when Republicans take control of the purse strings starting next month.
The anonymous whistleblower disclosure about bureau higher-ups misrepresenting field agents' work hours was supported by Stephen Friend, another whistleblower who has been suspended by the FBI. Friend said toying with WebTA is rampant at the bureau.
“Well, they’ve made such a big deal about [Jan. 6] stuff that they had everybody working it, and now they’ve gone over the number of hours they had budgeted for domestic terrorism cases, and they’ve come in well under the other cases on like international terrorism,” Friend said. “Now they’re worried that they’re going to go for appropriations and the Republican Congress is going to say, ‘You guys shouldn’t have funding for international terrorism. There’s clearly not a need. You guys didn’t even devote any time to it.’ ”
According to Friend, top FBI officials would say to him and other agents, regardless of what they were working on, that “this is happening all the time, not just with J6. They would come to me and say, ‘Hey, Steve, we need you to put this on your time sheet that you’re working this.’ ”
Related: Free the Jan. 6 prisoners, shut down the American Gulag, June 2, 2021
The whistleblower disclosure to Congress said that urging FBI agents to misstate the number of work hours on cases amounted to “pressuring agents to make false statements in official FBI records.”
“It also allows the FBI director to falsely report to Congress that a smaller amount of total FBI work hours was being dedicated to the Jan. 6 investigation,” the whistleblower said.
The Washington Times reviewed a draft of the whistleblower disclosure. The FBI told The Times that the allegations were inaccurate but did not elaborate.
The FBI has been hit by a flurry of whistleblower disclosures in recent months about widespread misconduct and politicized investigations.
Nearly two years after the Jan. 6 protests, at least 964 people have been charged. Federal prosecutors have charged 50 others with conspiracy.
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