A former FBI agent who was prosecuted for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and later hired by the Trump-era Justice Department has left his government post, he announced Thursday.
In a post on X, Jared Wise said he came to the Justice Department hoping to expose alleged abuses by prosecutors and agents who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, but he now believes it’s not possible to complete that mission from his role at the department.
“I returned to Washington to fully expose the abuses by the FBI and DOJ against J6 defendants, but it became clear that this will only happen from outside of government. So I left and will do so,” Wise wrote in his social media post.
Wise served as an FBI agent and a supervisory agent from 2004 to 2017. After leaving the bureau, he was charged in connection with Jan. 6, facing felony charges of civil disorder and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers, as well as four misdemeanor counts. Prosecutors said that Wise encouraged the crowd outside the Capitol to hurt law enforcement officers, yelling: “Yeah, kill ’em!” They also accused him of entering the Capitol building.
Wise was pardoned by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office, along with nearly 1,600 other alleged rioters. Wise was in the middle of his trial at the time.
Wise served as a counselor to Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney who previously presided over the agency’s Weaponization Working Group until he was ousted from that role at the beginning of the year.
In his role at the department, Wise was involved in drafting a report that was focused on the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters, sources previously told CBS News. No public report has ever been issued, and it was unclear whether one will be made public in the future.
Wise announced his resignation the same day that Mr. Trump ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi and installed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as acting attorney general.
Martin and staffers in Blanche’s office sometimes clashed, in part amid frustrations over what Blanche’s staff perceived as a lack of progress by Martin on the work of the Weaponization Working Group, according to several sources familiar with the dynamics.
Wise’s role at the Justice Department drew criticism from congressional Democrats. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois called his hiring “a slap in the face to law enforcement everywhere.”
CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
