Now that Democrats are in the minority in the House and unable to abuse their power as easily as they have done the last two years, they are resorting to shameless lies to sabotage oversight hearings and trash whistleblowers and other inconvenient witnesses.
They have anointed as queen of this disinformation operation, a little-known Democrat named Stacey Plaskett, who is not even a full-fledged member of Congress.
Plaskett’s favorite adjective is “so-called,” which is ironic since she is a so-called member of Congress.
She does not have voting rights as the “at-large” delegate for the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Yet she is a ranking member of the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, the first time a nonvoting delegate has occupied such a lofty post.
Fresh from besmirching two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, as “so-called journalists” who endangered people’s lives by exposing Twitter’s censorship regime, Plaskett and her colleague in dirty work, New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, are attacking FBI whistleblowers.
In a 316-page unauthorized report full of falsehoods and deceptively edited quotes from his confidential testimony to the committee last month, Plaskett and Nadler derided hero FBI Agent Steve Friend as a “so-called” whistleblower.
War on whistleblower
They lied about the status of his whistleblower complaint to the DOJ Inspector General, violated his confidentiality by leaking cherry-picked portions of his testimony to the media and then falsely portrayed him as being a kook in the pay of “far-right” Trump operatives.
Despite being a ranking member of the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, Plaskett doesn’t have voting rights as the “at-large” delegate for the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Friend, who first revealed his whistleblower complaint in The Post last year, sacrificed a career he loved as a respected member of the FBI’s Special Weapons and Tactics team in Florida to do the right thing.
He exposed the ugly truth about a hyper-politicized bureau, cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism, and using an overzealous January 6 investigation to persecute conservatives and violate their constitutional rights.
He stood against a two-tier system of justice in which Antifa revolutionaries commit domestic terrorism with impunity while the FBI raids pro-life groups and traditional Catholics who celebrate the Latin Mass.
For his trouble, Friend and his fellow FBI whistleblowers have been traduced by Democrats in Congress whose slimy deceptions were uncritically amplified by the media.
The central allegation against Friend was that the inspector general had dismissed his whistleblower claim.
But that’s just not true.
The IG confirmed this week that the investigation is ongoing and that Friend will be interviewed soon.
Democrats are the minority in the House after being the majority for the last two years.C-SPAN
This admission was prompted by Friend’s lawyers at whistleblower protection organization Empower Oversight.
After the Democrat smear sheet was published, Empower President Tristan Leavitt wrote to the IG on March 6 asking that he set the record straight because the silence of his office was being “hijacked by partisans and their media allies to leave a false impression with the public — all in the service of undermining a whistleblower for political purposes.”
On Monday, Assistant Inspector General Sean O’Neill confirmed in an official letter that the investigation is ongoing.
“As we conveyed to your office in early February, we are interested in interviewing Mr. Friend about his allegations, which remain under assessment by our office. We will follow up with you shortly to schedule an interview.”
So far, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone have issued corrections about aspects of their coverage.
But the damage is done.
The Plaskett-Nadler report was spun up to try to discredit the devastating testimony of Friend and other suspended FBI employees not as whistleblowers but just as “aggrieved” employees who have “trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories . . . and received financial support from a top ally of former President Donald J. Trump”.
The insinuation is that they are grifters and sellouts.
The truth is that Friend, a father of two small children, was suspended without pay as soon as he filed his whistleblower complaint.
“Aggrieved” employees who have “trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories received financial support from a top ally of former President Donald Trump.”
Then his wife lost her job in peculiar circumstances.
Then the FBI refused him access to his firearms training records, which he needed to get a license to do security work in Florida.
He was forced to resign in order to earn a living.
The gotcha that wasn’t
So, yes, during five months without a paycheck, he gratefully accepted $5,000 from the 501(c) charity Fight With Kash, which was set up by former prosecutor, Trump adviser, and House Intelligence Committee Russiagate investigator Kash Patel precisely to help FBI and other whistleblowers facing retaliation for speaking out publicly.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Patel knows all too well, after his Russiagate travails, that it’s a very different story on the other side of the political fence.
If you are useful to Democrats a constellation of legal, financial, and narrative protections are provided to you on a silver platter.
Take the BLM-Antifa rioters who got bailed out at the urging of Vice President Kamala Harris, or FBI agents like Timothy Thibault, who allegedly suppressed Hunter Biden laptop evidence and still got to resign with a full pension, and be represented pro bono by a pricey Democrat law firm.
It is despicable to portray an act of charity as if it were a form of corruption, but that’s what it’s come to in Washington, where Democrats are desperately scrambling to hide the abuses of the past two years, whether the dishonest narrative from their partisan Jan. 6 committee, the coverup of the Biden corruption story or the censorship industrial complex.
But the American people are beginning to see the truth.
The day Friend’s disclosures were published in The Post, a stranger came to his door, a retired Marine who just wanted to shake his hand.
“He was crying,” Friend recalled.
“This meant a lot to people.”
Opinion by Miranda Devine
