GOP lawmakers call on FBI official to testify on alleged misuse of revoking security clearances

GOP lawmakers have called on a senior official in the FBI’s general counsel’s office to testify behind closed doors about the bureau’s misuse of the security clearance suspension and revocation process against whistleblowers.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, sent a letter to the official saying that the committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government want transcribed testimony from the official given their work related to the FBI’s security division (SecD).

Mr. Jordan said lawmakers learned the official was involved in critical decisions concerning the FBI’s adjudication of security clearances.

SecD is the division at FBI headquarters tasked with investigating allegations against FBI employees that may require the suspension or revocation of their security clearance through the adjudication process.

As part of this process, SecD says it applies uniform, government-wide protocols to make a final determination as to whether an individual is approved to hold a clearance.

However, recent protected FBI whistleblower disclosures to the committee revealed that the official did not provide due process to bureau employees whom the division was investigating.

“In your position … you had the authority to review and concur with final adjudication outcomes. The Committee and Select Subcommittee have received specific information from multiple individuals that you personally reviewed the security clearance adjudication recommendations for several FBI whistleblowers, including Staff Operations Specialist (SOS) Marcus Allen and Special Agent (SA) Garret O’Boyle,” Mr. Jordan wrote in his letter Thursday.

The Washington Times is not disclosing the official’s name.

The FBI declined to comment for this story.

Mr. Jordan said the panels received information that the official recommended opening the case against Mr. Allen, based on informal conversations the individual had with FBI employees in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He also said the committee learned that the official was aware of concerns from within SecD that the FBI about not providing employees with due process during the security clearance investigations.

“Instead of pausing the investigations due to these concerns, you instead permitted SecD to move forward with the suspension and/or revocation of the whistleblowers’ security clearances,” Mr. Jordan said. “SOS Allen and SA O’Boyle are two specific employees for whom you failed to provide sufficient due process.”

Mr. Allen and Mr. O’Boyle publicly testified to Congress in May 2023 about abuses they witnessed at the bureau and how the FBI retaliates against its employees who speak out against the agency.

More recently, The Washington Times exclusively reported that an FBI whistleblower, a special agent, notified Congress in early May that the bureau’s top brass removed him from his job in retaliation for defending Mr. O’Boyle.

The agent, an attorney who worked as an adjudicator investigating misconduct within the FBI, said his superiors turned on him when he recommended ending the suspension and lifting the security clearance of Mr. O’Boyle.

Mr. O’Boyle has been at the center of a whistleblower saga since his security clearance was suspended in September 2022 for allegedly leaking information about a criminal investigation into Project Veritas.

Mr. Allen had his security clearance suspended after the bureau accused him of having conspiratorial views about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and of sympathizing with criminal conduct.

According to a November 2023 protected whistleblower disclosure sent by a SecD employee to lawmakers, Senior SecD officials Dena Perkins and Jeffrey Veltri opened an investigation against Mr. Allen because he had emailed several news items within his office related to former President Donald Trump that were deemed conspiratorial.

However, the executives in Mr. Allen’s Charlotte field office were not pushing for him to lose his security clearance or even have an administrative misconduct charge leveled against him.

The Charlotte field office planned to handle the matter by having Mr. Allen transferred from working in Domestic Terrorism to another branch within the field office.

The investigation into Mr. Allen continued despite SecD not finding any anti-American issues about Mr. Allen, initially, the disclosure says.

According to the disclosure, SecD concluded Mr. Allen was sympathetic to conservative viewpoints when he performed two background checks on subjects with whom he found no glaring issues. However, SecD investigators did subsequent checks and found information that they were sympathetic to right-wing ideologies.

“There was no indication that Allen had actually ever seen the information, however, Perkins and Veltri had decided that Allen had hidden the information because he was sympathetic to anti-American conservative groups,” the protected disclosure said.

The disclosure also says a senior SecD employee challenged Ms. Perkins about her deeming that Mr. Allen was anti-American, and told her that she could not just make things up about a Marine who had fought in combat. Ms. Perkins responded by having that SecD employee transferred to a “do-nothing” job until he left SecD.

Another SecD employee also complained to Ms. Perkins about her treatment of Mr. Allen, but she had her mind made up and Allen had his security clearance revoked, according to the whistleblower disclosure.

The committee previously called upon Mr. Veltri, special agent-in-charge of the Miami field office and former SecD official, to talk to both panels. The committee recently released a transcribed interview with FBI former Assistant Director of Human Resources Jennifer Moore.