Former FBI agent, Nicole Parker, recently penned an opinion piece for Fox News in which she detailed her reasons for leaving a career she deeply loved. And, during a recent Sean Hannity interview, she tearfully reflected on the heart-wrenching decision to resign her position as an FBI Special Agent.
The FBI’s hiring process is rigorous. For every FBI agent selected to begin 20 weeks of training at the FBI Academy, located on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, roughly eleven thousand applicants are rejected. Agents are truly the best and brightest that American law enforcement has to offer. NATs, or New Agent Trainees, engage with a plethora of training challenges and objectives while at Quantico. Defensive Tactics, Firearms, and specialized investigative techniques covering a wide range of federal criminal violations are taught by veteran special agents brought in from the field.
The FBI Academy complex houses the world famous Hostage Rescue Team, which specializes in operating within extreme tactical environments. The world famous FBI laboratory, Hogan’s Alley practical exercise town, state of the art firearms ranges, and the National Academy are all located in a complex of modern facilities. It is a special place.
Lifelong friendships are established at the FBI Academy and a new agent’s reputation begins to form as soon as he or she crosses the threshold at the main building. Once through the doors, a new agent is confronted by a hallway approximately twenty yards long.
Mounted on the wall for a portion of that hallway are the photographs of ninety FBI agents who have lost their lives in the line of duty. It’s known as the Wall of Honor and harkens back to 1925 and records the first “in the line of duty death” — Edwin C. Shanahan.
Nicole Parker honors the memory of those who’ve died defending our freedom by giving Americans a reasoned and balanced understanding of what is really wrong with the FBI today. She also honors the men and women who continue to “stand on the wall” and defend the ideas engrossed in our founding documents — she does so by identifying where the real responsibility lies for all the recent FBI overreaching.
There are a dishonorable few, scurrilous and vain, who have disparaged the FBI’s rank and file. Former agents, junior in tenure, disgruntled, and singularly unsuccessful have made the outlandish assertion that an FBI agent’s work is less dangerous than that of a U.S. Mail carrier. A statement like that only demonstrates the source’s inexperience, naïveté, and belies an incompetence that barred them from meaningful investigative work.
There are ninety names on the Wall of Honor that forever brand with a hot iron anyone who diminishes the deadly work of FBI agents with the professionally irredeemable calumny “liar.” Let all such be relegated, quickly, to the dustbin of history.
Parker is not one of those. “It was my privilege to work alongside the finest and brightest in the FBI, local law enforcement and our federal partners,” Parker said in her Fox News piece. But, she recognized that a change in “trajectory” signaled an ominous new emphasis that directed FBI resources according to partisan priorities and narratives.
The result of this executive level politicization has been the exoneration of Hillary Clinton’s breathtakingly stupid and criminal mishandling of classified information, the baseless “Russia, Russia, Russia” campaign against Trump, the indefensible Mar-a-Lago raid, and the burying of Hunter Biden’s Laptop.
Most recently, the complete lack of interest by the FBI in the criminal buffoonery of Joe Biden’s collection of Top Secret documents, curated next to his green Corvette, is indicative of politics at play within the seventh floor halls of FBI HQ. Perhaps most disturbingly, we’ve learned of the FBI’s collusion with big tech to suppress the free speech of people with naughty opinions.
Parker calls all of this out in a credible way. Her honor is intact. She chose to resign in protest. Unlike some who’ve been forced out due to their own misfeasance. And she hasn’t attempted to climb the social media Sisyphean hill on the backs of her colleagues.
Here’s the big picture problem distilled into a single sentence by Parker. She told Fox News that “distancing myself from egregious mistakes, immoral behavior and politically charged actions taken by a small but destructive few FBI employees became exhausting.”
Within any organization there are always a “small but destructive few.” The leadership vacuum at the FBI has allowed this destructive few to gain disproportionate influence. The solution to this problem isn’t as hard as it may seem, and Republicans like James Comer and Jim Jordan of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability are showing promise. If the House, lead by Speaker McCarthy, can actually cohere an effective committee and ferret out the FBI’s politically compromised, then there is a great deal of hope for real reform — as long as we get something akin to the Church committee and not the cloak-and-dagger Pike committee. Reform is the adult, rational solution.
Former Special Agent Parker is showing a great deal of promise. And, as a member of the retired agent community, I’m rooting for her continued success. Parker should be speaking to Comer and Jordan, providing actionable insight from a dedicated, patriotic perspective.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member