The White House pressured the FBI to investigate anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles in violation of the Constitution, a whistleblower alleges.
A former supervisory intelligence analyst in the bureau’s field office in Los Angeles, Jill Fields, made a formal complaint to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Trump administration’s response to the protests around federal buildings last year, NBC News reports.
After President Trump saw a TikTok video of people using megaphones to alert the public about immigration agents, their legal rights, and the legal requirement of judicial warrants, he ordered FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate those organizers, according to the complaint. A person whose name was redacted in Fields’s letter told her that “the President wants this investigation.”
The protests came in response to stepped-up ICE activity across Los Angeles early last year. Fields’s complaint states that the FBI’s L.A. agents were pulled from active drug cartel cases to provide “optics” and “make a show for the president,” in the words of one of her supervisors.
When Fields spoke to a senior bureau official who dealt with privacy and civil liberties issues, that agent shared her concerns but said she planned to resign. Fields would later resign herself after she was removed from leading three programs, which she believes was...
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