Top Former FBI Agent Calls Out DoJ Enforcer Bove’s “Betrayal”

Counterterrorism unit boss Chris O’Leary describes how Emil Bove—who demanded list of agents who worked Jan. 6 cases—helped oversee those cases himself.

Emil Bove: Rat (Getty via Fox News)

As one of the FBI’s most seasoned counterterrorism agents, Christopher O’Leary was singularly focused on one high-priority mission in early 2021: tracking down the men and women who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Within weeks, O’Leary—then the deputy chief of the bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in New York—had nabbed one of his top suspects: Samuel Fisher, a volatile QAnon conspiracy crank and self-described “dating coach” who had been spreading alarming messages on social media prior to the attack “telling people to bring guns” and “it was going to be 1776 all over again,” O’Leary recalls. The day after the attack, Fisher wrote on Facebook that he was there and that “it was awesome…” and that “people died… but if was f***ing great if you ask me…”

When O’Leary’s agents searched Fisher’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, they discovered an arsenal—thousands of rounds of ammunition, an illegally modified AR-15, an unregistered “ghost gun” and machetes.

“I mean this was a dangerous guy,” said O’Leary. (Fisher in 2022 pled guilty to misdemeanor charges for entering the Capitol and disorderly conduct on Jan. 6 and was pardoned last month by President Trump. He was separately sentenced to three and half years in New York State prison on multiple criminal charges related to his gun possessions.)

But today, when O’Leary, now retired from the FBI, looks back on the case, it is more out of anger than any sense of satisfaction that he had taken a potentially violent domestic extremist off the street.