Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
When FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Veltri addressed a room of reporters Sunday, he presented himself as a disinterested investigator in the second attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life. But Veltri was known at the FBI to be “adamantly and vocally anti-Trump,” according to a whistleblower account reported by The Washington Times.
“The FBI has assumed the role as the lead federal law enforcement agency in the investigation,” said Veltri, who is in charge of the FBI Miami Field Office, in the press conference. “We will continue to support this investigation with the full resources of the FBI.”
Veltri appeared alongside Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, Palm Beach State Attorney Dave Aronberg, and a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service to discuss the second assassination attempt against Trump, which occurred as the former president played golf Sunday afternoon in Palm Beach.
The attempted assassin allegedly hid in the bushes at Trump International Golf Club, and was aiming an SKS-style rifle through the fence when a Secret Service agent spotted and engaged the man. He fled, and the Martin County Sheriff’s Office apprehended him shortly thereafter.
Veltri assured those at the press conference the FBI would diligently investigate the matter.
“We’ve deployed a number of resources, including investigative teams, crisis response team members, bomb technicians, and evidence response team members,” he said.
Conflict of Interest?
Last year, however, a whistleblower told the House Judiciary Committee that the FBI made Veltri scrub his anti-Trump social media posts before promoting him to lead the Miami Field Office, according to The Washington Times.
“It was well known that Veltri was adamantly and vocally anti-Trump,” the whistleblower said in a disclosure, reported by the Times.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, Deputy Director Paul Abbate, and Executive Assistant Director of Human Resources Jennifer Moore were all allegedly involved in telling Veltri to whitewash his online posts. According to the Times, the whistleblower said those officials were worried about whether “information related to Veltri’s political bias can be removed from the public domain” rather than about his “bias against Trump.”
“Wray, Abbate and Moore wanted to ensure that Veltri appeared non-political, [so] Veltri was ordered to remove all of his Facebook and social media posts that were anti-Trump,” the whistleblower said.
The whistleblower also said, if an agent was deemed to be a “right-wing radical,” Veltri was in charge of efforts targeting those agents’ security clearances.
The FBI insisted to The Washington Times at the time that the “allegations about political bias impacting decisions … and SAC Veltri’s social media accounts and posts are demonstrably false.”
Veltri began working as an FBI special agent in 2002, according to a press release. Throughout his career, he worked in areas like anti-fraud, anti-trafficking, “civil rights squads,” and anti-terrorism, even doing a stint in Iraq.
He became chief of the FBI’s civil rights unit in 2016, where he enforced “hate crime, color-of-law, human trafficking, and Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances [FACE] Act investigations” across America. The FACE Act criminalized physically obstructing a person from obtaining an abortion and has become a favorite weapon of those targeting the pro-life movement. A Detroit jury convicted seven pro-life demonstrators — including a preacher, an evangelist, missionaries, a former police officer, and an 89-year-old concentration camp survivor — last month for allegedly violating the FACE Act, as The Federalist previously reported.
Veltri became special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office in March 2023, according to LinkedIn.
The Federalist reached out to an FBI representative, but the agency did not respond with comment in time for publication.
Weaponizing Justice
The FBI has a history of anti-Trump animus. During the 2016 election, the FBI recommended no charges be filed in then-Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, but launched the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign based on shoddy intel and used it to spy on campaign staff. Even after Trump won the election, the FBI continued with Crossfire Hurricane and used it to undermine the Trump administration.
Special Agent Peter Strzok, who was involved in investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and in Crossfire Hurricane, was revealed in 2018 to have expressed support for Clinton and hostility to Trump in leaked texts, as The Federalist previously reported.
Strzok was communicating with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair. The two called Trump a “f-cking idiot,” a “d-uche,” and a “disaster.”
Ahead of the 2020 election, FBI officials pressured Big Tech companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, which contained damning implications for Joe Biden that could have tilted the election. The agency and its affiliates have since been involved in comprehensive online censorship efforts.
The Department of Justice charged Trump last year with alleged mishandling of classified documents after the FBI carried out a dramatic raid at the president’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach. Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach state attorney who joined Veltri in Sunday’s press conference, dragged Trump last year on MSNBC, saying President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice had him “dead to rights” in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case and deriding the actions of Trump’s employees as “amateur hour.”
A judge tossed the case in July.
The same month, an FBI employee expressed disappointment on Facebook that Trump survived his first assassination attempt, posting a meme of the Grim Reaper missing Trump with the caption “AWWW SO CLOSE.”
‘Not the Best Thing for this Country’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced Sunday that the state would conduct its own investigation of the most recent attempt on Trump’s life.
DeSantis said during a press conference Monday that he sees the need for an independent investigation, citing “multiple violations” of state law. He said his office would make an announcement about the investigation in “the ensuing days.”
“There’s a need to make sure that the truth about all this comes out in a way that’s credible,” DeSantis said. “With all due respect to them, those same agencies that are prosecuting Trump in that jurisdiction are now going to be investigating this? I just think that that may not be the best thing for this country. Nevertheless, they have their prerogative, but we have our prerogative.”
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.