The question itself feels obscene, doesn’t it? Comparing the FBI to the Gestapo. That’s the kind of rhetorical excess that gets you dismissed as a crank, a conspiracy theorist, someone who’s watched too many movies and lost the plot.
Except the men and women saying it are not cranks. They’re not conspiracy theorists. They’re FBI agents with twenty years in, counting days until they can retire, nursing a genuine, deep-seated hatred for their own director and his coterie of Deep State lackeys.
When people who have spent their careers inside an institution start using that kind of language, you should listen.
The final straw for many of them was January 6. Not because they support what happened at the Capitol—most of them don’t. But because they watched their own agency handle it with a level of dishonesty that broke something fundamental.
Let’s start with what we know for certain. The FBI had intelligence about Antifa’s plans to infiltrate the crowds of Trump supporters and incite violence. That’s not speculation. That’s not rumor. That’s what the intelligence community told the Department of Homeland Security before January 6. The warning was there. It was ignored.
But that’s only half the story. The other half is what the FBI was doing with groups like the Proud Boys.
Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, has been an FBI informant since 2013. That’s not an allegation. That’s not a theory. That’s a matter of court record. A federal prosecutor, an FBI agent, and Tarrio’s own lawyer described his undercover work in a 2014 hearing. They said he helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in cases involving drugs, gambling, and human smuggling.
Tarrio denies it now. Of course he does. That’s what informants do when they get caught. But the transcript exists. The record exists. The pattern exists.
And the pattern is what matters.
The FBI has a long history of using informants to infiltrate groups, then becoming the spark that turns talk into action. The informant starts talking up the need to carry weapons. He provides money. He provides guns. He provides the idea. Then, when someone bites, when someone takes the bait and actually does something, the FBI swoops in. Arrests. Prosecutions. Victory laps. Another terrorist plot foiled.
That’s not counterterrorism. That’s entrapment. And it’s been going on for decades.
Now apply that pattern to January 6. Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader, is an FBI informant. He’s been working for them since 2013. He shows up in Washington on January 4 and gets arrested almost immediately—conveniently removed from the scene before anything happens. His followers go to the Capitol. Things happen. People die. And Tarrio sits in a jail cell, perfectly positioned to avoid any responsibility.
Was he the idea guy? Did he encourage actions that created legal risk for the suckers who tried to carry them out? Did the FBI use him the way they’ve used a hundred other informants before him?
We don’t know for certain. But we know enough to ask the question. And the question itself is corrosive to public trust.
The FBI used to be proud. It used to be respected. When J. Edgar Hoover ran it, people were terrified—but they also believed it was effective, that it caught bad guys, that it served some purpose beyond self-preservation. That’s gone now. What’s left is an agency that has become so politicized, so compromised, so deeply entangled in the games of the Deep State that even its own people can’t stand to be part of it.
Can we reform an FBI that behaves like this? I doubt it. Institutions this corrupted don’t reform themselves. They have to be broken open from outside, and that requires a level of public outrage and political will that simply doesn’t exist.
The agents counting days until retirement know this. They’re not sticking around to fix things. They’re just trying to survive until they can leave with their pensions intact. The ones who come after them will be different—more political, more pliable, more willing to play the game.
That’s not reform. That’s rot. And rot, left untreated, eventually consumes everything.
