One of the officials leading the hunt for prosecutors involved in investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol previously oversaw some of the cases himself. In a report published Tuesday, retired FBI official Christopher O’Leary told SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff the development was “outrageous.”
Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the FBI to provide names of those who worked on the Jan. 6 investigation, but “he should have started by acknowledging his own role,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Daly reported earlier this month. As co-chief counter-terrorism prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove participated in meetings of the FBI/NYPD Joint Terroism Task Force, where attendees discussed Jan. 6.
“In short, Bove was asking for the identities of agents who worked on some of the same cases that he himself oversaw,” Isikoff writes.
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O’Leary was deputy chief of the Joint Terrorism Task Force at the time, working to find those who participated in Jan. 6. “It’s outrageous that he is going to turn on the people that were his teammates just a few years ago,” O’Leary told the SpyTalk podcast. “I [have spoken] to agents and detectives non-stop for the last week and a half, and they feel betrayed.”
“If he had any concern, any objection,” about the Jan. 6 investigations, “he never voiced it,” O’Leary said.
“If he witnessed any violation of due process or any violation by an FBI agent or task force officer,” he would have needed to report it, “none of which was done," the former official noted.
“People are just going to leave,” O’Leary said. “So anybody who's eligible for retirement probably will just leave, right? Just out of self-protection. They'll raise their hand, they'll take their retirement, and they'll try to get out before something happens to them or before they're fired overnight, which is what happened to some of the senior leaders.
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“But if you go further down, [and] you can see your retirement and your pension within your sights, more junior agents may go as well," he continued. "Because if it's a coercive environment where you can't do your job, where you could be facing punitive action for just doing your job at any point in your career, well, it might not be the place or the culture you want to continue to commit yourself.”
“We’re in greater danger," O'Leary said of that potential outcome.
Read the full report at SkyTalk.
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