WAUKESHA, Wis.— Contemplating the hellish past two years he and his family have endured at the hands of the FBI, indefinitely suspended Special Agent Garret O’Boyle paused for a moment over his breakfast plate at a favorite local diner.
How does one sum up such a nightmare roller coaster?
Bumped from his upward career-track FBI job based on provably bogus charges, O’Boyle was suspended and lost his security clearance, his salary, his health insurance, his home, and his peace of mind. All thanks to the FBI, which he says knew the charges that started it all were false — but proceeded against him anyway. Who has words for that?
As it turns out, O’Boyle does.
“It’s evil,” he said.
During his days as a patrol officer with the Waukesha Police Department, O’Boyle sometimes walked a beat downtown near the end of his overnight shift. One of his favorite breakfast haunts was Dave’s Family Restaurant on West Broadway.
More than seven years later, O’Boyle, 38, found himself back in a booth at Dave’s, enjoying a hamburger steak, eggs, and hash browns while trying to process and verbalize what the past two years have wrought.
Back then, his goal was to become an FBI special agent, a dream he realized in mid-2018. His attempts to rectify serious problems he found at the FBI were met with a weaponized response — an unpaid suspension and a campaign of retaliation that has devastated him, his wife of 14 years, and their growing family of four daughters.
“I’ve been telling my wife since the beginning of the suspension that we’re different people now,” O’Boyle explained. “We’re changed forever. We’re never going to be the Garret and Heidi that we were. I struggle with that on one end, because we liked our life.”
As a new special agent in July 2018, O’Boyle was assigned to the resident agency in Wichita, Kansas, part of the Kansas City Field Office. He excelled at the work. In his first two years, he was named to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, was selected for the Kansas City Division’s SWAT team, and became a defensive-tactics instructor.
When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, O’Boyle saw cracks form in the facade of the FBI as he once imagined it. There were serious problems with how the FBI handled its response to the virus. Several times O’Boyle spoke to supervisors about FBI practices he believed were civil rights violations that ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution and violated federal law.
“It soon became clear that no one within FBI management or leadership took seriously his good-faith protected disclosures of FBI wrongdoing — much less investigated them, fixed the problems or punished the wrongdoers,” said Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, a Virginia-based group that advocates for government whistleblowers.
'The FBI will crush you.'
Convinced the FBI had become politicized, O’Boyle took his concerns to his local congressman, U.S. Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kan.). Thus began what was to become a long string of whistleblower disclosures to Estes and later to U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who became chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee after the 2022 midterm elections.
O’Boyle’s whistleblower disclosures were a litany of alleged wrongdoing, including COVID testing requirements and vaccine policies with no basic exemptions for religious objections. He said the FBI was targeting employees who refused to take the experimental, gene-modifying COVID shots. In all, O’Boyle reported 19 disclosures alleging the FBI’s COVID policies violated the law.
O’Boyle told Estes’ staff that the FBI opened a politically motivated investigation of journalist James O’Keefe III and Project Veritas. The FBI raided the homes of O’Keefe and two staff members in November 2021, ostensibly searching for information on the theft of presidential daughter Ashley Biden’s diary.
The U.S. Department of Justice made a legal filing in the case that claimed Project Veritas was not a journalistic organization. O’Boyle said the FBI knew that wasn’t true. The Project Veritas investigation was labeled internally by the FBI as a “sensitive investigative matter” for news media. That meant the organization was classified as a journalistic enterprise.
O’Boyle’s disclosures kept coming.
In March 2022, he told Jordan’s staff that the FBI had created a new “threat tag” in its system — EDUOFFICIALS — and ordered that it be applied to alleged threats against local school boards by parents. He said these cases were often local matters based on unreliable, anonymous tips.
O’Boyle “reasonably believed the FBI was engaged in politically motivated law enforcement targeting, wasting resources and abusing the FBI’s authority,” Leavitt wrote in a July 2024 summation of O’Boyle’s case.
In May 2022, O’Boyle disclosed that the FBI was using the public leak of the Supreme Court decision in the landmark abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a pretext to target pro-life individuals, who were tagged as potential risk for abortion-clinic bombings. O’Boyle believed those actions were a “gross misuse of resources and a gross abuse of authority,” Leavitt wrote.
The FBI National Press Office has declined several requests over the past year to comment on O’Boyle’s case.
O’Boyle reported the FBI was pushing Jan. 6-related investigations and seeking subpoenas based on uncorroborated and ambiguous information, unreliable tips, and questionable methods of identifying suspects. O’Boyle had been asked to make an identification of a possible Jan. 6 suspect using a 25-year-old driver’s license photo, something he refused to do. He would not sign a request for a subpoena in the case with such a flimsy pretext.
In August 2022, O’Boyle reported the FBI was using patriotic symbols such as the Betsy Ross American flag and the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag to help define domestic terrorists. That information was included in the bureau’s Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide.
Symbols the FBI associated with domestic terrorism included the Liberty Tree, Revolutionary War imagery, the popular Second Amendment phrase Molon Labe (ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ), and a list of so-called “martyrs” including Vicki Weaver — shot in the face and killed by the FBI at Ruby Ridge, Idaho — and Ashli Babbitt — shot and killed by U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on Jan. 6, 2021.
Amid all of the turmoil, O’Boyle was looking for a new start. He applied to be part of the new National Surveillance Team, part of the FBI Critical Incident Response Group based in northern Virginia. He was selected for the prestigious group in June 2022 and began planning to move his wife and then-three daughters to Stafford County, Va.
'Why won’t they let us have our bikes? I just want my bike.'
By mid-August 2022, the family home in Wichita was sold and most of their belongings were put into storage. O’Boyle attended the 10-day FBI Surveillance Certification Course in Manassas, Va., in preparation for his new job.
O’Boyle used his free time in the evenings to search for a new house. He visited some 40 candidates before finding their dream house on the last night of his trip. It was an immaculate, four-bedroom home set into a hill on three wooded acres just outside of Stafford, Va. He said it was the kind of place not just to raise a family but think about retiring too.
“We were very excited for this next phase of life and new location to explore,” Heidi O’Boyle, 38, said. “We had experienced the Flint Hills of Kansas and were excited to be within driving distance of the ocean along with all new topography of forests and lakes that Virginia had to offer.”
Unknown to O’Boyle at the time, the FBI had quietly opened an investigation on him on Aug. 1, 2022. Later allegations claimed he made an “unauthorized disclosure” to the media that was “uploaded on a social media website.” Under FBI policy, the charges should have automatically blocked him from being reassigned and moving to Virginia.
That didn’t happen. Was it by design?
A whistleblower who worked in the FBI’s Security Division later told Empower Oversight that O’Boyle’s transfer to Virginia was allowed to proceed despite the investigation.
Heidi O’Boyle had just given birth to daughter Lucy via caesarean section on Sept. 8, 2022, a fact known to his new supervisor in Manassas and officials in the Kansas City Field Office from which he was departing.
The family belongings were shipped to Virginia, and the O’Boyles headed to Wisconsin for a visit. O’Boyle traveled east to report for duty in Manassas on Sept. 26, 2022. What should have been a great day in his career instead was the leading edge of a hurricane.
When O’Boyle arrived at the FBI offices, he was led into a conference room by the Critical Incident Response Group’s Acting Chief Security Officer Laila Blake and approached by two special agents. They did not identify what office they worked for but said they were “traveling around the country interviewing anyone who had accessed the Project Veritas case.”
The agents peppered O’Boyle with questions about Project Veritas. They referred to a May 2022 television broadcast on which O’Keefe interviewed an FBI special agent who was hidden in shadows and his voice altered to protect his identity. They asked him about information leaks to the Washington Times.
O’Boyle told the agents he had made protected disclosures to Congress in accord with federal law but did not leak information to the news media.
The actual agent who appeared on the program was Kyle Seraphin. He provided an affidavit to the FBI through his attorney stating O’Boyle never disclosed information to Project Veritas but did make legal protected disclosures to Congress.
It didn’t matter. It appeared the die was cast either way.
“I just was basically telling them, ‘Look, I was whistleblowing to Congress about these things.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, that’s separate.’ And I’m like, ‘Pretty sure it’s not, because you’re accusing me of leaking things that I took to Congress. You’re accusing me of leaking those to the media, which I didn’t do.’”
Two more agents and a security officer entered the room. O’Boyle was ordered to surrender his badge, credentials, building passkey, and service weapon. As he unholstered his pistol and went to unload it, one of the agents grabbed his arm as if he were a threat. O’Boyle recalled thinking, “Seriously, dude? You don’t need to do that.”
In less than an hour, O’Boyle was back outside the building. What had just happened? He walked into a buzz saw. His new job just evaporated, his security clearance was suspended, and he was about to be placed on an indefinite job suspension that has stayed in place for two years.
When O’Boyle called home to share the shocking news of his suspension, Heidi was sitting at the table holding 2-week-old Lucy while the other three girls worked on home school. “When I heard the words, ‘I was just suspended,’ I couldn’t even wrap my brain around it,” Heidi said. “I was saying, ‘What? What do you mean suspended? How? And for what?’ I remember thinking, ‘Are you ok? You’re alone there and just drove 14 hours to get there.’”
O’Boyle would eventually learn through Empower Oversight that the FBI could have simply had him come to Milwaukee, a 30-minute drive from where Heidi and his children were visiting. But they let him go through with selling his home and proceeding well into a move to Virginia before they suspended him.
'Those are dead people, Freeburger.'
Another whistleblower told Empower Oversight, “The FBI did do this intentionally, that they did this to, I think his words were to, ‘Financially devastate them and leave them stranded in a new city with with no support,’” O’Boyle said. “And I mean, that’s exactly what happened.”
It was even worse than that.
His home office in Kansas City was told by the FBI in Washington, D.C., to stay out of it and let it play out, the whistleblower said, even though everyone knew Heidi O’Boyle was recovering from a C-section delivery and caring for a 3-week-old infant and three young children back in Wisconsin.
“They said, ‘Yeah, let’s pull the plug on this guy now in violation of our own policy, because we allowed him to transfer, and we told his chain of command in Kansas City, ‘Do not intervene.’"
“That’s evil,” he said.
Multiple FBI officials, including the lead investigator on O’Boyle's security-clearance case, knew it was only a theory that O’Boyle was the Project Veritas source, a supervisory special agent whistleblower told Congress in July 2024.
“By withholding this material information and allowing a false perjury referral based on false information, the FBI is responsible for significant damage to SA O’Boyle’s reputation,” Leavitt wrote to Jordan in July 2024.
Sean Clark, the supervisory special agent of the West Coast Clearance Investigation Unit assigned to O’Boyle’s case, went ahead with the suspension even after another FBI official of equal rank objected, according to a whistleblower memo from Empower Oversight.
Clark “bragged to at least one other FBI employee that he was going to really ‘screw’ O’Boyle,” the whistleblower disclosure said. O’Boyle said he has it “on strong authority” that Clark actually said, “We’re going to f**k the motherf***er.”
Leavitt said FBI Executive Assistant Director Jennifer Leigh Moore withheld exculpatory information about O’Boyle when she testified under oath before the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in April and June 2023.
Two years after the fact, in August 2024, Heidi O’Boyle learned from Apple that the FBI had apparently served a search warrant on the company for access to her iPhone and iCloud account, which contained call logs, personal messages, photographs, and other data. What were they looking for? Was she a target, or was this a fishing expedition?
“Absolutely absurd that they would subpoena her information in any way, especially considering that they had scant evidence at best that I even did anything wrong,” O’Boyle said. “Yet they make the extraordinary leap in logic to claim that she was somehow involved in criminal activity? What a joke. Absolutely absurd. Just more two-tiered justice.”
Heidi O’Boyle couldn’t believe the FBI apparently chose to snoop in her private communications at a time she was working tirelessly getting her family ready to move.
“I spent most of my final month of pregnancy packing and cleaning our Kansas home that we sold, so to think that they requested access during that time made me angry,” she said. “I would not have chosen to move across the country with our four kids, one being a newborn, and yet knowing this, they opened an investigation and allowed us to continue all the preparation and work it takes to move."
“I felt violated,” she said, “frustrated, and sad that the FBI continues to have some level of power over us.”
The fallout began almost immediately. The O’Boyles were required to report any “adverse events” to their mortgage lender, which promptly canceled the loan for their dream home near Stafford. They were $30,000 in debt for moving costs the FBI was supposed to cover as part of O’Boyle’s new job. No payment was forthcoming.
And now — with Wisconsin’s fall weather soon to give way to the brutish Midwest winter — they were homeless. The family’s clothing and belongings were in storage in Virginia. The FBI would not allow the O’Boyles to retrieve their things — even the children’s clothing. By the end of 2022, O’Boyle’s FBI salary would be cut off. What could be worse?
A Wisconsin relative offered the use of a recreational vehicle — a motor home — as a respite for the family of six. It was humble compared to their dream Virginia home, but it was a shelter. The O’Boyles gratefully accepted the offer. Their 3,400-square-foot home was traded for a Fleetwood RV Flair mobile home.
O’Boyle’s suspension came with its own set of rules. He was still an employee of the FBI, so he could not take another job or even look for temporary work to replace some of the lost income. This controversial policy has come under fire as a preemptive punishment. According to the DOJ Office of Inspector General, the average time FBI employees spend without pay waiting for a case decision is 17.5 months.
'It’s like watching a movie in my mind. The odor. The piling up of bodies in Iraqi police and army pickup trucks.'
In October 2022, the O’Boyles took the RV that served as their home on a camping trip to get away from the controversy for a bit. They had been scheduled to close on their Virginia home on Oct. 5. But the sorrow over it all followed them on the mini-vacation. Seven-year-old Gwen wanted to ride her bike at the campground, but it was stuck in storage in Virginia, and the FBI was refusing the family access.
While her cousins zoomed around the campground on their bikes, Gwen tried to keep up, but it just wasn’t the same. “Gwen came to me with tears in her eyes, and I asked what was wrong,” O’Boyle recalled. “Through deeper crying she asked, ‘Why won’t they let us have our bikes? I just want my bike.’"
“I told her I didn’t know why, gave her a hug, and rubbed her back,” he said.
Not long after, O’Boyle wandered alone into the woods and shed his own angry, bitter tears.
Heidi said the early part of Garret’s suspension was difficult.
“I was enduring the time of transition with a newborn but longed for our home, our comfortable beds, and bedrooms with doors,” she said. “I wanted the baby clothes that all three of our girls had previously worn at that stage. We had a newborn, we homeschool, we live in our home more than most. I longed for that security.”
Some fall nights when baby Lucy was awake, O’Boyle sat with her in a camping chair behind the RV and watched YouTube videos of the trial of Darrell E. Brooks, who was convicted of six counts of first-degree homicide and 70 other charges in the November 2021 Waukesha Christmas Parade massacre.
The Brooks case hit home for O’Boyle, because he used to walk a beat on the street where Brooks used his SUV to mow down families, parade marchers, and spectators in one of Wisconsin’s most infamous crimes. The SUV zigged and zagged down the street to maximize the carnage, plowing through a marching band, a “Dancing Grannies” group, and many spectators.
His former coworkers were in harm’s way that day. This was an event he would have worked during his time at the Waukesha Police Department.
One of his best friends from those days, Officer Bryce Scholten, faced down Brooks’ speeding SUV, firing his weapon three times in an effort to stop the madman. O’Boyle later spoke to Scholten about it. “Garret, like these kids [were] just run over and crushed by this guy. This evil guy,” Scholten said.
Brooks, who made a spectacle of himself acting as his own lawyer in his criminal trial, was found guilty of all charges in October 2022. He was sentenced to six consecutive life terms without parole, to be followed by more than 760 years in prison on the other charges.
The case made O’Boyle think of his combat tour in Iraq in 2009. Groups of Iranians often took buses into Iraq to visit holy sites and would return at night. O’Boyle’s platoon was dispatched to al-Abbarah in the Diyala Province when a suicide bomber got off one of those buses and detonated himself at a checkpoint. The explosion killed at least 45 and wounded more than 70, he said.
While responding to the call, the Army driver, Private First Class Dennis Freeburger, commented on a sickening smell in the air. O’Boyle recalled warning him, “Those are dead people, Freeburger."
“Then it was just silent the rest of the way.”
O’Boyle still recalls the sight of a dead child on the ground and an older woman slumped over dead in a white plastic lawn chair.
“It’s weird when I think about something like that today,” he said. “It’s like watching a movie in my mind. The odor. The piling up of bodies in Iraqi police and Army pickup trucks to be taken to God only knows where.”
At Christmas 2022, Kash Patel, a former senior aide to President Donald J. Trump, provided the O’Boyles with a $5,000 grant from his charitable foundation to help with expenses and allow Garret and Heidi to give their children Christmas gifts.
That unsolicited gesture was twisted by Democrats in the U.S. House as something unethical or illegal. They would later try to block the O’Boyles from receiving funds raised in a GiveSendGo campaign and made a criminal referral against O’Boyle to the Department of Justice, claiming he gave false testimony before Congress. The referral did not lead to any action and was quietly withdrawn by House Democrats.
Heidi O’Boyle said the challenges presented by the suspension actually had an upside.
“Despite the struggle that all of this brought, we still continued to see the Lord at work in our lives. Our precious Lucy became our comfort while our world was spinning out of control,” she said. “We grew closer as a family to get through each day, we enjoyed the little things and the simplicity of only living with the bare necessities. We turned to the Word for more direction and guidance than ever before.”
The family struggled during those early months, especially after O’Boyle’s FBI paycheck was cut off in January 2023.
His disclosures to Rep. Jordan’s office garnered him an invitation to testify behind closed doors Feb. 10 before the House Committee on the Judiciary. That was a dry run for what would be a widely covered May 2023 hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The hearing was the first wide airing of charges that the FBI was targeting its own employees for punishment and suspension for political reasons.
Democrats on the subcommittee predictably attacked the four witnesses, O’Boyle included, falsely accusing them of lying under oath, improperly taking money (charity), and even of not being patriotic Americans. It was a sight to behold, Democrats defending law enforcement and carrying the banner of so-called patriotism while trying to smear combat veterans as disloyal.
“I just want to tell you guys, get ready,” Jordan warned the witnesses. “Get ready because these guys are going to come after you. You know they are.”
O’Boyle, wearing a dark suit and a multicolor tie picked out by his daughter Iris, was the first to testify.
“I’m sad. I’m disappointed. And I’m angry that I have to be here to testify about the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ weaponization against not only its own employees, but against those institutions and individuals that are supposed to protect the American people,” O’Boyle said.
“I’m here today because even though I am wrongfully suspended from the FBI, I remain duty bound to the American people to play my small role in rectifying these issues,” he said.
O’Boyle’s most powerful words that day served as a warning to others like him who seek to cast light on the darkness in government.
“The FBI will crush you,” he said. “This government will crush you and your family if you try to expose the truth about things that they are doing that are wrong, and we are all examples of that.”
As O’Boyle left Capitol Hill with his D.C.-based attorney, Jesse Binnall, he received what he sees now was sage wisdom.
“He said to me something to the effect of, ‘Garret, what you’re doing now is more important than anything you ever could have done as an FBI agent.’ And as much as I want to disagree with that, he’s right,” O’Boyle said. “It’s not easy. Sometimes doing the right thing simply is not easy.”
More than 15 months after the congressional hearing, O’Boyle said he and his family continue to take hits and face challenges brought on by the FBI’s delay tactics.
“I thought things were going to change for the better. They haven’t really, because I got referred criminally on false pretenses,” he said. “Just more weaponization.”
Two Democrat House members, Rep. Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate O’Boyle for possible perjury, claiming he was the disguised agent interviewed by Project Veritas and had taken an illicit gift of more than $250,000 raised by former Special Agent Kyle Seraphin.
The problem with those allegations is that neither is true. O’Boyle was not the Project Veritas source but rather it was Seraphin, something O’Boyle said was known by the FBI well before he testified before Congress.
According to an FBI whistleblower represented by Empower Oversight, the video of the Project Veritas broadcast with the masked special agent was sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., which concluded by early 2023 that the voice behind the mask was not O’Boyle.
Seraphin started a GiveSendGo campaign to raise money to support O’Boyle and then-suspended FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen, both of whom were denied their FBI salaries while their cases were pending. The campaign has raised more than $618,000 from 11,316 donors. Seraphin posted a photograph of checks made out to Allen and O’Boyle on social media and shared his intention to present the funds as charity.
The checks were not cashed or deposited. Although under his suspension O’Boyle is stripped of all ability to function as an official FBI special agent in any way, FBI officials claim taking charitable donations would violate its policy prohibiting gifts.
“We have not given him the money that we raised for him,” Seraphin said. “I’ve invested it independently, and I'm holding on to it.”
By early 2024, O’Boyle lost his security clearance, was suspended from his job, was unable to look for work while his case is pending, was stuck with the bill for $30,000 in non-reimbursed moving costs, handed a $3,400 tax bill for the “benefit” of the moving expenses, and was being threatened with prosecution if he took the helping hand of charity.
What more could the FBI do to him?
After denying O’Boyle a paycheck for 13 months, he said the FBI notified him in early February 2024 that his government health insurance was being terminated. This news came not long after the O’Boyles learned they were expecting their fifth child.
“I remember her saying, ‘Garret,’ crying, ‘I’m pregnant and now we don’t have health insurance.’”
Heidi O’Boyle had a miscarriage a few weeks later.
“I’m not saying that was the only cause,” Garret O’Boyle said said. “I’m sure there were other things at play [than] the stress of that.”
“They still say you’re an employee and you have to follow our rules, but we took your pay, we took your health insurance, we took your job, we took your position, we took your duty, but you have to follow our rules still, and your family too, then they also have to.”
In July 2024, the FBI notified O’Boyle that it was revoking his security clearance after suspending it in September 2022. A week later, Empower Oversight filed a detailed complaint against the FBI with the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General.
The 24-page complaint alleges, among other things, the FBI could have placed O’Boyle on paid administrative leave, assigned him tasks not requiring access to classified information, the FBI does not have authority to make a security clearance a required condition in its employment agreements, and the FBI has no authority under a presidential executive order to suspend a security clearance.
“As if the FBI’s treatment of SA O’Boyle and his family when it suspended him wasn’t reprehensible enough, the FBI’s withholding of material information from Congress is more evidence of its vindictive retaliation,” Leavitt wrote. “By withholding this material information and allowing a false perjury referral based on false information, the FBI is responsible for significant damage to SA O’Boyle’s reputation.”
O’Boyle said he hopes his efforts will help future whistleblowers. Despite what appears to be a conspiracy to retaliate against him and potentially libelous testimony given about him before Congress, he is not seeking some big financial reward.
“I would never pick this. I’m actually a relatively shy person. I like my alone time. I like my privacy,” he said. “And now I’m thrust into this position, doing a podcast with Steve Friend three times a week, doing interviews for written work, for podcasts, for news."
“I don’t want this. I just wanted to be an FBI agent. That’s it, and uphold my oath. And yet here we are.”
Editor's note: Steve Baker contributed to this article.
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FBI whistleblower Steve Friend has a warning in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump — and it’s not for former President Trump.
“There was an exchange between deputy director Paul Abbate and Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, where to the layperson it seems reasonable the FBI wants to open up all avenues, remove the blindfold, have no blinders on, consider the fact that this could be assassination, this could be domestic terrorism,” Friend tells Jill Savage of “Blaze News Tonight.”
However, to the non-layperson — this could mean something more sinister.
“When you designate something as a domestic terrorist investigation, that enables you to make it classified, and when you have a classification code on there, you have to have a need to know in a security clearance,” Friend explains.
Because of that, the FBI can withhold information.
“The American people are not going to have the transparency that we ultimately need for this investigation,” he says.
While the FBI’s actions are concerning, that’s not Savage’s only concern.
“Lindsey Graham had a very concerning solution for the issues with the investigation,” Savage tells Friend.
“We have encrypted apps of an assassin, a murderer, and we can’t get into them all these days after,” Graham said. “That needs to be fixed folks. I’m all for privacy, but to a point.”
“What if, in the future, somebody’s using these apps to communicate with a foreign power. I think we need to know these things. We need to know them in real time,” he added.
Friend says that Graham’s suggestion would effectively render the Fourth Amendment a “dead letter, at that point.”
Graham’s use of the phrase “real time” is also concerning.
“Real time, which means continually monitoring it,” Friend explains.
“This is the government assuming that a tool will be used for ill, when it is just a tool. Because we don’t trust the government in this country. The job of law enforcement is not supposed to be easy. You’re supposed to have reasonable suspicion, probable cause, the burden is supposed to be there,” he adds.
To enjoy more provocative opinions, expert analysis, and breaking stories you won’t see anywhere else, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Kyle Seraphin has always been a "bit of a contrarian" — a trait that fueled him as a special agent, pushed him to be a whistleblower, and later put a target on his back courtesy of a weaponized and woke Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"I'm kind of this sort of sarcastic dude," Seraphin, 42, of Williamson County, Texas, said in an extensive interview with Blaze News.
Seraphin finds that sarcasm — and a quick wit — comes in handy.
After battling the bureau over heavy-handed COVID rules and authoritarian vaccine mandates, Seraphin became a protected whistleblower, taking his concerns to Congress. That eventually led to being targeted — set up, really — in a an apparent bureau effort to drive him out.
Seraphin transitioned from his life doing surveillance work for the FBI to broadcasting a daily podcast — "The Kyle Seraphin Show" — covering politics, current events, and yes, the FBI.
"I consider myself a husband and father first and American second, and then distant — whatever job it is now — podcast host. But obviously, former FBI. A recovering FBI agent, so that's part of it."
When he joined the U.S. military, he was 27. Most of his basic-training mates were barely out of high school. "I was the grandpa of the group, if you will, the oldest age you could go through," Seraphin said. "So I've definitely kind of marched to a different drummer most of my life."
When he got out of the service, Seraphin spun through a range of jobs: movie-studio financial analyst at Warner Bros, restaurant manager, paramedic, ad salesman at a CBS affiliate — even selling ergonomic office furniture for a manufacturer from Piscataway, New Jersey.
"I was in the military for just shy of four years," Seraphin said. "Got out of my first enlistment, worked for a hospital. I was a paramedic. I was an air-traffic controller. And I was trying to figure out — I’ve got these skill sets I learned. What am I going to do? And I applied to the FBI."
'That’s the part that has been the hardest for me is to have my livelihood stripped.'
Seraphin joined the bureau in 2016, drawing his first assignment just after the historic presidential election that saw Donald J. Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.
"So one of my first really official duties was walking around in the crowd at Trump's inauguration," he said. "It was also my first interaction with the Secret Service."
CORRUPTION: FBI Knowingly Suspends WRONG Agent for Info Leak youtu.be
From almost the get-go, Seraphin found his expectations didn't match with what he was assigned to do.
"As I joined the FBI, I was immediately disillusioned in my first assignment that what we were doing was not what I was sold," Seraphin said. "I was told that it was an elite organization. That's not my experience. I was told that it was the best job in the world. And that was also not my experience."
Seraphin's first assignment was in counterintelligence.
"I inherited investigations that were eight years old, into Americans with no allegation of criminality," he said. "That was not what I was signing up to do."
"The reality of counterintelligence investigations in the FBI is that it's very slow," he said. "It's a pace that is meant for seasoned investigators that have a lot of time under their belt that want to kind of take a step back and work slow, long-term investigations."
Seraphin found himself shoulder to shoulder with Secret Service agents at the White House after violent police-brutality protesters got so near to the White House that President Trump was taken to an underground bunker for safety.
"I was on front lines the day after they put him in the bunker," he recalled. "My entire surveillance team drove down in covert vehicles that we had to take the license plates off so that, you know, the Antifa types didn't recognize us. And we stood the line with Secret Service because they ran out of people in the uniformed division."
Seraphin's role as a whistleblower grew out of the 2020 COVID pandemic, when a highly contagious virus drove hundreds of millions of people into self-isolation, followed by a massive government push for a largely untested "vaccine."
Seraphin asked for a religious accommodation to the mandatory vaccine, concerned in part because the shots were developed using cell lines obtained from aborted babies.
In spring of 2022, Seraphin was suspended under the guise of an investigation for doing target practice with his service weapon at a shooting range on federal land in New Mexico. The sound of the shots had apparently prompted calls to local police from a nearby school.
'It appears that there is a political vendetta against your organization.'
The police officer who made contact with Seraphin at the range concluded that Seraphin did nothing wrong. The officer left the scene without taking any action, Seraphin said. The land was often used by the public for target practice.
Even before the unsettling incident in New Mexico, Seraphin had already begun networking with like-minded FBI agents in an online group he set up on the encrypted app Signal. Concern was high over the vaccine mandate. He figured at least 10% of bureau employees felt strongly enough to be conscientious objectors.
One of them turned out to be Special Agent Garret O'Boyle, attached to the FBI's Kansas City field office.
"We'd never worked together. We’d never met in person," Seraphin said. "We simply were part of the same chat group that I was sending out inspirational messages to and letting people know, 'You're not alone.'”
The men discovered that each of them had concerns about the bureau beyond the heavy-handed COVID mandates. They connected on the Signal group and each learned the other was primed to go to Congress with concerns about conditions inside the bureau — including a climate not tolerant of those with conservative views.
"I said, 'Yeah, I'm going to Congress, and I gave them four pages of handwritten notes of what is going on that is wrong in the bureau for the time that I've been there," Seraphin recalled. "And he said, 'I’ve been doing the same thing. I've also been trying to get my member of Congress interested. And I've got some other stuff.'”
Seraphin then did something that O'Boyle would later be blamed for. He contacted the crusading Project Veritas, led by James O'Keefe III. The investigative journalism organization became an FBI target in 2021 after it was provided with the diary of Ashley Biden, the president's daughter. The FBI response included SWAT raids on the homes of O'Keefe and some of his associates.
Seraphin discovered the unique way the bureau was treating the Veritas case. Soon he was doing an interview wearing dark shades and a hoodie from a darkened set with his voice disguised.
"It appears that there is a political vendetta against your organization," he told O'Keefe. "We don't see a lot of investigations into news organizations. That's not common. The ones that are, are almost specifically tied to threat countries that we'd be investigating for intelligence purposes."
"To see a criminal investigation, particularly one categorized as this one, is alerting, and it's surprising based on the public information that is provided," he said.
Seraphin told how the FBI had classified the Veritas investigation as a "SIM," or sensitive investigative matter, and classified in FBI records as related to federal election crimes. Seraphin believed the public — and many within the bureau — would like to know what a news story about the Biden diary had to do with elections.
Based on how the FBI classified the Veritas case, "They're saying that nobody would consider these people journalists, and nobody would consider them news media," Seraphin said. "And I know that to be false, because I'm looking at the document. So I made a decision. This is not the way that our country is supposed to work."
It turned out the methods Project Veritas used to disguise Seraphin's identity were easy pickings for the bureau. It did not take long for the FBI to unmask the voice and determine that Seraphin was the disguised whistleblower.
It would be natural to think that Seraphin would be the target of FBI investigators in the Veritas case, but that's not what happened.
O'Boyle, who had raised objections within his resident FBI agency office about the tactics being used to investigate January 6 cases, would soon be blamed for the "leaks" to Project Veritas.
O'Boyle had just decided to take a new job within the bureau to join an elite new surveillance unit based in Washington, D.C. He and his wife, Heidi, who had just delivered their fourth daughter, sold their home in Wichita, Kansas, shipped their belongings to a new home in Virginia, and thought they were on the way to a new life.
On the day O'Boyle was to start his new assignment, he was ushered into a conference room and told to surrender his FBI credentials and his service weapon. His security clearance was suspended. He was accused of being the Project Veritas leaker.
There was just one problem. He wasn't the leaker. He knew it. Seraphin knew it. And most significantly, the FBI knew it. And yet injustice in the case moved along like a runaway train.
O'Boyle's life suddenly turned upside down. The family's belongings were in storage awaiting the move into their new home. Their approved mortgage was canceled. He and Heidi returned to their native Wisconsin without their belongings — and without O'Boyle's FBI salary.
The O'Boyles were suddenly a homeless family of six. They sought shelter in a camper parked in a relative's driveway, just as the Wisconsin fall tumbled into winter.
“That’s the part that has been the hardest for me is to have my livelihood stripped,” O'Boyle said in 2023. “My ability to take care of my family just taken."
"And, you know, I’m sure people would say this is too extreme, but I don’t think it is. In the modern era, when you take a man’s livelihood away from him, and you tell him he can’t have another one, that’s a death warrant. And you’re going to say, ‘You quit. We’re not going to fire you. You quit.’"
'It’s absurd to me on every level. It defies credulity.'
While Seraphin has left the FBI and pursued his search for the truth in the world of podcasting, O'Boyle is still a suspended special agent without pay, forbidden from seeking or taking work to support his family.
In July 2024, Seraphin went public with the story and his belief that the FBI has opened a grand jury investigation in retaliation for his actions as a whistleblower.
“They went after Garret simply because we were connected together, we were good friends,” Seraphin said. “My belief is they lined it up because they knew we both had gotten into that COVID group that I started on Signal, which had 300 FBI employees.”
Seraphin is determined to see his friend's name cleared and the FBI forced to reinstate O'Boyle with back pay. He cheers on the work done by Empower Oversight, a support organization seeking to get justice for O'Boyle and other whistleblowers.
"What they revealed at Empower Oversight — which is something obviously I've known — is that I did that interview, not Garret," Seraphin said. "Which is a big deal because I know that they suspended my friend. And the other big deal is, is that the FBI knew it wasn't Garret."
Seraphin made headlines for exposing the FBI's interest in investigating the supposed threat presented by parents who went before local school boards to protest COVID lockdowns, the introduction of woke classroom materials, and the fight against placement of explicit homosexual materials in school libraries.
A few weeks after submitting his request for a religious accommodation for the COVID shot, Seraphin was tipped off about the effort to monitor local schools.
"I'm walking through the office, and I get this supervisor who's working intelligence stuff. He's an intel analyst," Seraphin said. "And he said, 'Did you see that email?'" Seraphin had no idea what the supervisor was talking about, but he soon received an email explanation.
"Again, I feel like God's plan is sort of like these crooked lines that make a straight path," he said. "So I got the email, and I opened it up, and I immediately took a walk and made an appointment to go talk to my member of Congress — because the email came from two places: the FBI’s Criminal Division and the FBI’s assistant director of counterterrorism."
'That's a no-brainer for me. That looks like perjury.'
They had plans to introduce a threat tag — "EDU officials" — to track investigations of parents threatening local school officials.
"I knew that [Attorney General] Merrick Garland had just gone in front of Congress, not five days earlier, and said that the FBI would not be using resources to investigate parents at school board meetings, using specifically counterterrorism resources," he said.
"Here we are seeing an email suggesting that the counterterrorism division is involved in this because the AD of counterterrorism signed it," Seraphin said. "That's a no-brainer for me. That looks like perjury."
"My allegation was never that the FBI can investigate parents," he said. "I don't want them to, but they can. I mean, I'm a parent. But there has to be an interstate nexus. There has to be a federal nexus for a federal violation of crime."
Seraphin took another case to Congress — a memo from the Richmond field office that described so-called "radical traditionalist Catholics" as potential terror subjects. It proposed infiltrating Catholic churches as some sort of threat mitigation.
'I'm going home. I'm going back to my father.'
That disclosure led the House Committee on the judiciary to open an investigation and issue a subpoena to FBI Director Christopher Wray. The bureau eventually withdrew the memo after a huge public uproar.
Documents obtained by House investigators showed the FBI "singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction," according to a December 2023 House report.
Seraphin's post-FBI life has taken him in new directions. He founded the Suspendables, an honor society of current and former FBI employees who are veterans of the weaponized bureau. The group has a website, a logo (an FBI badge turned upside down), and a catalog of merchandise.
He helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to support O'Boyle and Marcus Allen, an FBI analyst who also had his security clearance suspended and was in danger of losing his house. Seraphin is the dean of the Suspendables, using his podcast platform to keep the issues before the public.
He might well have learned the skills for the new role watching his father, Charlie Seraphin, a career radio broadcast journalist and station manager who later transitioned into vice president of marketing for the Texas Rangers and Kansas City Royals.
In 1993, Charlie Seraphin did radio interviews with cult leader David Koresh, the messianic leader of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. As the station manager at KRLD-AM radio in Dallas, he made the difficult decision to air messages from Koresh after the FBI made the request. It led to the release of eight children from the heavily armed building, weeks before an FBI raid and massive fire consumed the grounds.
Charlie Seraphin did a live interview in March 1993 with Koresh, who had been wounded in a firefight with federal authorities. After speaking with the cult leader off the air for 45 minutes, he put him on live, with the FBI's approval.
"I've been shot. I'm bleeding bad," Koresh said. "I'm going home. I'm going back to my father."
The younger Seraphin continues the broadcast tradition of his father with a daily show covering hot-button issues like the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago compound, the failure of the FBI to arrest the person who planted two pipe bombs in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, and the ongoing prosecutions of more than 1,470 Capitol protesters.
The contrarian continues in this new role as an observer and critic.
Noting that more than three and a half years after Jan. 6, the FBI has not made an arrest in the pipe bombs case, Seraphin said: "The fact that they didn't catch the most terroristic person on that day — that will forever live in infamy. It’s absurd to me on every level. It defies credulity."
Seraphin has been a whistleblower, calling attention to abuses inside the agency, but his former employer does not recognize him in that role.
"Democrats have said, 'Your agency has done an investigation and determined that you're not a whistleblower. So we don't recognize you as a whistleblower,'” he said.
"So let me say that in a different way: 'The government has investigated the government and found that the government did nothing wrong.'"
"Take that for whatever that's worth."
In response to a request for comment, the FBI National Press Office told Blaze News: "The FBI does not have any comment."
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