A former FBI official slammed FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday for reportedly firing an agent trainee who displayed a homosexual pleasure flag on his desk.
“This is insane on so many levels,” stated Michael Feinberg, a former assistant particular agent in cost, in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
Patel — who notified the agent in coaching of his speedy termination in a letter dated Oct. 1 — cited the agent trainee’s “poor judgement” for putting “an inappropriate display of political signage” on his desk whereas assigned to the Los Angeles subject workplace underneath Joe Biden’s administration, in accordance with MSNBC.
The letter didn’t explicitly consult with the pleasure flag. CNN was first to report the firing.
The agent trainee — a longtime worker with the FBI — was the recipient of a number of awards for service, was a subject workplace variety program coordinator and displayed a pleasure flag at his workstation, per CNN. Two company veterans instructed the community that such a show doesn’t violate the FBI’s previous insurance policies.
Wednesday’s firing arrives lower than per week after studies surfaced on the FBI terminating greater than a dozen brokers who had been pictured kneeling throughout a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington, D.C., following the homicide of George Floyd.
Trump — when requested by Actual America’s Voice reporter Brian Glenn final month about “a lot of people” feeling “threatened” by the Progress Satisfaction flag, which incorporates parts of the transgender flag — stated he would have “no problem” banning its show if the First Modification didn’t get in the way in which.
HuffPost has reached out to the FBI for remark.
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Feinberg, in his interview with Wallace, famous that there are concerns underneath the Hatch Act that prohibit sure kinds of “political advocacy” by federal workers. Nevertheless, a pleasure flag “implicates none of those.”
He added that each FBI subject workplace and Justice Division constructing would fly the pleasure flag outdoors of their amenities in June when he labored for the FBI.
“So what this employee was doing was not at all out of line, out of the norm or at all inappropriate,” Feinberg stated. “It’s absolute madness, and the fact that Kash Patel would go after this individual is lunacy.”
Feinberg claimed that the agent trainee — whom he didn’t title — received an Lawyer Basic’s Award, the DOJ’s highest award for investigative or prosecutorial accomplishments.
Feinberg, who spent a portion of his profession on the FBI in the identical workplace because the agent trainee, stated his outdated colleagues confused the significance of the worker’s involvement within the company.
“This erosion of constitutional protections and rule of law is getting so far out of hand that I don’t understand why American citizens are putting up with it,” he stated.
