FBI officials asked a longtime employee if he opposed COVID-19 vaccination, was a supporter of former president Donald Trump or had ever attended a pro-Second Amendment rally, according to memos obtained by Just the News and published Monday.
FBI officials asked a longtime employee if he opposed COVID-19 vaccination, supported former President Donald Trump or had ever attended a pro-Second Amendment rally, according to memos obtained by Just the News and published Monday.
Describing the incident as “The New McCarthyism” and a “shocking litmus test,” Just the News reported the memos “prompted a complaint to the Justice Department’s [DOJ] internal watchdog alleging political bias inside the bureau.”
The questions were asked during a spring 2022 security clearance — several months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for private employers and another federal court issued an injunction on the government’s vaccine mandate for federal employees.
The employee’s security clearance was subsequently revoked, Just the News reported, noting that the interviews “confirmed his support for Trump and gun rights and his concerns about the COVID vaccine.”
“I think it’s becoming more and more apparent that we have entered the new American McCarthyism era,” said journalist Kim Iversen on Wednesday’s edition of “The Kim Iversen Show.” Iversen said people are routinely and openly punished for their views and opinions.
She added:
“If you were any of those things that might red-flag you according to the FBI’s security clearance … if you were skeptical of Big Pharma vaccines and if you actually are pro-Second Amendment, a right that’s enshrined in our Constitution, then you potentially are un-American and you potentially need to be red-flagged … or you might just have the propensity to become a terrorist.”
‘If you question the vaccine, you’re potentially an enemy of the state’
According to Just the News, “The memos show that agents for the FBI’s Security Division asked at least three witnesses in spring 2022 whether the employee, whose name and job title was redacted from the memos, had been known to ‘vocalize support for President Trump’ or ‘vocalize objections to Covid-19 vaccination.’”
One of the witnesses confirmed that the employee in question “had declined to get the coronavirus inoculation” but “was following the bureau’s rules for unvaccinated employees.”
“Very against masks and vaccines. Not vaccinated. … Not vaccinated and tried not to wear mask,” the agent noted for one of the security clearance interviews, adding that the employee was “connected to anti-vaccinated FBI groups” but had participated in “no anti-FBI rhetoric.”
Commenting on the memo, Iversen said, “Can you believe this? So, if you question the vaccine, you’re potentially an enemy of the state. You can’t have a security clearance. We can’t trust you.”
‘The FBI has always been the American Gestapo’
Experts who spoke with The Defender said they were not surprised about the revelations.
“I ran investigations into problems in the federal government as a Senate investigator and I’m shocked to see this stuff,” said investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker of The Disinformation Chronicle, adding:
“Government agencies should definitely be backgrounding people for political extremism. Asking them whether they support government vaccine mandates seems fair, since it’s questioning whether someone would follow federal policy. But asking potential government employees which politicians they support — that seems to cross so many lines.”
Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., an author and professor of media studies at New York University whose research focuses on propaganda told The Defender the FBI’s actions are reflective of “government’s police powers growing still more dangerous” in recent years.
“It’s therefore way past time to junk the old ‘left/right’ divide, in favor of a subtler split between authoritarians and real believers in American democracy — whom some may call ‘populists,’ perhaps,” Miller said.
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender, “The FBI has always been the American Gestapo.” Boyle cited his addition to the U.S. government’s terrorist watch lists in 2011 after he refused a joint FBI-CIA request to become an informant on his Arab and Muslim clients.
Boyle said that he remains on these lists, “five or six” in number, to the present day, noting that when he applied for Social Security benefits, he was told his name “had come up on a computer alert list” and he was “going to have to have a personal interview — which is not how it is usually done.”
“I had about a one-hour interrogation, where I politely and diplomatically had to convince the Social Security examiner that I was a law professor, not a terrorist,” he said.
Evidence the FBI’s practices were ‘not isolated’
The employee’s lawyer, Tristan Leavitt, submitted a letter to the DOJ inspector general with these whistleblower disclosures, alleging that the security clearance process was commenced after the employee self-reported taking a vacation day on Jan. 6, 2021, to attend the pro-Trump rally outside the U.S. Capitol that day.
“The FBl’s intentions are made clear by the questions it chose to put in black and white on a government document,” the letter states, arguing the FBI violated the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedent concerning the First Amendment and employment law.
“The Supreme Court held that terminating public employees for political patronage purposes — belonging to the wrong political party — ‘to the extent it compels or restrains belief and association is inimical to the process which undergirds our system of government and is at war with the deeper traditions of democracy embodied in the First Amendment,’” the letter states.
According to Just the News, FBI officials declined to comment on the story. However, two sources revealed that “there is evidence that information was gathered during FBI security clearance reviews on other employees’ political views, suggesting the practice was not isolated.”
In late 2022 and early 2023, subsequent releases of the “Twitter Files” showed the FBI colluded with Big Tech platforms such as Twitter — now X — and Facebook to keep track of and censor individuals who questioned the Biden administration’s COVID-19 policies or the 2020 U.S. presidential election results.
These documents included revelations that the FBI flagged specific users for Twitter to take action against, pressured platforms to remove purported “COVID misinformation” — including information confirmed to be true — and partnered with Stanford University’s “Virality Project” to develop an internal “ticketing” system for tweets to be further scrutinized for their content.
The Virality Project is affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory. Platformer reported Thursday that Stanford is “winding down” the observatory’s operations, as “the lab will not conduct research into the 2024 election or other elections in the future.”
Referring to the Just the News revelations, Iversen said, “This is really scary.” She added:
“We’ve talked to several FBI whistleblowers who’ve said, look, they’re going after Catholics. They’re going after parents at parent-teacher … conferences where the parents were angry, saying, ‘Hey, we don’t want our kids to be masked up all the time and we want you to open the schools back up.’ And they’re labeling all these people as terrorists. …
“We can’t be allowing the elites, the Deep State, the powers that be to be just eroding every right that we have and telling us that we need to become robots, just gobbling up everything they tell us or else we’re enemies of the state.”
