In every field office, agents that work domestic terrorism are on the JTTF.

But the domestic terrorism program is not, I repeat, not part of the national Security program.

It is not funded by the NIT.

The National Intelligence Program funding is not NIT.

Well, here you go.

Here's the solution.

As the CT threat wanes down, they're facing the prospect of losing their funding for the CT IT mission.

Well, you hire up all of these CT ages, that threat starts going away.

But those people don't start going away.

They're continuing to work on JTTFS, but they become gradually more and more say, unemployed because the threat has been waning.

Now all interviewers have their own style, and my style is to try to get to the point and to be intensely curious.

And the key to interviewing is listening.

Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistleblower and American patriot.

Prepare to embrace the uncomfortable truth because this program has no time for comforting lies.

Here is civil liberties enthusiast, Second Amendment defender and recovering FBI agent Kyle Seraphim.

Today's Sunday Sit down, take number.

I think we're up to five.

This is Bill Taylor.

He is a retired FBI supervisory special agent.

He was an FBI whistleblower and I wanted to have him come tell his story here with an FBI guy 'cause I think we share some commonality and understanding.

Bill, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me in the invite.

I appreciate this.

This is great.

This is really great.

Thanks for the patience too.

We, we've been doing this for about 35 minutes.

Folks try to get this thing to run, but I think we've got all the the demons exercised out.

Will you tell people where you grew up, maybe some of your back story, your professional history and what made you, you know, want to become and how did you become an FBI agent?

Yeah, it's great.

I, I grew up a little bit here, a little bit everywhere.

I kind of started out in the Northeast.

I moved down to Florida when I was a teenager, spent a lot of time down there and then ended up going to college at University of Texas in Austin, where where I think you are, and loved it there back in the 90s.

Stayed there for the next like 13 years until I became an agent in 2003.

Before being an Asian, I was a teacher, I taught public school.

I just had a real sort of passion for public service and trying to get back and help.

And you know, after doing that for about 7 years, I, I had the calling to try to take it to another level.

And I'd always had some law enforcement in my family and an interest in it.

So I put my name in the hat for the FBI.

Actually, it was before 9/11.

It was in January of 2001.

When I put my name in the hat.

I didn't hear anything back whatsoever.

I mean, I was a teacher.

I didn't really expect to.

911 happens and then suddenly they're rooting around through the bottom of the desk drawers to find any application.

And I think mine, mine showed up then because I still remember it.

December 18th of 2001, I, I got a package in the mail from DOJ and I'm like, what the heck is this?

Am I in trouble or something here?

And I open it and I'm like astounded.

It's like, hey, would you come and interview, you know, do the Phase 1 testing and all that kind of stuff.

So I did and I passed and I, I just feel like I was the perpetual alternate candidate.

Like it took me 3 years to on board into the FBI.

So my my on boarding was in October of 2003 and I retired in October of 2023 after 20 years.

And again, just something that I'd always wanted to do, and I'm thankful I had the opportunity to do.

I started out at the Newark Field office of the FBI.

That's, it was #7 I think on my list, you know, you put, you put numbers on them, right?

It's #7 I, I, I think they, they saw anybody who put it above #50 and they're like, oh, that guy's going there.

And so that was me.

I was going there.

And I spent about 7 years working at the Newark Field office, about seven years as initially assigned to the OSA def stuff.

So the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which was great work.

I mean, I, I loved it.

We worked like International cartel.

Columbia was mostly our thing.

We did drug buys in Columbia.

We laundered money with undercover operations.

It was some really cool and fun work.

I, I really enjoyed it, but I'd always had sort of a desire.

Maybe I'd watched too many spy movies or something, or grew up too much during the, the Cold War.

But I always liked national security.

And so I asked, you know, for permission, like, hey, can I go over and work some national security, some CI stuff?

And of course everybody on drug squads.

Like, what the hell is the matter with you?

Are you stupid?

I mean, I took, you know, a beating, which I understand, but I always wanted to work it.

And, you know, they come to you and they're like, OK, well, you, you got this big case.

Just give me another year, give me another two years and we'll help you get there and do a good job and we'll get you there.

Well, you know, like another year comes not another two years comes not and all you still, you know, but eventually they they made good on their promise.

And I got to go over to work some CI stuff on on the squad there and that was good experience too.

But I had no family in, in Newark, NJ, nothing.

And, you know, trying to raise a, you know, a new family.

And so the only ticket out was to go to headquarters.

And you know, at that time you had two, two paths, right?

You could either do a TDYA temporary duty assignment and come back 18 months later or go permanent.

Well, I had no family.

I, I mean, as much as I liked the work in Newark, I, I didn't want to go back to New Jersey.

And so I opted for the permanent transfer.

We got to, we got to let people know kind of inside Bureau language.

When someone says, you know, the work is good, it means the office is terrible and the only thing that's keeping you interested is that you have a lot of scumbags to go after.

Is that fair?

Bingo, man, that so that's one of the right, obviously one of the the Bureau euphemisms.

The office has great work.

That means it's a it's a disaster of a place to be.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, you come in as AGS 10, which is, you know, I mean, I was one of the few people, let's put it this way, of 50 people in my class, I think I was literally the only person that got a raise.

And that's only because I was a public school teacher in Texas.

You were one of those guys, too.

I was a public school teacher.

After teaching seven years, my salary was $32,000.

So, you know, Texas didn't pay anything back then to teachers.

And so like, I was one of the only people who got a raise, but you can't raise a family and live in Newark, NJ, just outside of New York on AGS 10 step one salary.

It's just not possible.

It's very difficult, let's put it that way.

And so after putting in my time there, I had to, I had to get out, I had to do something different.

The commute is an hour plus each way.

And we spent like extra money to not live in Pennsylvania, which a lot of the people did.

So it was time to time to get out and headquarters was our was my ticket out.

That's.

A terrible, that's a terrible ticket that you have to buy.

But let me let me also hone in a couple of things.

You mentioned this in one of our earlier takes as we were trying to get this through.

What age were you going through the Academy and what kind of backgrounds did you see?

If you took a pay cut or you took a raise and everyone else took a pay cut, what were the backgrounds of the folks that you you entered?

I was 34, so I was a little bit older than the average which you know was is said to be about 30 just on on average.

So I was a little bit a bit older.

I think the maximum age at that time you could come in is 37.

Otherwise you'd age out.

The guy literally sitting next to me was a rocket scientist, literally like he worked for NASA.

I was a mathematician.

We had attorneys.

We had all kinds of crazy professional people, of course, military people, kind of weird like, so this is 2003.

Our class at that time, I believe was known as the class with the most females ever.

At that point.

We had about 30% females in our class.

It's just not historically a female dominated profession, but that was sort of maybe the beginning of trying to change that.

Yeah, I don't envy that class.

Yeah, it was interesting.

I could tell you that.

Some some a lot of stories, but.

Let me let me hone in on that for one second.

Yeah, go ahead.

Were there instances, no names needed?

Were there instances of marital infidelity with females in your class that you're aware of?

Infidelity.

Not that I'm aware of.

Like there were some relationships that were formed, sure.

I don't think that they were married though.

And and did any marriages fall apart while?

Not that I'm.

Aware male, male or female colleagues?

No, not that I'm aware of.

Not from my class, but there was a rather notorious class counselor there.

At the same time, it wasn't our class counselor who had apparently lots of problems with with having affairs with the with his students going through there just.

I, I, I just point that out because everybody thinks you're going to get these paradigms of, of virtue and you're going to get rocket scientists and CIA case officers and all that.

And the reality of it is, is, you know, we had Jim Comedy run through when my class was there and he came up and talked about the the show.

Quantico was just coming out.

And he was like, that's just what it's like you.

Know we all hang out in our towels and talk.

And I was like, yeah, that's funny 'cause it's not real.

And then I went like every single female minus maybe one of them was having a relationship with a student or a counselor there.

And three marriages fell apart from my class.

And one of the gals that was in my class ended up mothering a baby from one of my classmates when she was married to another agent.

And and like just all of the worst things, I think it probably got worse over time, but it's interesting.

30%, yeah, there there's certainly you.

You had the seeds of it back then.

For sure, for sure.

And there were definitely some qualified women in the class, there's no doubt about it.

Most of our class, you know, if you make it to the Academy, I don't know, but the exact number is, but it's up over 95% graduate at one point, like we had, we had recycles for injuries, but we only had one person out of roughly 50 that failed out of of the Academy, just one person.

And they gave her a position in surveillance to help her out.

But yeah, so all but one of us ultimately became ages.

Did did you know that when you went to the while you were at the Academy, do you know the fail rate was less than 5%?

No, I didn't.

I, I was, you know, I don't know.

I kind of straight laced and I just feared that, you know, I was going to be that, that one guy who, you know, so I was always very motivated to, you know, keep a low profile, keep my head down and and just do whatever I could to get through it.

You know, I just I my my way of it's always been during life is just don't throw attention to yourself.

Try not to, which is completely not what I did when I became a whistle blower, right.

Yeah, I end up a lot of attention to myself against my better senses and and judgement, but yeah.

But it was good to get out of the Academy.

It was, I mean, it wasn't the the best training.

I mean, it was just a lot of administrative stuff.

Yeah.

And.

And I think that's also worth people hearing because every, you know, you see these shows that glamorize it and they act like it's boot camp and it's grad school and it's the toughest thing ever.

You were years after The Silence of the Lambs, but did people still have that sort of attitude that that's what they were getting into?

And yeah, the Hollywood version.

For sure, there was definitely people that were there for the wrong reasons that you could tell or you could sense and you know, nothing individually was hard.

It was if anything was difficult, it was the collected.

You know, you've got the studying, you've got the, the physical, you've got the, the tactics and of course the firearms.

And any one of those things could, could wash you out and send you home.

And you know, it's, it's, I guess part of it is just as the high stakes.

I mean, you quit your job, you, you, you jettisoned your job and you may or may not be able to go back to it if you fail out.

So it's, it's just high stakes, I guess if you, if you do not succeed, but they found ways to get most people through.

That's the to get people not through if they didn't like them too.

We saw that in a couple other classes that were going through at the same time and they would have these meetings like all the instructors, they called it the pig or whatever, where they would have like these informal boards to people who didn't exhibit the right characteristics.

They would find ways to to get them out.

They would call them, deem them unsuitable.

Yes, the suitability crisis.

Were there any other school teachers, former school teachers that were in your class that you recall?

No, I don't think so.

And I only met a couple in the Bureau.

I think it's, it's kind of funny, like I, I processed through San Antonio, the same office.

I think you'd process through.

And I I think that maybe the only reason I even got that first phone call, that first letter in the mail was because the applicant coordinator was a former teacher.

Yeah.

And see, I I just speculate.

And she saw that I was a teacher and, you know, had, you know, succeeded at what I had done through life And then maybe, I don't know, took pity on a fellow teacher.

I don't know.

But.

That's a we can't rule it out.

And you know, it's one of those little coincidence.

We'll play with one last little thought on that.

You said you were 34.

The average age we know is probably late 20s or like right at 30.

Were you the oldest member of your class or were you close to it?

No, I was the probably the upper quartile of the class in age.

But I think there was one guy that was like a couple of weeks away from his 37th birthday when he graduated type of thing.

So like, yeah.

But by and large, the average age I think in our class was right around 30 to 31.

And I was, you know, probably in the upper 10 people in terms of age.

Yeah.

All right, so Newark, it's got good work, but nobody wants to be there.

You're working drugs for, what, almost eight years it sounded like?

5-6 years roughly, yeah.

And.

Then and then CI after.

That and then CI.

Yep, in Newark.

In Newark, that's right for about two years.

OK.

And you're and you punched the ticket and what kind of work did you go to in headquarters and what was the headquarters experience?

That's a That's a different animal once you.

Stepped up, it's a way different animal and it's not for everybody.

It's probably not for most people.

I, I took AI, took a, a job, an SSA job at headquarters in the Iran unit.

I worked a subset of counterintelligence called counter proliferation, like preventing people from getting, you know, parts and components for their WMD programs and whatnot.

And Iran was a big thing back then and I was fortunate enough, I say fortunate enough, I I wanted it fortunate enough to get that position in the Iran unit.

And you know, at the time it covered all Iran CI.

So your Intel officer type stuff and as well as like this counter proliferation thing.

And in fact, like nobody really knew or liked counter proliferation.

They didn't know what it was.

It's kind of like the most criminal aspect of CI work of of any.

And so like I took to it because I was a drug guy.

And so like when people on my squad in Newark were, you know, having to go over to like the US attorney's office, they were sometimes like, I don't, I've never talked to AUS attorney's office before.

I don't know what I'm like.

I'll do it.

I've done it before.

It's cool, you know, so when I got to headquarters in the Iran unit, I, they said, oh, you, you work counter proliferation.

They're like, oh, you can have all those cases.

You know, they didn't want to have anything to do with it.

I was like, fine.

So it was me and one other SSA at headquarters in the Iran unit that, that program manage.

That's what they do program.

They don't actually work cases, but program manage the entire country's Iran counter proliferation program.

And it was, I loved it.

I, I thought it was great and I got a chance to work a lot with some of the other agencies like CIA.

We partner and work very closely with them.

And from doing that, we have details over there.

And so I raised my hand and said, hey, I'd like to go be a detailee over at CIA working the same kind of stuff.

And I was fortunate enough to get selected to go over to the agency for a couple of years to be a detailee working basically the exact same stuff, except not just Iran, Syria, North Korea, primarily Iran, but still there's others.

And this was at the time that the JCPOA was being undertaken.

And it was just a very tumultuous time in the Iran program, which actually was the source of my very first protected disclosure in 2015.

So after spending a couple of years at CIA doing some really, really good stuff, some really cool stuff, I often consider that sort of the high watermark of my career.

I mean, you felt like you were actually.

Yeah, being detailed over to the to the agency.

At least it particularly in the capacity I was in.

Sometimes detailees turn out to be pencil, pencil pushers depending on what position.

The position I was in as a detailee was probably the most operationally oriented position that our detailees had.

And so I just got to do some fantastic operational type things that I wish I could talk about.

Yeah.

I'm watching you talk.

I'm watching you dance around what you can see my.

Filter is going off on my head like I I can't say or whatever, but it was just a great sense of professional satisfaction like anything you would see related to Iran that in the news during those years.

But I mean, we were working it like every day.

It was it was stuff that you would see on the news almost on a daily basis whenever Iran came up.

And, you know, we focused on interdicting things.

And so, well, we worked a lot with other intelligence services all around the world, people.

I was surprised how much and how free we worked with other intelligence agencies around the world.

You know, we work with other intelligence, other nations closer than we worked with some other U.S.

government partners.

So that was just fascinating.

And when I finished with my detail there, I came back as and was promoted and basically came back as a unit chief in our counter proliferation section.

And so I was the chief then of FB is Iran counter proliferation program for the next 4 1/2 five years until I left headquarters.

I want to dig into the the granularity of it because I think a lot of people don't have an idea of what why CI is not considered to be very fun counterintelligence.

Oh yeah, generally no arrests.

Would you agree?

Generally that's correct.

A lot of sort of information based gathering of of Intel and mapping out networks or mapping out who's talking to who, but a lot of is not criminal activity.

100% right.

But the overlap that you had doing drugs and OSA def type cases and counter proliferation, it makes sense to me.

I'd never thought about it before, but we're talking about you're setting up probably controlled buys of of controlled products like ITAR products, restricted items.

You don't kind of talk about sort of why that that background sets you up perfectly to do something that most people, most people, if you said you want to go do counter proliferation and you worked in the FBI, they'd rather like put a pencil into their nose.

They no doubt about it, absolutely.

And it was this weird hybrid that I'd sort of found as a niche because, you know, there's that, that that group of people that want to put on their, their their cloak and daggers fiber spy thing and go chase like an IO from, you know, whatever Russia for three years and do nothing.

And then, you know, maybe go interview him on his way out.

There's a unique personality that can do that.

That wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do.

And because I was set up with this background in criminal stuff, which I got to tell you like at the time.

Our office mandated everybody work criminal for two years before you even consider going to work anything national security.

And I didn't like that policy at the time because I wanted to work national SEC.

I'm like, oh, come on, man, I can do this.

But I'm telling you, that was the smartest thing and the right thing to do because it set me up for being able to do like CI and counter proliferation work so much better because I had that background in the criminal realm and I was able to understand prosecutions.

I was able to talk to US attorney's offices, and it made all the difference in the world for going over to work CI.

And then I just gravitated towards the CP stuff because I had that unique experience and could turn CI cases into criminal cases.

And we're able to sort of impact national security using sort of these traditional criminal tools because there are a lot of legal tools that prohibit this export of goods to other countries.

It's very convoluted web of laws, but it was very effective to do and I enjoyed doing it.

And I found my home there, I guess.

The the way it was explained to me in The Academy Is that there's this thing that we go after and it's called contraband and that's the government's property.

And so that's what drugs are and illegal guns or whatever else.

But you know, being able to work counter proliferation, it's the same sort of mechanism you're just going up against.

Instead of, you know, St.

level gangs or cartels, you're doing nation state actors and whoever's working on their behalf is that.

Oh, it's so true.

And so especially coming from a background of working like cartel drugs, like one of our, our main techniques that we, we implemented, we, we ran undercover operations to launder cartel money and that's how we made our drug cases.

So we had a Group 1 undercover operation where, you know, so the cartels would send cocaine that was took for a big thing back at that time.

We'd send cocaine into the US, But their big problem was, OK, well, that's great.

We have a 10 keys or 100 keys in, you know, New York.

How do we get the money back to Colombia?

That's where we came in with our undercover operation.

We had an undercover operation.

We would physically go out into the street, meet money brokers, pick up the drug money that you know, so you know, they would sell all the drugs they would collect.

We would pick up to three $400,000 at a time in a parking lot in a mall and with the understanding that we have a business.

And then we would take, we would as part of the undercover, we would physically take the cash back.

We'd count it deposited to our COBRA bank account and then we'd wait for instructions from Columbia, the, the cartels on where to wire it to.

So.

And so that was sort of their, their trade mechanism.

And by doing that, we were able to identify the assets and players in the Columbia side of it, as well as the money brokers and the people distributing the drugs here.

So I laundered like several $1,000,000 of, of cash back to Colombia doing this drug operation.

And then ultimately, because some of the US attorneys are skeptical of prosecuting, sometimes they're like, well, how do we know that this is actually drug money?

And so we were doing like these goofy things like testing the, you know, 50 and $100 bills for like the amount of residue cocaine on them and things like that.

And we're like, come on, like usually, of course it's drug money.

What do you think this is?

You don't just pick up $400,000 in the parking lot of a Macy's or something.

And so we're like, fine, we'll, we'll just go and buy the, the cocaine ourselves in Colombia.

And so that's exactly what we did.

In fact, I, I believe it was the first time the US government ever bought undercover cocaine in Colombia.

The Colombian constitution prohibited that type of undercover activity from Yeah.

And so we went down there right after they changed.

I mean, we had an ongoing relationship, but once they changed their constitution, we went down there and talked to their, they call them the Fistilia, their prosecutors, their head prosecutors and pitched a plan of our undercovers buying cocaine from in Bogota and they approved it.

And so, yeah, I went down there and, you know, we used a confidential informant to actually do the transaction that I, I handled.

And yeah, we, we went down there, we bought 6 kilos at a time of, of cocaine several times.

And it was, it's pretty, pretty interesting, pretty pretty scary too.

And you're buying, you know, high purity cocaine directly from the cartels.

I believe so.

There's a lot of money in it too.

Like we were buying cocaine in whatever 2006, $1000 a kilo and in Colombia, yeah.

And the cocaine in New York at that time at my memories, right, is probably about 25 or so a kilo, maybe more.

So there's a tremendous profit motive.

And and then like when you compound on top of that, the, the cocaine we bought there, the lowest purity cocaine we bought was like 80% pure and we bought stuff over 9095% pure.

When you see it in the street, it's way deluded to like I don't even though like 5 or 10% purity or something.

So there's this huge markup.

Just getting stepped on from dealer to dealer to dealer and you guys are?

Playing, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we of course as an undercover picking up the money, we would take a cut like so our fee was anywhere from 5 to 10%.

So if you brought us say $400,000 to to launder, you know our fee would be upwards of 10% of that to to do it.

But with a 25% or A25X markup 25 what, 1000% or something or easily?

Easily right 20.

500% markup I guess you're getting horrible they they can eat 10% no problem yeah now when you're doing the national security stuff you're dealing with nation state obviously Iran being the focus were you doing by walks were you doing control buys and and and setting up you know brokers trying to be that same man in the middle and using.

The same thing.

No, it was a little bit more complex in some.

In some ways it was exactly the same.

Like these networks, the money laundering, the movement of goods, it's the same thing.

It's a widget instead of a kilo.

I mean, it really is the same thing.

The difference though, in terms of the undercover was as a matter of U.S.

policy, they were not wanting or willing to let equipment walk because these things were going into missiles and nuclear programs and things like that.

So it was very difficult at best to get the approval to let something walk.

But we were still able to do the network analysis and one of the two and interdictions was one of the big things.

And that was, that was a lot of fun in a sense, because we had, so we could use FISA obviously for targeting those networks overseas.

The problem had been we really weren't allowed to use FISA to conduct interdictions of stuff.

But we were able to figure out a way to to do that.

And it was great when you would interdict a a shipment, whether it was in the United States or overseas.

It was great to see them then argue about what happened that.

Was.

Good, I blanked out for a second.

Am I still with you?

You are.

Yeah, I saw that too.

It's.

It looked like the feed was getting interfered with and then it just disappeared for a second but OK.

Cool.

So yeah, we were able to interdict things.

And then they had no idea where it came from.

Like, how did you know?

How did they find out or where did this go?

And they would blame each other and sort of destroy their trusted networks because then they think each one's, you know, a source or a rat.

And then we took that same thing.

Instead of interdicting physical goods, we started interdicting money and using treasury authorities, which was great too.

And we were able to because they have to pay for these things.

And so it's usually done by wires, for example.

All of this stuff kind of indicates that the people that were involved in it, they absolutely knew what they were getting involved in.

They knew that they were trying to skirt US laws and they knew that they were trying to provide contraband.

Let's call it broadly speaking, dual use technologies or or you know, military specific to a a.

100% accurate, yeah.

Most of the time now the US companies like, so just to to be clear, like the US companies that were selling these things 99% of the time didn't know that it was going to Iran.

The for using Iran as the example, Iran would use cutouts in third countries.

So the US company from their perspective was selling, you know, a widget to, you know, UAE or Malaysia where they have other customers.

So the US company very rarely willingly or knowingly sent stuff to like, say, Iran.

We had special access to special intelligence.

We knew it was going to Iran.

And that's where we were able to sort of slip ourselves in the middle in one fashion or another to disrupt or scuttle the transaction, whether it be with the goods or and or the money, and then watch them fight about what happened.

Broadly speaking, is that where the the CIA, the agency in inject is, is the overseas connections and for sure some of their that's their capability.

Absolutely.

And it could be at very, it could be at a lot of points.

It could be at a physical port.

It could be in the financial system.

It could be in a lot of different ways.

Yeah, yeah.

So you got pretty steeped in that.

How many years were you doing it as a as a program manager?

So I was a program manager like an SSA for about two years and then I went to the agency for a couple of years officially like a two year detail, a little bit of extra overlap on either side and then back to headquarters as the chief of the Iran program for like the next four or five years.

It's like left headquarters.

Well, I kind of enjoyed my headquarters time.

I was doing what I felt was some meaningful and some fun stuff, kind of creating some new programs as well that, you know, I believe still live to this day that, you know, we're using to interdict and and thwart things.

So I sort of enjoyed it.

That was to me, that was a good time.

Obviously the bureaucracy of it was a disaster and the way the headquarters was run is an absolute disaster and train wreck.

What?

What state or district did you live in during your headquarters time?

I lived in Virginia, Yeah.

Fairfax County.

Yep.

And so I was like, I was on the train every day I came in now.

Yeah.

So you lived in the Americas and I think that delineates the the different types of people that go to headquarters because I can only be friends with people that lived in Virginia.

Not the Maryland.

Folks, I just don't get it.

Virginia is right there.

You could live.

There.

You can own a gun and it's okay, yeah.

It's okay.

Nope, Although not New Jersey, you couldn't own a gun.

Right, Yeah, so you lived, you moved from America to a slightly more America, even though it's not very American.

That's right.

In some ways that's right.

Okay, let's set up your Well, I last little question on that too.

What was your interaction with the field agents 'cause I know it's a mixed bag when it comes to program managers and their interaction.

My buddy Steve friend regularly talks about someone taps in for 18 months, you know, puts their name on a memo, doesn't help anything, doesn't understand the program.

What was your dynamic and and did that change at all during your time there as you got more senior in it and how how did you interact with the field?

Depends on who you ask I.

Think yeah of.

Course, as a, As a field agent working CI or anything, like I hated headquarters.

They were a bunch of idiots who did nothing to help your case and were just obstacles, administrative burdens.

I hated this program managers, as they're called there and then I went and became one.

But in some ways that that was maybe helpful because like I, I tried to swear to myself, I will never be like like those people.

Like my personal position was.

I'm here to assist you, the case agent, not run your case or tell you what or how to do it necessarily.

I'm going to try to help you and add value to it in any way that I possibly could.

I'm going to try to make your life easier.

You know, you had to get headquarters approvals to do all kinds of things.

I mean, as a field case agent, especially on national security stuff, you need headquarters approval.

If you want to travel somewhere, you gotta get headquarters approval.

If you want to do this or that, you gotta get headquarters approval.

So my job I felt was to make it as easy as possible.

Now having said that, like when you work those national security things, you, you really are working in the interagency.

This is no longer like partnering on a like a Vic MO bank robbery with like the local sheriff.

If you have a big case on like a counter proliferation, like I was working, not only are you working with almost certainly the CIA and other three letter agencies, but you might be working with Mossad, you might be working with Germans, you might be working with the British.

And those are all people with real stakes and equities that, you know, Jim, the case agent in Omaha just can't like dictate terms to the entire international community on how his case is going to run.

And that's where like I felt like it was the most challenging to to get everybody synchronized.

I mean, you really have to be a diplomat to get everybody singing on the same page.

And so like I'm, I am certain that there were a lot of folks that probably didn't like me in the field because of having to coordinate these things.

There are others that like me a lot that were like, hey, thanks for helping me coordinate with, you know, Mossad or whoever.

Sure.

Well, the reason I bring that up is because I've had people who retired and it is a unique experience to spend enough time at headquarters to understand it.

And almost to a man, the folks that I respect that worked in the Bureau and retired said if you really want to understand what the FBI is, you have to go to headquarters.

You have to spend time there because you've got to see it from the side that you just explained, and I've never heard it explained quite that way and that that's where the other equities come.

In it might be true, like like I, I obviously have heard that and people, you know, criticize that philosophy coming from a headquarters guy and, and it, it's probably not necessary on the strictly criminal stuff.

I don't know.

I, I guess I can't say that.

But on the national security stuff, when there are so many stakeholders, it really is like imperative to to know and be able to coordinate this.

And you don't operate in a, in a vacuum.

And then, you know, there's certain field offices, right, that are particularly like, this is my investigation, screw you and screw everybody else.

I'm going to do it my way like you know.

We're totally not talking about New York field office, right?

There, right?

Exactly.

It's so true.

I was trying to.

Because I had respect the work that they did, the folks in New York on like this program, best, best cases they had.

Oh my gosh.

So I Can't Sing their praises enough.

And I know some of them were very upset with me at various points, but to their credit, they had the most impactful best work and they were phenomenal, not notwithstanding the the gear grinding of trying to coordinate things and and get things to work out the way that they they ought to be, but.

But that perspective and the headquarter side of it and the working on the agency side, I think that does give the bona fides to talk about the the first whistleblower activity.

I got a little CHEAT SHEET because I got to listen to you talk to Chris Farrell about it.

So I have kind of a sense of what that was.

But it even makes more sense because I didn't hear you talk about that background and the international interplay of all the other, you know, IC partners in the world you want to set up.

And then walk us through your first whistleblower activity and we'll get into consequences of what that looks like.

Yeah, sure.

So I come back from CIA and of course, like even at that time, there was the negotiations for the nuclear deal.

But around 2013 is when those negotiations really started getting serious and heating up.

And so you had John Kerry was the Secretary of State at the time and our investigations are in that space.

Iran counter proliferation, in particular our multi year, multi agency, multi nation, in many cases investigations.

And yeah, So what happens in 20/13/2014 when they're desperate for any agreement with Iran, they start interfering with law enforcement, not just FBI, Department of Commerce, DHS, other investigations.

But obviously I'll just speak to the FBI side of things.

You know, we had a lot of arrest warrants and indictments pending and some of these people, many of them are international figures and they don't travel often.

We use it extradition as a tool quite a bit and try to get them maybe lured to a country that's favorable for extradition.

You want to talk about what the what the process is for pause and and the State Department involvement there since she's brought up Kerry?

Yeah, yeah.

So when you get so, you know, we would get an indictment on your Iranian bad guy who travels a lot.

Maybe he's in Iran but travels internationally, probably never to the United States.

And you know, then there's this thing where with Interpol you can put a red notice in which like alerts the system.

Well, we generally would not put red notices in because there's a good chance that that would leak that we were interested and then they would never travel.

So you're basically what we did on the intelligence side is we would wait and have good visibility on their travel plans.

And if we saw them traveling, we would start spinning up our our coordination and we would then while they're like in flight, get a provisional arrest warrant, a pause, you described it.

And then send that provisional arrest warrant to the country that they're about to land in or just landed in or traveling in and saying, Hey, we want to arrest them and we pledge to extradite them.

And here's the charges that they're on.

And we had to, you know, pick that very careful because only certain countries, every country had different rules.

And even the countries that had favorable rules didn't always have the political will.

And so we had to work very carefully with countries that both had the rules and the political will to extradite somebody back to us.

And so they would land or whatever to do their meetings, and then they would be greeted by the local police who would take them into custody.

And ultimately, you know, it would usually take months and months, but ultimately extradite them to the United States.

But they're very complex and difficult to pull off things.

And so the interference comes from State Department.

Any time that there was any sort of law enforcement type thing against the Iranians, like clockwork, the Iranians meaning like the foreign minister Javad Zarif or his deputy would be on the phone with John Kerry complaining and like, hey, what are you trying to do?

And.

You know, you're trying to to derail these these negotiations.

You've got to let this guy go.

You can't do that.

And in there, Ernst, to get this agreement, the State Department was like, oh, yeah, sure.

We'll do whatever you want us to do.

And so State Department and DOJ formed this, I call it a working group.

Actually I call it the Star Chamber.

Like there were a small group of people that would get together and give like this thumbs up or thumbs down whether we could arrest somebody.

Now, this is something where we've investigated for 5-10 years maybe.

And we went to AUS attorney.

If US attorney agreed to prosecute, the US attorney took it to a grand jury.

the US attorney got an arrest warrant and an indictment signed by a judge.

And now we're trying to execute that arrest warrant and somebody at State Department, like in some cases, specifically John Kerry was stepping in and saying, no, you can't do that.

Like this is not prosecutorial discretion here.

Prosecutorial discretion is when you know, you're like with the AUSAI don't really think we have enough here, doesn't need a threshold, blah, blah, blah.

We better not take it to the grand jury.

That's prosecutorial discretion.

And I might not always agree with it, but that's just the way it goes.

This is you've got a warrant.

And the guy in some cases, like we had one guy that landed in the United States, he was on a terrorist watch list.

He was part of their nuclear program.

We got in here and we're about to arrest him.

And as he was landing, they said they're not allowed to arrest him, send him back.

We're like, what are you talking about?

This is like a major figure in Iran's program.

The amount of intelligence that we would have gotten from debriefing, looking at his electronics and things like that, that he had with them would have informed on the very deal that they're negotiating.

But they don't want it.

Not to mention taking a very important person out of the the equation.

They insisted and they made us break all kinds of rules.

You need to remove them from NCIC right now and everything.

And DHS and CVP are looking at us like, what kind of idiots are you?

I have an active warrant in NCIC here.

We have to arrest them.

And I mean, it was just a complete, complete show.

And they let him go.

Did they let him go?

Absolutely.

They let him go and actually it's part of my that was part of my that specific instance was an example I used in my protected disclosure 2015.

I did made protected disclosure in July of 2015 to directly to director comedy and so in 2015 as they formed an agreement with Iran, the US Congress passed the law called the Iran Nuclear agreement Review Act of 2015 and in it it's specifically prohibited during the review period of the negotiated deal.

It specifically prohibited any type of sanctions relief or any help or assistance.

Section B3 for for your people out there that want to check and.

They'll be.

There will be.

Some I know, that's why I throw it out there.

And by virtue of interfering with these lawful arrest warrants, they were providing sanctions relief to Iran, allowing them to not be arrested and giving them this reprieve.

And so I was like, look, I might not have liked the previous policy of the US, but I didn't necessarily know or think it was a violation of law, you know, the standard basically for whistleblower disclosure.

But when I saw that they were violating this new statute at the time, I was like, I can't, I can't sit idly anymore.

And I took it to two of our attorneys at FBI in NSLB and said, hey, can you guys give me your opinion to the interference effort, the interference that we've seen from State Department, FBI itself and DOJ, Does that constitute a violation of this federal act?

Do you can you look at it?

They're like, sure, we'll be happy to look at.

They emailed me back and I posted this on my, on my account.

So they emailed me back, said, yeah, we think it did.

Would you like us to, you know, I was like, can you put it in writing?

They're like, yeah, would it like a blurb on e-mail be sufficient?

I'm like, yeah, that's fine.

They're like, do you want me to?

Do you want us to add that?

It's based on political factors and political interference?

I'm like, no, you don't need to do that.

I'll let the chips fall where they may just, you know, then violates the statue and they're like, sure, next day I get a phone call.

The attorneys got a phone call saying you're not putting anything in writing and they were shut down.

And I have that on e-mail which I posted on my account too.

So complete corruption.

NSLB, National Security legal branch or law branch.

And so these are attorneys inside the FBI that their entire job is interpreting national security matters of federal law.

Yes.

Correct.

That's right.

They're legit, like that's their expertise.

And that's exactly what they did.

And I asked them to do just that.

And, and they knew, you know, we worked with them before they knew what had been going on with these cases.

And I simply asked them, hey, the things that I documented here, can you look against this law here that was passed and tell me if you think that this law was violated.

And they said yes.

And they were willing to put it in writing until management shut them down.

And, and that's actually why that branch exists.

You go out there and query them with specific things.

You go, here's the circumstance.

Here's a tactic I want to use.

Here's a, you know, here's an operation I'd like to run.

Can we validate that this thing is something I can legally do and then I can ethically do?

And then we can, you know, an age we had a, a deal where we had a guy who, who escaped on a, on a UFAP from New Mexico and he had been accused and then he was indicted for sexually assaulting.

It's more graphic than that, but let's just leave it nicely.

A handful of young girls.

And he was old.

He was in his 70s, late 70s.

And his family members helped him escape to the other side of the country, you know, to the other side of the border.

So he went to Mexico and he was hanging out there.

And the international unit ended up locating him, finding him, knew what was going on.

And so I ran this idea.

I said, look, he's got Social Security coming in.

United States is paying this man and he's he's a fugitive from justice.

We can shut that down.

So we did and then we found that the the footage showed that his, his daughter had involved herself in getting him across the border and she was living in the United States.

And I said, why don't we make a phone call to the number that we have on record and state to him in no uncertain terms that you can surrender yourself or we're going to go after your your daughter for accessory.

And here's the statute that I want to do.

Can you interpret whether this plays?

And are we violating anything by asking a man in Mexico whose phone number we have to turn himself in at the bridge the Americas at a certain time and, you know, in a week or we're going to go and make sure that we get this the the daughter.

And we should probably get the daughter anyway because that's the right thing to do.

So we kind of laid out the plan and, you know, the same kind of deal.

They look at it and they go, OK, well, this is where you would run afoul.

Or here's how you'd have to word your language and this what your OP plan has to look like.

But that's what these guys exist.

For yeah, giving the parameters to make sure you're doing it right.

I mean, you know, a lot of us are type A personalities, right?

And we, we come up with sometimes maybe even some crazy ideas.

They're supposed to be.

That might be a crazy idea I just thought by the way, but I don't think it's a bad.

No, no.

And they're supposed to be the backstop to make sure that, you know, we're not doing anything crazy.

And sometimes it works and sometimes in this case.

That's right.

That guy's still.

That guy's still in Mexico.

As far as.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah, probably watching you, laughing at you.

That hopefully so that and that's just the reward.

But end of the day, all you're trying to do and they asked you for politics.

Did they know what your politics were?

These people, you do they Do they know you personally?

Yeah, I mean, you, you know, them headquarters is a big social club and and whatnot.

So you go out drinking with them and stuff.

I mean, you certainly get a sense maybe.

But you know, that's sort of a weird thing.

Like when you look at like the politicization of the FBI, I didn't really feel or notice any politicization until like this 2015.

Like that was the first time that I really started to see and feel politically motivated things happening.

And like I can remember.

So New Jersey, where I came from as a as an agent, like that's the liberal place.

And frankly, a lot of the agents there, you know, were more liberal and Democrats.

But yet on the squad, Myosa def squad, you could sit there and talk about, you know, your liberal or, or democratic views and I could talk about a conservative view and it doesn't matter.

Like you're still going through the door.

At the same time, you still trust each other with your lives.

Things changed in 2015 and moving forward things and I frankly attribute that to comedy.

I mean, it really became politicized and it didn't change.

It got worse under Ray in my in my opinion.

And it do you.

Have a sense of what that do.

You have a sense of the mechanism that comedy would have used that that caused that.

I I would say hiring is probably a factor that that inculcated it in the lower ranks, right?

When you purposefully and we're talking about like the quote UN quote DEI hiring for example, when you.

I'm hearing personnel is policy.

I'm just saying.

Personnel is in fact policy and it's long lived policy as well because as you know, you if everyone Floyd is very difficult to well, I I was gonna.

Have have you heard the term 20 year mistake?

Have you heard that term?

Yeah, yeah.

And it's true.

Like I, I unfortunately had to work to get a couple of people removed at one point and it is next to impossible.

And so like, I personally, like, understand why managers in the FBI just throw their hands up.

Like I can't do anything legitimately.

People the need to go, you can't get rid of them and then.

Send them to SOG.

They can only they can screw up a whole team instead of screwing up one person's desk.

But if you're a whistleblower, man, they will find a way to get rid of you in a heartbeat.

Suddenly, suddenly they can find a way.

Yeah, it's.

Well, let's do, let's do consequences.

What method did you get your whistleblower disclosure your your protected disclosure to comedy?

You said you took it to him directly.

So what was that route?

I literally emailed it to him.

So I got this, this thing back from the attorneys.

I'm saying yeah, we'll put it in writing, yadda yadda.

And then I get I, I talked to them and they're like, no, we can't put it right.

I'm like, that's it, I'm done.

I immediately sat down and started writing my protected disclosure.

And I think it was like a Thursday night at like 7:00 or something.

I sent it the e-mail.

It was an e-mail directly to to James Comedy and.

And how did you, how did you formulate this disclosure?

Because as you mentioned, there are parameters that have to be fit for it to be quote UN quote.

Protected.

Yeah.

So I, I, you know, being a, an agent, a case agent, you know, I try to think in terms of like proving a case, like an agent, like collecting evidence, demonstrating evidence.

And so like it all of my whistle blowing.

I have always tried to tie whatever my complaint is to a specific and I articulated what the fact or I'm sorry, what the statute is, it's been violated or what the policy.

It's not that I'm just like making up some allegation that I didn't like or didn't agree with and then also providing the evidence to sport and show that this was broken.

So that's sort of what I did.

I, I laid out in my protect disclosure the, the headline of it, the title of the e-mail was whistleblower protected disclosure to make it, you know, blank and, you know, be crystal clear what this was and not be ambiguous about it.

And then, you know, I tried to acknowledge in the beginning, I understand the greater policy posture of the United States, etcetera, etcetera.

However, you know, these are the laws that were broken, specifically this law, these were the policies that were broken.

And here's examples illustrating that.

And I tried to keep it short.

I think it was, I don't know, maybe two or three pages, 3 pages or something, but I laid out specific examples showing some very damning and significant things where people like John Kerry himself were interfering with lawful FBI and other agency arrest warrants and wielding power arbitrarily that they didn't have.

And it sounds like you were not rewarded with an on the spot award for doing a great job.

So what happens next?

Surprisingly comedy, I say.

Surprisingly comedy responded to me.

He sent an e-mail back on, I believe Sunday night or Sunday.

It was night or night.

Unfortunately, his response was really completely dismissive.

And you know, I talked about that prosecutorial discretion.

He chalked everything up to prosecutorial discretion.

He kind of missed the point that these people had already been indicted in some cases years and years ago.

And the the whole influence and people can read my protective disclosure online now because I posted it to X.

There's some pretty serious things like the the personal financial enrichment of Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in one case.

So those things were done with Kerry's knowledge and approval.

That's corruption.

There's no two ways about it.

It's corruption.

And if I could tell the classified story, man, it would make it all that much clearer, too.

I wish I could.

So he, yeah, he dismissed it, said, hey, we'll send it over to inspection division.

You know, they sent it over to inspection division.

Frankly, I thought it would be investigated.

I was very surprised when I got a letter like, I don't know, six weeks later, which I also posted saying, you know, we're not going to investigate it.

I was like, what?

I documented a violation of a specific law that Congress just passed.

Was that the first time that you kind of did a double take at or had a kind of a like a real serious gut check on the on the Bureau?

That was the eye opener for me.

I mean, because I went into it like this was a, a serious matter.

I didn't undertake this lightly.

And in fact, I told all of the my employees in in my unit like, hey, I'm doing this and I showed them my protective disclosure before I submitted.

I think it was before, maybe it was just after and said, hey, look, I'm not asking anybody to sign on to this.

I know you all are disappointed and upset with the same shenanigans that I am, but I'm just showing this to you.

I might not be here, you know, next week or something.

How was that received by folks around?

Actually, it's my understanding that at least two other employees wrote their own protected disclosures, echoing the same things that I did in my protected disclosure and got the same similar, you know, thanks, but no thanks.

We're not, we're not investigating it.

We're not going to look into it, But I, I don't know, I felt like I needed to be, you know, transparent with them and let them know what I was doing and, you know, it was up to them if they wanted to jump in on it or not.

It was interesting because some were like no, I they were clearly afraid of the consequences of of saying something even though they shared the same belief.

Yeah, even though they get that annual whistleblower training.

That's weird.

Why do they?

Yeah, what's that far?

What's that training do?

There's a there's a culture moment I want to dig into and it's it's unique, I think at least our maybe common experience.

But if you haven't had that moment, the gut check, the eye open, the unexpected consequence of something that you thought you were doing the right, you thought you were probably being trained for that moment, were you not?

Because I don't want to put words in your mouth.

But I didn't.

I feel like I've heard you say that.

I did not think or feel that retaliation was headed my way.

I had a little quirk on the video.

I didn't know if it.

Yeah, Yeah, you're good.

You didn't think.

OK, You were saying that you didn't think or.

Feel.

Yeah.

I didn't think or feel that I would have any retaliation per SE.

I mean, like you said, we get annual training about it.

I took it very seriously.

I consulted attorneys ahead of time, like FBI attorneys to make sure I wasn't like some lunatic in left field with this.

And I again, I was just shocked.

Like I, I didn't put everything in my protected disclosure because AI was trying to keep it short.

And then BI was like, well, they're going to open an investigation and you know, I'll tell them the other stuff then you know, that I have and you know, I get this e-mail back saying we're not going to investigate.

I'm like, what are you talking about?

Like, and by the way, like Ding, Ding, Ding, these other two or three things to inspection division, you the chief and asking him if OIG had seen it.

And he said, yeah, OIG saw it and they declined it on such and such date.

And so, you know, good luck.

And that was it.

I mean, I got, you know, yelled at by, you know, the assistant director pretty good.

And I think, you know, I didn't really have career and ambitions beyond my current position at that point.

So like, I know my career would, it was, was over at that point.

But I didn't, you know, I, I wasn't aspiring to anything further.

It was, I guess, kind of funny too, because not long after this, like my boss pulls me into his to his office.

My boss was section chief.

He's like, and I didn't have field desk.

I wasn't a field supervisor previously at this point.

So I was AGS 15 unit chief, but I had not been a field supervisor, just a headquarter supervisor.

And if you're progressing through your career, you have to be do 2 years as a field supervisor to check that box to go up in your career.

So my boss pulls me in and it's like, hey, Bill, there's going to be a desk coming open at WFO.

And I know you don't have your field experience yet.

I think you might want to think about taking that.

And like, I was the problem that they need to get rid of.

So they were willing to like direct place me in a field supervisory position to Get Me Out of the, the unit chief position at headquarters, who just, you know, became a whistleblower.

You know, they would have done and tried to do anything to get rid of me if they could.

But I was like, I'm happy where I'm at.

This is good, you know, for now until, you know, I decide it's time to leave, you know, but in their mentality, though, they don't get it because they're there for 18 to 24 months Max.

And that was one of my biggest complaints about headquarters.

You know, I, I mentioned what a, you know, joke.

A lot of it is these managers, particularly at the lower SES levels, like section chiefs would rotate through.

And so like, they would get there.

It would take them six months to learn what they're doing.

They might contribute for six months and then their last six months is figuring out where they're going next.

And, you know, they don't know or care about the program.

Like I had countless section chiefs, bosses that had no clue about counter proliferation.

Some of them didn't even know anything about counterintelligence hardly.

But yet they're, and it's so embarrassing because you go to other agencies and you introduce your boss like this SES section chief and they expect them to know something like I bring them over to CIA and things like that to meet with people.

And they're just like empty suits.

And it's, it's honestly embarrassing that they have no knowledge or background.

They're just there punching a ticket to get to their next position and they're never there long enough to contribute.

And I promise myself I'm, I'm not going to be one of those people.

Like I'm not going to punch a ticket for two, two years just so I can get another position.

I want to contribute something.

And so that's why, you know, I know people laugh like what kind of idiot to be at headquarters for seven or eight years and, you know, a unit chief for like 4 or five years.

You know, that's why like I didn't want to, you know, be that guy who just turns it over, turns it over.

I wanted to try to contribute meaningfully and and know what I was working too I mean.

Yeah, Well, that sounds like you're not, you're not one of us.

If I had to guess, just based on the the way these people work.

One of the things that a friend of mine, George Hill, has talked about, he's, you know, we we deal with him on Twitter too.

But George and I talk all the time.

And he mentioned the difference between what the FBI considers to be a Smee, a subject matter expert, and what the intelligence community considers to be a Smee.

And so when you go and you bring your FBISES boss who's got six months on the job and knows nothing about your threat, and then you go meet with a real subject matter expert who spent 20 years studying the insurance and outs and intricacies.

We just had that on the, on the bombing of the, of the nuclear facility in Iran very recently where you heard about guys that spent 15 years and every single day they, they woke up and they thought about and they worked and they went to sleep thinking about the same individual singular threat.

And they knew the atmospherics and they knew the altitudes and they knew the GPS coordinates of every possible entry.

And they knew the progression of technologies and the movements in and they could tell you the number of trucks on a Wednesday on average, kind of like that was all they did.

And and that's real deal too.

Like I met in my time at CIA, a lot of those types of people, those highly specialized, spend years on a specific thing, a specific widget even.

I mean, it would come as no surprise, right?

Then the CIA uses covert authorities, corporate action authorities that it has from the president to to do sort of like the really cool secret shady stuff.

And to do that, you need that level of understanding of things.

And I saw some, I mean, that's why I say like that was very impressive.

Like these people are dedicated patriots that like literally devote years to the most minute things to make sure that large effects that benefit our country happen later.

And right.

Like that's why it's just so embarrassing to bring our quote UN quote subject matter experts over to talk to to their subject matter experts sometimes, I mean.

Right, theirs is like a weaponized autistic person in their 40s who's been studying it their whole adult life and we bring over like a 26 year old female analyst who got assigned to it randomly after having a background that was unrelated.

Kind of thing.

And you're just, yeah, she was an intern, you know, six months ago and maybe have, you know, some experience in a service industry, I don't know.

That sounds, that sounds super familiar.

And all right, here's what I also want to key in on because this is a Bureau culture thing that people won't get anywhere else.

Did you ever see somebody go up against the Bureau in the let's what?

How many years was it before 2003 to what, 2015, 12 years?

Yeah, probably right.

Yeah.

Did you see anybody go up against the Bureau in that time and if So, what did you think about the results?

I'm just trying to think it's an excellent question.

Like I'm trying to remember any specific instance like go up against, not as a whistleblower, like I never heard, Yeah.

But like, you know, someone who was said, hey, we got a problem here, whether it be a specific whistleblower where they actually took it to a comedy, but theoretically saying we're violating rule, policy or law.

Somebody was a stickler for sort of like doing things the right way or maybe said, hey, this is an improper way of doing it.

Anybody who was kind of the the squeaky wheel for policy or for what would later be looked at as being like, hey, you probably have a different perspective on them today, but did you see anybody go up against the Bureau and and kind of push back and say, hey, we got a problem here I'm.

Trying to think of an example, and I'm sure if I thought long enough I could probably think of one.

But the only thing that really comes to mind is just in general terms, like we sort of policed our own in a sense.

Like I'm I'm thinking back to the drum squad and like when guys screwed up or did something, you know, not right.

Like we had a senior guy on the squad that would talk to you and say, hey, man, like you can't do that.

You know, you can't press the barrel of your gun against that guy's head when he's on the ground.

I mean, I literally saw that happen.

Yeah.

I, you know, we're arresting a drug guy and I have him on the ground and another AG comes up and presses the barrel of his Glock into the side of the guy's head and says don't move or I'll shoot you MF for.

And after that, you know, we, you know, we always would do like a hot wash after to, to see how things went.

And that was definitely a an issue that came up.

That's like, yeah, we, that's not, that's no, no bueno.

Don't do that.

That's tactically.

Bad.

Exactly.

There's so many things wrong with that.

And it was just like, what are you doing?

But like a lot of the things that your question kind of it just seemed like we remedied ourselves whether it was on that squad or even maybe to a lesser degree on the CI squad when I was on it, you know, but I never, I don't remember like like a policy thing that was escalated up the chain so much.

Did you ever see the OPR Quarterly?

Oh yeah, those are fun.

Can you describe what those are for folks who are not FBI people or nurses?

Yeah, we would wait for these things to come out like.

It's a whole morning.

Yeah, exactly, 'cause you're like, I never want to be that guy or whatever.

That's that's Can you believe that?

So what they are is every.

So an OPR is an internal investigation on an employee and to make, you know, to try to maybe inform the employee base, they published this OPR quarterly, which highlights some of the cases that internal investigations adjudicated.

And they have a very scripted kind of format with these things.

They lay out some brief facts of the case and then they'll tell you what the discipline may have been with it, whether, you know, there's these things called aggravators and mitigators, like there's a standard penalty for something.

And then like in mitigation, you know, you were highly decorated in the past or something in aggravation, you were like a a real big idiot.

And so we're going to hit you harder.

And so, you know, we would always wait for those things because usually it always featured a lot of very poor judgement, like, you know, agents abusing the view car in various ways.

Like going to strip clubs in the work day or?

Exactly or.

Taking, taking, taking their stripper source home.

Yeah, yeah.

To avoid the wife for something you know, I don't know how many.

These funny things.

But listen in.

In mitigation, mitigate.

Was a really good.

And he was a Cub Scout leader and father of four children.

But in aggravation, he was also known for drinking on the job and had previously wrapped his Buchar around a telephone pole.

And right there you.

Go, you know, something about that that's frustrating.

You know, I think they just do it for a self-serving purpose to to show the the employees that they actually take action against misconduct.

But here's a story.

So I'm in Newark as a fairly new agent, but there's a new agent that comes in even newer than me.

He's on probation and I come into work one day and find out that he was arrested for drunk driving.

He was driving the wrong way on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at night and I think it was his Bukar.

I'm not 100% sure of his Bukar, but he got arrested for or DUI.

In my mind, he's a probationary agent.

That's it.

He's fired like you're done, but there is no, you know, mitigating factors there.

They didn't fire him.

I I was shocked.

So what happens is he goes for his trial for on his DUI and the cop doesn't show up to be a witness.

So what happens?

Dismissed.

Of course you get you know, they did him a favor right now.

I don't know if anybody arranged that favor or not, but charge was dropped.

And so here's a guy that had a DUI, he spends another maybe year or two in in Newark and then he gets transferred to DC or takes a transfer, puts in for it to the AG protective detail.

Smart.

Within I don't even think he reported for duty within maybe a week or two of him arriving, he once again is drunk driving on the the roads in Maryland and this time his drunk driving results in the vehicular homicide of a teenager and the serious injury of the passenger.

If he was properly prosecuted and or terminated like everybody believes he should have been and and could have been and maybe that kid would still be alive.

An 18 year old kid lost his life because the FBI failed to do what it should have done and hold people accountable.

It resulted in a kid losing his life to a drunk driver, a person that they know the FBI knew had a problem with drunk driving.

It's it's indefensible, it's an excuse.

Yeah.

No, that's exactly it.

And then you also probably have a slightly different perspective after you're your life now looking back at some of these Oprs in the way that they're drafted and the charges on them.

And when you've seen what they're willing to put in an OPR file, it probably changes the game a little bit about how you look at those things and whether or not they were being particularly.

Truthful.

It makes it even worse because I now know not only from personal experience, but from other people sharing their personal experiences, the FBI is more than willing to fabricate and exaggerate allegations against somebody in an OPR investigation against them if they just don't like you.

But yet at the same time, they won't legitimately hold people accountable that clearly, you know, should be held accountable.

They wield it simply as a tool.

The two tiers of justice that we see in society is alive and well inside the FBI, unfortunately.

I just got a text message before we decided to start recording.

Friend of mine who's been watching the case that's out of Montana and it was the SSRA.

So the what do they call that?

Is that supervisory senior or is it?

Supervisory resident agent, senior supervisory special resident agent.

I think I want to get it mixed up SSR, Yeah, in the in the RA above another Ssas even, but still in the same pay grade.

But but he's technically the head of that office.

So as I recall, he was out of Helena, Mt.

I'll post the story over on X so people can find it because it's worth reading.

NBC covered it, but he was arrested by the state police for stalking an X and I don't know if it was a girlfriend or a wife.

The details escaped me right now.

I I saw the headline and I knew the story already a little bit.

He'd been arrested for stalking and there was a protective order that was put in place by this this female that this guy was doing dangerous and predatory stuff.

And you know, you're arrested by one of your quote UN quote state local partners, right?

People you got to have a good relationship with.

And he was out on bail and waiting for trial.

So the FBI let him stay in his job as AGS 14 supervisor of the FBI on a domestic violence stalking charge, a woman who feared for her life.

And he was able to continue it all the way until I the outcome of the trial is irrelevant because he was able to retire from the Bureau while under investigation for a violent and dangerous thing.

And I think there was some physical violence that was involved previously.

So I'll get the whole story out for people to hear it.

But you know that kind of stuff.

Kill a teenager, run down your ex-wife and scare the hell out of her in her house and make her live in fear of her life because you're an FBI agent who still carries a badge and a.

Gun Yeah, yeah, they're they just, I mean, people refer to this mafia thing and it really is an apartment descriptor form.

They act like a mafia.

Would they to have this unrighteous system of carrying out the, you know, retaliation and retribution against people and ignoring things that clearly should be punished?

I mean, I posted recently about perjury in the J6 case.

I mean, I have the receipts like I have the testimony transcript.

I have an audio recording of his comments.

I mean, it's dead to rights, but yet nothing 0 no accountability whatsoever.

It's bad news.

I want to tease people and do a Part 2 of this.

We'll continue recording right now.

And but what I want to Can you give me a summary of kind of some high points to some of the salacious details we're going to have to get into to tear out the rest of your story now that you had your eyes opened and and Jim Comedy decided that it didn't matter whether or not somebody was violating federal law.

Yeah, So I go, I do my protective disclosure in 2015, you know, whatever sort of insignificant retaliation, I never complained about it type of a thing.

And I'm going on with my career.

And then in 2018, I'm, I'm taking my, my off ramp, if you will, getting out to the field just to where I want to retire.

And I end up in Knoxville, TN and I come here in 2018 and you know, I've got like 6-7 years to go going to finish out my career here as a supervisory special agent.

And I had no expectation of being a whistleblower or, or anything.

And then suddenly a lot of bad things happened in the last couple years that again, like I just couldn't turn a blind eye to Like I wasn't going to allow violations of the Constitution.

I wasn't going to allow people to fabricate predication of investigations and just kind of go along with it.

But and I and surprised that everybody else was willing to go along with it.

It still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

People just think differently.

I guess there's two ways of people thinking.

There's people who I like to say I took an oath to the Constitution, not the institution of the FBII think a lot of people take an oath to the institution of the FBI, which is a source of a lot of our problems.

It's going to conclude our Part 1 right there.

It's Bill Taylor.

You can find him on X.

It's at RETFBI like retired FBI, Rhett, FBI.

Check out Bill's commentary on there.

If you're looking for documents, they are all there.

He is a gifted writer and he, I think he says a lot of things that you should hear from another voice than my own and you should hear from another voice than some of the other whistleblowers you've heard.

It's got a small enough platform that you're going to see it's not biased.

It's just what the man sees.

And I think it will resonate.

We don't have to agree on everything, but I think we're going to agree on a lot of the main stuff and then check in for for Round 2 of this because we're going to do it a little bit further where we get into what actually ends up being, I think probably the nastiest thing, including all the was there a was some death threats involved in the, the next round of this round, I mean.

We can get into death threats, assassination lists, We can get into J6 related.

We do.

And the retaliation from the FBI we're.

Going to do all.

That we shouldn't do that.

It's worth, it's worth.

Bring it out.

And that is the Sunday sit down with Bill Taylor.

Round one, Part 1, You guys are going to have to like, share and subscribe it if you want to get to Part 2.

I'm just saying put it out there.

This one is sponsored by our folks over on locals.

If you guys want to hear a little teaser.

Part 2, we have FBI agents committing perjury on the stand.

We've got street fights that turned into domestic terrorism charges and we have a hit list of 35 FBI employees and some real wild stuff going on with J Sixers.

So guys, make sure you guys listen to this mostly so you have an understanding that it's just not me out there telling this stuff.

And you can support us and sponsor this program yourselves by joining us over on LOCALS.

It's Kyle serafin.com.

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Really appreciate all of you guys joining me and I look forward for you seeing us on Tuesday and then also match in Part 2 next Sunday.

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