Suspended Special FBI Agent Garret O'Boyle risks it all to warn Americans about politicized agency

WAUKESHA, Wis.— Contemplating the hellish past two years he and his family have endured at the hands of the FBI, indefinitely suspended Special Agent Garret O’Boyle paused for a moment over his breakfast plate at a favorite local diner.

How does one sum up such a nightmare roller coaster?

Bumped from his upward career-track FBI job based on provably bogus charges, O’Boyle was suspended and lost his security clearance, his salary, his health insurance, his home, and his peace of mind. All thanks to the FBI, which he says knew the charges that started it all were false — but proceeded against him anyway. Who has words for that?

As it turns out, O’Boyle does.

“It’s evil,” he said.

During his days as a patrol officer with the Waukesha Police Department, O’Boyle sometimes walked a beat downtown near the end of his overnight shift. One of his favorite breakfast haunts was Dave’s Family Restaurant on West Broadway.

More than seven years later, O’Boyle, 38, found himself back in a booth at Dave’s, enjoying a hamburger steak, eggs, and hash browns while trying to process and verbalize what the past two years have wrought.

Back then, his goal was to become an FBI special agent, a dream he realized in mid-2018. His attempts to rectify serious problems he found at the FBI were met with a weaponized response — an unpaid suspension and a campaign of retaliation that has devastated him, his wife of 14 years, and their growing family of four daughters.

“I’ve been telling my wife since the beginning of the suspension that we’re different people now,” O’Boyle explained. “We’re changed forever. We’re never going to be the Garret and Heidi that we were. I struggle with that on one end, because we liked our life.”

As a new special agent in July 2018, O’Boyle was assigned to the resident agency in Wichita, Kansas, part of the Kansas City Field Office. He excelled at the work. In his first two years, he was named to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, was selected for the Kansas City Division’s SWAT team, and became a defensive-tactics instructor.

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, O’Boyle saw cracks form in the facade of the FBI as he once imagined it. There were serious problems with how the FBI handled its response to the virus. Several times O’Boyle spoke to supervisors about FBI practices he believed were civil rights violations that ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution and violated federal law.

“It soon became clear that no one within FBI management or leadership took seriously his good-faith protected disclosures of FBI wrongdoing — much less investigated them, fixed the problems or punished the wrongdoers,” said Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, a Virginia-based group that advocates for government whistleblowers.

Convinced the FBI had become politicized, O’Boyle took his concerns to his local congressman, U.S. Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kan.). Thus began what was to become a long string of whistleblower disclosures to Estes and later to U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who became chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee after the 2022 midterm elections.

O’Boyle’s whistleblower disclosures were a litany of alleged wrongdoing, including COVID testing requirements and vaccine policies with no basic exemptions for religious objections. He said the FBI was targeting employees who refused to take the experimental, gene-modifying COVID shots. In all, O’Boyle reported 19 disclosures alleging the FBI’s COVID policies violated the law.

O’Boyle told Estes’ staff that the FBI opened a politically motivated investigation of journalist James O’Keefe III and Project Veritas. The FBI raided the homes of O’Keefe and two staff members in November 2021, ostensibly searching for information on the theft of presidential daughter Ashley Biden’s diary.

The U.S. Department of Justice made a legal filing in the case that claimed Project Veritas was not a journalistic organization. O’Boyle said the FBI knew that wasn’t true. The Project Veritas investigation was labeled internally by the FBI as a “sensitive investigative matter” for news media. That meant the organization was classified as a journalistic enterprise.

O’Boyle’s disclosures kept coming.

In March 2022, he told Jordan’s staff that the FBI had created a new “threat tag” in its system — EDUOFFICIALS — and ordered that it be applied to alleged threats against local school boards by parents. He said these cases were often local matters based on unreliable, anonymous tips.

O’Boyle “reasonably believed the FBI was engaged in politically motivated law enforcement targeting, wasting resources and abusing the FBI’s authority,” Leavitt wrote in a July 2024 summation of O’Boyle’s case.

In May 2022, O’Boyle disclosed that the FBI was using the public leak of the Supreme Court decision in the landmark abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a pretext to target pro-life individuals, who were tagged as potential risk for abortion-clinic bombings. O’Boyle believed those actions were a “gross misuse of resources and a gross abuse of authority,” Leavitt wrote.

The FBI National Press Office has declined several requests over the past year to comment on O’Boyle’s case.

O’Boyle reported the FBI was pushing Jan. 6-related investigations and seeking subpoenas based on uncorroborated and ambiguous information, unreliable tips, and questionable methods of identifying suspects. O’Boyle had been asked to make an identification of a possible Jan. 6 suspect using a 25-year-old driver’s license photo, something he refused to do. He would not sign a request for a subpoena in the case with such a flimsy pretext.

In August 2022, O’Boyle reported the FBI was using patriotic symbols such as the Betsy Ross American flag and the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag to help define domestic terrorists. That information was included in the bureau’s Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide.

Symbols the FBI associated with domestic terrorism included the Liberty Tree, Revolutionary War imagery, the popular Second Amendment phrase Molon Labe (ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ), and a list of so-called “martyrs” including Vicki Weaver — shot in the face and killed by the FBI at Ruby Ridge, Idaho — and Ashli Babbitt — shot and killed by U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on Jan. 6, 2021.

Amid all of the turmoil, O’Boyle was looking for a new start. He applied to be part of the new National Surveillance Team, part of the FBI Critical Incident Response Group based in northern Virginia. He was selected for the prestigious group in June 2022 and began planning to move his wife and then-three daughters to Stafford County, Va.

By mid-August 2022, the family home in Wichita was sold and most of their belongings were put into storage. O’Boyle attended the 10-day FBI Surveillance Certification Course in Manassas, Va., in preparation for his new job.

O’Boyle used his free time in the evenings to search for a new house. He visited some 40 candidates before finding their dream house on the last night of his trip. It was an immaculate, four-bedroom home set into a hill on three wooded acres just outside of Stafford, Va. He said it was the kind of place not just to raise a family but think about retiring too.

“We were very excited for this next phase of life and new location to explore,” Heidi O’Boyle, 38, said. “We had experienced the Flint Hills of Kansas and were excited to be within driving distance of the ocean along with all new topography of forests and lakes that Virginia had to offer.”

Unknown to O’Boyle at the time, the FBI had quietly opened an investigation on him on Aug. 1, 2022. Later allegations claimed he made an “unauthorized disclosure” to the media that was “uploaded on a social media website.” Under FBI policy, the charges should have automatically blocked him from being reassigned and moving to Virginia.

That didn’t happen. Was it by design?

A whistleblower who worked in the FBI’s Security Division later told Empower Oversight that O’Boyle’s transfer to Virginia was allowed to proceed despite the investigation.

Heidi O’Boyle had just given birth to daughter Lucy via caesarean section on Sept. 8, 2022, a fact known to his new supervisor in Manassas and officials in the Kansas City Field Office from which he was departing.

The family belongings were shipped to Virginia, and the O’Boyles headed to Wisconsin for a visit. O’Boyle traveled east to report for duty in Manassas on Sept. 26, 2022. What should have been a great day in his career instead was the leading edge of a hurricane.

When O’Boyle arrived at the FBI offices, he was led into a conference room by the Critical Incident Response Group’s Acting Chief Security Officer Laila Blake and approached by two special agents. They did not identify what office they worked for but said they were “traveling around the country interviewing anyone who had accessed the Project Veritas case.”

The agents peppered O’Boyle with questions about Project Veritas. They referred to a May 2022 television broadcast on which O’Keefe interviewed an FBI special agent who was hidden in shadows and his voice altered to protect his identity. They asked him about information leaks to the Washington Times.

O’Boyle told the agents he had made protected disclosures to Congress in accord with federal law but did not leak information to the news media.

The actual agent who appeared on the program was Kyle Seraphin. He provided an affidavit to the FBI through his attorney stating O’Boyle never disclosed information to Project Veritas but did make legal protected disclosures to Congress.

It didn’t matter. It appeared the die was cast either way.

“I just was basically telling them, ‘Look, I was whistleblowing to Congress about these things.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, that’s separate.’ And I’m like, ‘Pretty sure it’s not, because you’re accusing me of leaking things that I took to Congress. You’re accusing me of leaking those to the media, which I didn’t do.’”

Two more agents and a security officer entered the room. O’Boyle was ordered to surrender his badge, credentials, building passkey, and service weapon. As he unholstered his pistol and went to unload it, one of the agents grabbed his arm as if he were a threat. O’Boyle recalled thinking, “Seriously, dude? You don’t need to do that.”

In less than an hour, O’Boyle was back outside the building. What had just happened? He walked into a buzz saw. His new job just evaporated, his security clearance was suspended, and he was about to be placed on an indefinite job suspension that has stayed in place for two years.

When O’Boyle called home to share the shocking news of his suspension, Heidi was sitting at the table holding 2-week-old Lucy while the other three girls worked on home school. “When I heard the words, ‘I was just suspended,’ I couldn’t even wrap my brain around it,” Heidi said. “I was saying, ‘What? What do you mean suspended? How? And for what?’ I remember thinking, ‘Are you ok? You’re alone there and just drove 14 hours to get there.’”

O’Boyle would eventually learn through Empower Oversight that the FBI could have simply had him come to Milwaukee, a 30-minute drive from where Heidi and his children were visiting. But they let him go through with selling his home and proceeding well into a move to Virginia before they suspended him.

Another whistleblower told Empower Oversight, “The FBI did do this intentionally, that they did this to, I think his words were to, ‘Financially devastate them and leave them stranded in a new city with with no support,’” O’Boyle said. “And I mean, that’s exactly what happened.”

It was even worse than that.

His home office in Kansas City was told by the FBI in Washington, D.C., to stay out of it and let it play out, the whistleblower said, even though everyone knew Heidi O’Boyle was recovering from a C-section delivery and caring for a 3-week-old infant and three young children back in Wisconsin.

“They said, ‘Yeah, let’s pull the plug on this guy now in violation of our own policy, because we allowed him to transfer, and we told his chain of command in Kansas City, ‘Do not intervene.’"

“That’s evil,” he said.

Multiple FBI officials, including the lead investigator on O’Boyle's security-clearance case, knew it was only a theory that O’Boyle was the Project Veritas source, a supervisory special agent whistleblower told Congress in July 2024.

“By withholding this material information and allowing a false perjury referral based on false information, the FBI is responsible for significant damage to SA O’Boyle’s reputation,” Leavitt wrote to Jordan in July 2024.

Sean Clark, the supervisory special agent of the West Coast Clearance Investigation Unit assigned to O’Boyle’s case, went ahead with the suspension even after another FBI official of equal rank objected, according to a whistleblower memo from Empower Oversight.

Clark “bragged to at least one other FBI employee that he was going to really ‘screw’ O’Boyle,” the whistleblower disclosure said.

Leavitt said FBI Executive Assistant Director Jennifer Leigh Moore withheld exculpatory information about O’Boyle when she testified under oath before the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in April and June 2023.

Two years after the fact, in August 2024, Heidi O’Boyle learned from Apple that the FBI had apparently served a grand jury subpoena on the company for access to her iPhone and iCloud account, which contained call logs, personal messages, photographs, and other data. What were they looking for? Was she a target, or was this a fishing expedition?

“Absolutely absurd that they would subpoena her information in any way, especially considering that they had scant evidence at best that I even did anything wrong,” O’Boyle said. “Yet they make the extraordinary leap in logic to claim that she was somehow involved in criminal activity? What a joke. Absolutely absurd. Just more two-tiered justice.”

Heidi O’Boyle couldn’t believe the FBI apparently chose to snoop in her private communications at a time she was working tirelessly getting her family ready to move.

“I spent most of my final month of pregnancy packing and cleaning our Kansas home that we sold, so to think that they requested access during that time made me angry,” she said. “I would not have chosen to move across the country with our four kids, one being a newborn, and yet knowing this, they opened an investigation and allowed us to continue all the preparation and work it takes to move."

“I felt violated,” she said, “frustrated, and sad that the FBI continues to have some level of power over us.”

The fallout began almost immediately. The O’Boyles were required to report any “adverse events” to their mortgage lender, which promptly canceled the loan for their dream home near Stafford. They were $30,000 in debt for moving costs the FBI was supposed to cover as part of O’Boyle’s new job. No payment was forthcoming.

And now — with Wisconsin’s fall weather soon to give way to the brutish Midwest winter — they were homeless. The family’s clothing and belongings were in storage in Virginia. The FBI would not allow the O’Boyles to retrieve their things — even the children’s clothing. By the end of 2022, O’Boyle’s FBI salary would be cut off. What could be worse?

A Wisconsin relative offered the use of a recreational vehicle — a motor home — as a respite for the family of six. It was humble compared to their dream Virginia home, but it was a shelter. The O’Boyles gratefully accepted the offer. Their 3,400-square-foot home was traded for a Fleetwood RV Flair mobile home.

O’Boyle’s suspension came with its own set of rules. He was still an employee of the FBI, so he could not take another job or even look for temporary work to replace some of the lost income. This controversial policy has come under fire as a preemptive punishment. According to the DOJ Office of Inspector General, the average time FBI employees spend without pay waiting for a case decision is 17.5 months.

In October 2022, the O’Boyles took the RV that served as their home on a camping trip to get away from the controversy for a bit. They had been scheduled to close on their Virginia home on Oct. 5. But the sorrow over it all followed them on the mini-vacation. Seven-year-old Gwen wanted to ride her bike at the campground, but it was stuck in storage in Virginia, and the FBI was refusing the family access.

While her cousins zoomed around the campground on their bikes, Gwen tried to keep up, but it just wasn’t the same. “Gwen came to me with tears in her eyes, and I asked what was wrong,” O’Boyle recalled. “Through deeper crying she asked, ‘Why won’t they let us have our bikes? I just want my bike.’"

“I told her I didn’t know why, gave her a hug, and rubbed her back,” he said.

Not long after, O’Boyle wandered alone into the woods and shed his own angry, bitter tears.