Does it strike you as odd for an FBI agent with a demonstrated bias against former President Donald Trump to be heading up the investigation into the second assassination attempt on the former president in as many months? Okay, maybe not so odd, given the current state of affairs in our federal bureaucracy. Perhaps we can settle on “concerning” or “problematic.”
Yet, the Miami Field Office Special Agent in Charge (SAC) leading the investigation is Jeffrey Veltri, whose political preferences have seemingly been driving a number of questionable personnel actions at the agency.
Empower Oversight, the firm representing numerous governmental whistleblowers, has had its hands full trying to keep up with numerous calls for congressional testimony, pursuing retaliation claims, and even filing a defamation action against Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, on behalf of IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler.
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Empower also represents the FBI whistleblowers who testified before the House Judiciary Committee Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in May of 2023. (Who can forget the genius cross-examination of Democratic Rep. Linda Sanchez (CA) trying to blast FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen with tweets that…weren’t his?)
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Allen recently was vindicated (after over two years in limbo), reaching a settlement that included reinstatement of his security clearance and an award of back pay. But consider what he went through to get to that point:
Allen is one of numerous FBI employees who suffered retaliation after daring to question some of the agency’s actions.
Marcus Allen who is an FBI staff operations specialist also had his security clearance revoked this month. Allen got in trouble for daring to send public articles to his colleagues which he said was part of his job for “situational awareness.”
“Because these open-source articles questioned the FBI’s handling of the violence at the Capitol, the FBI suspended Allen for ‘conspiratorial views in regard to the events of January 6th,’” the report states, adding that the FBI did not give him approval to seek outside employment during his suspension.
Not only did Allen lose his security clearance, but he was also suspended without pay, and virtually all alternative avenues of income were foreclosed to him pending the investigation.
But that’s barely the tip of the iceberg. On Thursday, Empower directed a 22-page letter to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), detailing the numerous ways in which the FBI’s Security Division (SecD) violated regulations and even an executive order in its handling of Allen’s case, as well as that of FBI Special Agent Garrett O’Boyle. And further compounded the problem by making retaliatory moves against investigators looking into those matters who pushed back on the disciplinary actions taken against Allen and O’Boyle.
Who was the acting Deputy Assistant Director under whom SecD took these improper actions? Jeffrey Veltri.
🚨 We’ll see what @JusticeOIG Michael Horowitz has to say about FBI retaliation a week from tomorrow, when Horowitz testifies in front of @Weaponization alongside me and Marcus Allen—an FBI employee DAD Jeffrey Veltri improperly opened a security clearance investigation on after… pic.twitter.com/Fb9im9U1pW
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) September 17, 2024
Tristan Leavitt is the president of Empower Oversight. As indicated in the above tweet, Leavitt and Allen will again be testifying before the Weaponization Committee on Wednesday, September 25, alongside Michael Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector General. (That’s going to be a must-see hearing.)
The letter from Leavitt to Jordan provides a very detailed chronology of the improper retaliation taken against Allen, O’Boyle, and others, but below are some of the key excerpts involving Veltri:
Under then-acting DAD Veltri, the FBI’s Security Division (“SecD”) probed the political beliefs and personal medical decisions of FBI employees as part of its security clearance investigations. Additional whistleblowers from inside SecD have provided us information that SecD leadership improperly encouraged using those factors when considering suspending and revoking FBI employee security clearances to remove them from the FBI—without properly documenting those factors in FBI files.
Contrary to Director Christopher Wray’s recent testimony before your committee, the so-called “Trump questionnaire” was not the only time FBI’s SecD interrogated employees about co-workers’ support for Donald Trump and views on personal medical decisions, such as whether to take the experimental COVID-19 vaccine. The evidence clearly contradicts the FBI’s recent false claim that it “has not . . . retaliate[d] against individuals who make protected whistleblower disclosures.” In fact, the FBI took reprisals against employees it absolutely knew had made protected whistleblower disclosures—including to Congress.
…
As we have brought to the attention of the DOJ OIG, SecD whistleblowers tell Empower Oversight they participated in many discussions in which it became clear that Veltri’s and Perkins’s perspectives were that if an FBI employee fit a certain profile as a political conservative, they were viewed as a security concern and unworthy to work at the FBI. Witnesses also heard Veltri openly state that while FBI employees might have First Amendment rights, they had no right to a security clearance. It’s hard to imagine a clearer signal from a SecD leader that he approved, if not encouraged, leveraging security clearances as pretext to purge employees in a way that could not otherwise be done constitutionally.
WEAPONIZATION OF THE SECURITY CLEARANCE PROCESS
According to whistleblowers, one of the first politicized security clearance actions during the Biden Administration came after two FBI Intelligence Analysts had a discussion on an FBI IT system where one of the employees wrote he believed the 2020 election was possibly stolen and would like to see the outcome of voter fraud investigations. Veltri ordered that the Intelligence Analyst’s clearance be revoked, and made comments suggesting to witnesses that he thought this employee was not entitled to a security clearance because the employee did not believe in the Constitution.
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Yet AGC Gibbs also forwarded Mr. Allen’s emails to SC Veltri, apparently seeking to engineer a security clearance investigation instead. SC Veltri responded to AGC Gibbs that SIIS would open a new clearance investigation into Mr. Allen.
SIIS’s standard process is to refer concerns about eligibility for security clearances to its Clearance Referral Evaluations Unit (“CREU”). As part of its review, CREU contacts the relevant office to inquire what actions they’ve taken to resolve security concerns with an employee. If the concerns are deemed to require investigation, they are referred to SIIS’s Clearance Investigations Unit (“CIU”). Once CIU completes its investigation, it sends the file to the Clearance Adjudications Unit (“CAU”) for the file to be adjudicated by an independent decisionmaker. Rather than sending the information about Mr. Allen to be assessed by CREU, SC Veltri cut the normal process short and directed that it go directly to CIU to have an investigation opened. As SC Veltri’s successor would later note, this was an “abortion of the process.”
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The CIU investigator had all three of the serials approved by an acting supervisor rather than SSA Clark, suggesting he either anticipated Clark’s negative response or had already broached the subject with Clark. At some point the CIU investigator disclosed to his supervisory chain his concerns that applying the Adjudicative Guidelines, particularly “Guideline A – Allegiance to the United States,” did not justify suspending Mr. Allen’s security clearance. Regardless, Veltri and Perkins, by then serving as acting DAD and acting SC respectively, directed that Mr. Allen’s clearance be suspended anyway, contradicting the investigator’s conclusion that it was unwarranted. It was rumored in SecD that DAD Veltri and SC Perkins waited until a legal advisor to SecD management was away on leave before issuing the suspension because that advisor, AGC Adreanna Orlang, also opposed suspending Mr. Allen’s clearance.
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As mentioned above, the CIU investigator on Mr. Allen’s case was a highly-respected former SAC and former Inspection Division executive. But in retaliation for the CIU investigator’s protected whistleblower disclosure regarding the Allen case, DAD Veltri and SC Perkins removed the CIU investigator as the Allen case manager and transferred him to CREU. According to witnesses, the CREU UC said the investigator had been transferred because SC Perkins and DAD Veltri were “not about the pushback they were getting on the Marcus Allen case.”
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According to our SecD SSA client, DAD Veltri made comments suggesting Mr. Allen was delusional for referring to his religious belief instead of secular, moral or ethical reasons for disclosing wrongdoing. The implication to others in SecD was that DAD Veltri believed Mr. Allen’s Christian beliefs as a devout Catholic were a reason to revoke his access to classified information. Again, it is difficult to imagine a clearer signal from a SecD leader that improper considerations about an FBI employee’s protected First Amendment religious beliefs unconstitutionally infected the security clearance process.
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According to whistleblowers, Director Wray and Deputy Director Abbate selected acting DAD Veltri in September 2022 to become the new SAC of the Miami Field Office, the FBI’s fifth largest field office (and the office where AGC Gibbs was working remotely). But on September 29, 2022, you and Subcommittee Ranking Members Mike Johnson and Darrell Issa sent a letter to EAD Moore which read: “[W]e have received protected whistleblower disclosures that the FBI is engaging in a ‘purge’ of employees with conservative views by revoking their security clearances and indefinitely suspending these employees.” As EAD Moore’s second-level subordinate over the Security Division, Veltri was directly at the heart of those allegations. Additionally, FBI leadership reportedly learned of an investigation into Veltri for his role in the retaliation against the CIU investigator on Mr. Allen’s case. Accordingly, FBI leadership delayed announcing Veltri’s appointment.
Around this exact time period, our CAU SSA client briefed acting DAD Veltri regarding an FBI SSA under investigation for his texts with FBI employees who were on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, but not near the violence or breaking any laws. When CAU staff disclosed in the meeting that there was no basis to suspend the SSA’s clearance, Veltri ordered that the SSA’s clearance nevertheless be revoked. DAD Veltri went on an extended rant to the CAU staff that he didn’t even know why the case was being briefed. Multiple witnesses to the meeting reportedly commented that they had never seen such rude and unprofessional behavior by an executive in their entire careers.
QUEST TO JUSTIFY IMPROPER ALLEN CLEARANCE REVOCATION
According to whistleblowers, as the CAU adjudicator assigned to Mr. Allen’s case reviewed it in October and November 2022, he reportedly agreed with the CIU investigator that the facts did not merit revoking Mr. Allen’s clearance. However, the aforementioned interaction with DAD Veltri reportedly created significant apprehension within CAU about making a recommendation contrary to the outcome FBI leadership wanted.
To sum up, the man leading the FBI’s investigation into the second assassination attempt on former President and current GOP nominee Donald Trump oversaw the FBI’s Security Division at a time when it was probing employees’ political views via the “Trump questionnaire” and retaliating against those who held or expressed conservative viewpoints — and those who questioned that retaliation.
But I’m sure he’s “working tirelessly” (does anyone ever work indolently?) at getting to the bottom of this second near miss. Mostly sure. Maybe.
