Telling the truth inside the federal government now comes with a price — and Steve Friend has paid it over and over again.
“I received news right before Christmas that you had been fired by the FBI,” BlazeTV host Steve Deace tells Steve Friend on the “Steve Deace Show.”
It all started when Friend was assigned to what he calls “the most important, highest-priority case in the history of the FBI” — January 6. This ultimately led to Friend becoming a whistleblower in 2022 when he saw the way the government was weaponizing the law to go after American citizens.
“What I found was that so few people who are currently in the employ of our federal government, in the employ of the FBI, were willing to actually stand by my side when I brought forward my concerns,” Friend tells Deace.
“And that resulted in my ultimate suspension and eventually having my security clearance suspended and permanently revoked,” he explains.
While Friend was promised that things would be different under the Trump administration, it hasn’t changed — and has ended in his termination from the FBI.
“I get a phone call Sunday night, December 7, from the FBI that says I am to report to work the following day. And I did. I reported to work Monday, December 8,” Friend tells Deace. “Was actually driven to Jacksonville. I was not the recipient of a gun because I didn’t have an active security clearance.”
“The FBI, in fact, told me they couldn’t assign me any work, and I had to be escorted around like a prisoner through the facility because they couldn’t allow me to have unfettered access to their facility. I didn’t have access to a computer, a cell phone,” he continues, noting that he did receive credentials and went to work the next few days.
“I had no insurance information, no back pay, and finally was told, ‘You have 400 hours of vacation time. Feel free to use it,’” he adds.
When Friend decided to use the vacation time to take his wife to Tampa for a Christmas event, he got a call asking him to come back to the office — to which he responded that he was out of pocket and couldn’t be there.
“They said, ‘Okay, come back on Monday.’ An hour later, got a text message from Caitlin Doornbos, a journalist from the New York Post, that said she was working on a story about the FBI planning to fire me and wanted a comment,” he tells Deace.
“So, apparently, the plan was in that they were going to bring me back as a sort of humiliation ritual to fire me, but they didn’t execute it properly because they leaked it to the media to besmirch my reputation before they had actually fired me,” he says.
“Wound up getting a termination letter signed, autographed by Kash Patel himself dismissing me as an FBI agent,” he continues, adding, “and then 90 minutes later, the New York Post dropped their story, and then MAGA Inc. influencer crowd went to work to try to besmirch me and say that I had issued some sort of a veiled threat to the director but somehow got a credential and badge 72 hours later.”
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