Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the main representative of his party in the Judiciary Committee of the US Upper House, has asked the FBI to clarify the resignation of 665 agents, employees and managers of the federal agency who between 2004 and 2020 resigned or retired from the FBI. service to avoid accountability in misconduct investigations. Many of the cases would be related to acts of sexual misconduct, including the hiring of prostitutes during missions abroad: a practice prohibited by this police and investigative arm of the government.
Grassley requested information from the FBI following a complaint from an informant who revealed some results of the in-depth review that the Department of Justice and State Attorney General's Office undertook two years ago in the FBI's disciplinary database. The examination was launched after an investigation by the AP agency into allegations of sexual misconduct against at least six top FBI officials. The acts investigated ranged "from unwanted touching and advances to coercion."
Along these lines, the Department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published last December a public information about the investigation carried out against five FBI officials involved in "sex trade" abroad.
Among the 665 employees who between 2004 and 2020 left the agency to avoid the consequences of investigations of such conduct and other abuse or neglect, 45 were high-ranking officials. This was indicated by Grassley in the letter that he sent this week to the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, and to the attorney general, Merrick Garland.
The deserters left after the opening of the investigations that affected them but before the federal office issued a disciplinary or dismissal letter, the senator said.
AP inquiries from two years ago concluded that "several senior officials" at the federal body avoided disciplinary action even by retiring with full benefits...and in some cases "after allegations of sexual misconduct against them were substantiated." ".
In one such case, an FBI deputy director stepped down after the inspector general determined he had "harassed a subordinate and pursued an inappropriate relationship with her."
Although it is not clear how many of the cases refer to sexual misconduct - and this is one of the data he is trying to obtain - the parliamentarian estimated that there could be "hundreds".
The FBI said that, days after the AP story was published, it had implemented a series of changes that included the opening of a service to receive and deal with complaints of abuse, as well as the creation of a task force to review policies and procedures on bullying and victim support.
A lawyer who represents several victims of sexual misconduct within the FBI, David Shaffer, called on the US Congress to pay special attention to cases where the allegations are turned against their perpetrators: "The most serious abuse part of the FBI's disciplinary system is to retaliate against the women who complain themselves by launching investigations against them and thereby discouraging reporting," she said.
News of this serious taint on the agency comes shortly after prominent Republicans called for defunding the FBI and angrily protested the search of Donald Trump's residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, where federal agents seized more of a hundred classified and top secret documents that the former president had taken from the White House.
