1,004 days of betrayal for suspended FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle

The way suspended FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle sees it, he has lived through 1,004 betrayals — and counting.

O’Boyle was rewarded for his whistleblower disclosures to Congress with a loss of pay and benefits, attempted character assassination, and what he said is a malicious FBI effort to destroy him and his family.

‘I thought he was going to do the right thing.’

“If the FBI is trying to make you do something that is wrong or illegal or against policy or against rule, you’re supposed to be able to push back and be protected for doing so,” O’Boyle told Blaze News. “But then look what happens. You get suspended for a thousand days with no paycheck.”

What hurts as much as, if not more than, what was dished out by the Christopher Wray-led FBI is knowing the new FBI director, his friend Kash Patel, seems to have done nothing to repair the breach or bring justice to the case.

O’Boyle was suspended in September 2022 based on a provably false allegation that he leaked materials to Project Veritas.

O’Boyle well remembers that Patel and his foundation helped him financially in December 2022 so that the O’Boyle children could have a nice Christmas.

He recalls with clarity how Patel promised to fix the unjust suspension after he was nominated as FBI director in November 2024. O’Boyle said he was told he would be brought back to the FBI, have his security clearance restored, and be provided more than 140 weeks of back pay.

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Suspended FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle says he trusted that new FBI Director Kash Patel would end his prolonged whistleblower nightmare.Photo by Chris Duzynski for Blaze News

As recently as March 2025, O’Boyle said, he was in communication with Patel, who had been relying on several FBI whistleblowers for advice and feedback as he got himself established as the ninth director of the FBI.

But now the silence from the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., is deafening.

No solution. No decisions. No communication. And most recently, word through a third party from Patel: There would be no job restoration for O’Boyle.

“Initially we were still corresponding,” O’Boyle said in an interview. “I even had a few people who would send me information that they thought he should know, and I passed some of that on to him. The bit of communication I [last] got was just a thumbs-up emoji.”

As O’Boyle’s suspension flew past the 1,000-day mark on June 22, it appears that thumbs-up emoji might as well feature a different finger.

“I thought he was going to do the right thing,” O’Boyle said. “I've known him for almost three years now, and he told me — he told all of us — that he was going to bring us back. Now it’s the end of June. The last I heard was that that’s not going to be happening.”

‘There’s something in your file that is preventing him from bringing you back.’

O’Boyle said he has heard that Patel and podcaster turned Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino have been stung by sharp criticism of them on social media. They have been blasted for allegedly not doing enough to clean house of agents who took part in the weaponized abuses of the Jan. 6 investigation.

Patel once famously said if he were ever FBI director, on day one he would shut down the Hoover Building and turn it into a deep state museum.

O’Boyle said he has been restrained on social media when it comes to Patel and Bongino. He teams up with former Agent Steve Friend on a thrice-weekly show, “The American Radicals Podcast.” He is a founding member of “The Suspendables,” a tight-knit group of former whistleblowers.

‘Just trust me, bro’

Others have taken a more in-your-face approach, including former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin in his daily podcast, “The Kyle Seraphin Show.” Seraphin doesn’t hold his fire when criticizing the FBI. He mockingly refers to the two top leaders as “Dash Pongino.” He has ridiculed their reason for delays in reforming the FBI and says their attitude is one of, “Just trust me, bro.”

O’Boyle said it’s ironic that of the suspended FBI employees who testified before Congress in May 2023, one, Marcus Allen, was given his job back by the Biden administration. Now, with Donald J. Trump in the White House and an ostensible friendly running the FBI, it appears there is no plan to make O’Boyle and his family whole.

“You can argue the point that Joe Biden and Christopher Wray did more for FBI whistleblowers than Donald Trump and Kash Patel,” O’Boyle said.

O’Boyle’s whistleblower disclosures were a litany of alleged FBI 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 that the FBI’s COVID policies violated the law.

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 risks for abortion-clinic bombings.

O’Boyle said an official who has spoken to Patel told him he will not get his job back. Word has leaked out of the FBI that there are suddenly “character issues,” not just with O’Boyle but with former special agents like Steve Friend, who was driven out of the FBI for making whistleblower disclosures about Jan. 6 and other issues.

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Suspended FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle tells the House Judiciary Committee on May 18, 2023: “The FBI will crush you. This government will crush you and your family.”Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

“There’s something in your file that is preventing him from bringing you back,” O’Boyle said he was told.

If that’s true, O’Boyle said, that “something” must have been added to his personnel file recently. O’Boyle said earlier this year that he obtained the full contents of his FBI file as part of his appeal. Nothing was flagged as a “character issue,” nor was that term used by the FBI in falsely accusing him of leaking to the media, he said.

“There weren’t any character issues when we got hired,” he said. “There were no character issues when I was getting awards for cases I was working on or the highest annual rating an employee can get. Or when getting selected for specialty units like a SWAT team or the surveillance unit I was headed to.

“Suddenly, once Kash Patel and Dan Bongino get there, there are character issues,” O’Boyle said. “That doesn’t make sense or add up. It tells me that either Kash or Dan or both have decided for whatever reason to not make things right.”

‘You’re accusing me of leaking those to the media, which I didn’t do.’

Back in summer 2022, O’Boyle was looking forward to moving his family from Kansas to Virginia to take a new FBI job on a special surveillance team. He and his wife, Heidi, had found their dream house, sold their old home, and were packed up and ready to go.

When O’Boyle showed up for the new job in Manassas, Va., instead of taking part in a new-job orientation, he had his badge, credentials, and service weapon taken. Two agents asked him about Project Veritas and a May 2022 broadcast featuring James O’Keefe interviewing an FBI agent hidden in shadow with his voice disguised. It wasn’t O’Boyle who did the Veritas interview but rather Kyle Seraphin.

“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.’”

Within an hour of showing up for his new job, O’Boyle was back out in the parking lot. His security clearance was suspended — and so was he.

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Kash Patel, director of the FBI, attends the funeral of former New York Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik at St. Patrick's Cathedral on June 6, 2025, in New York City.Photo by NDZ/Star Max/GC Images

O’Boyle has since learned that the FBI knew it wasn’t him on the Project Veritas video. Yet officials allowed him to get far into a move halfway across the country, only to suspend him. Worse yet, according to whistleblower disclosures given to Empower Oversight, it was done on purpose.

Thus began an open-ended suspension without pay. The family’s belongings were in storage in Virginia. The FBI initially would not allow O’Boyle to access them, he said. Then the bureau stuck him with the $30,000 cost of the move to Virginia. The mortgage loan on the new house was canceled. Before long, the O’Boyle family members were back in their home state of Wisconsin, living in an RV.

During the 1,004 days since the suspension began, O’Boyle was not allowed to look for work even though he had no income. The family’s FBI-paid health insurance was canceled. A short time after that, Heidi had a miscarriage. The O’Boyles said they believe the stress from being persecuted by the FBI was a factor in losing their fifth child.

Unbeknownst to the O’Boyles at the time, the FBI had gotten a grand jury subpoena for Heidi’s iPhone. That gave the bureau access to texts, photos, and call logs. For what? They never found out.

If all of this were not bad enough, O’Boyle later learned that he was targeted by his own government for this treatment. On purpose.

The head of the West Coast office that reviews security clearances “bragged to at least one other FBI employee that he was going to really ‘screw’ O’Boyle,” according to an FBI whistleblower disclosure made to Empower Oversight. O’Boyle said he has it “on strong authority” that clearance review agent actually said, “We’re going to f**k the motherf**ker.”

“They didn’t do it because they thought it would hurt me,” O’Boyle said. “They did it because they knew it would. That was their intent.”

Congress does little

Although O’Boyle testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary in 2023, nothing ever came of it. Aside from a letter or two, no lawmaker intervened to help. And for all of the difficult days since, O’Boyle has been left to twist in the wind.

Empower Oversight investigated O’Boyle’s suspension and prepared a detailed 22-page letter refuting every point made by the FBI to suspend and later revoke O’Boyle’s security clearance. That document was sent to the FBI in March 2025. Nothing has happened since.

The chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), pressed Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi for action on the whistleblower cases.

“The Biden administration’s political weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI has caused significant damage to these institutions and its employees, but you’re in the position to right the ship,” Grassley wrote in a March 2025 letter to Bondi and Patel.

It all has been enough to make O’Boyle question whether he should ever have spoken up and made whistleblower disclosures to Congress.

‘Is there going to be an end?’

“For the longest time, I used to say I did the right thing,” he said. “I still think I did the right thing. But to have no conclusion at this point, no restoration of anything: position, back pay, health care, you name it.”

O’Boyle said he initially heard that even with Patel in charge at the FBI, his case would take some time.

“He [Patel] did say that it’s going to take a couple months or it’s going to take a few months,” O’Boyle said. “And I suppose looking back on that, I should have known then that it wasn’t going to happen.

“It really shouldn’t take a couple months. Why would it? Anybody who is familiar with the intimate details of my case, they know that the FBI did this intentionally.”

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Former FBI Special Agent Steve Friend and suspended Special Agent Garret O’Boyle host “The American Radicals Podcast.”Screenshot/Rumble via Garret O’Boyle

O’Boyle questioned why the FBI doesn’t just fire him.

“I’m still technically an employee, so fire me then,” O’Boyle said. “If you’re not going to reinstate me, then the only other option is for you to fire me. So why hasn’t that happened either? I don’t know what they’re waiting for. I don’t know what they’re trying to determine.”

O’Boyle does not believe he can get a similar job in law enforcement because of the beating his reputation has taken at the hands of the FBI. He recently interviewed for a police officer position at a smaller department. He was honest about his situation and explained the FBI suspension and whistleblower disclosures.

“They called me back a couple days later, and they led with — and I recorded it; I have the call recorded — they led with, ‘Hey Garret, it’s got nothing to do with what you got going on with the FBI, but we’re going to be moving in a different direction.’

“I’m a whistleblower, so no city or state or federal entity is going to hire me again.”

Garret and Heidi O’Boyle have leaned heavily on their faith to get through the 1,004 days.

“As the months have ticked by, it’s like, what do we do? Lean into our faith and trust in that,” he said. “But even that has become a monumental task because we just are like, ‘Hey, Lord, when is this going to end? Is there going to be an end?’

“We just feel like we’ve been forgotten. We don’t know what to do,” he said. “We don’t know how to take care of our family. And we’re crying out, ‘Lord, when is enough enough?’”

Blaze News reached out to the FBI for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

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