FBI supervisor hired prostitutes while on assignment, watchdog says
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An FBI special agent who supervised other agents had sex with prostitutes during overseas assignments and domestic travels, and used an agency-issued device to pay for the encounters, the Justice Department’s watchdog said Tuesday, committing policy violations that agency officials have said could expose agents to extortion.
The findings by the department’s Office of the Inspector General resemble damning reports of misconduct that have been made public in recent years showing FBI agents solicited or had sex with prostitutes in several countries while stationed overseas or traveling for work.
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In a one-page investigative summary released Tuesday, the watchdog said its investigators had substantiated allegations that the agent “solicited and used prostitutes on numerous occasions” and had misused an FBI mobile device, all in violation of Justice Department and FBI policy. The inspector general said the agent had failed to self-report their contact with a foreign national they were dating and foreign nationals whom they paid for sex – also a violation.
The inspector general’s summary said “criminal prosecution was declined,” without elaborating.
The summary did not provide the time frame for the alleged misconduct, nor the locations where it occurred. It did not say whether disciplinary action was taken and referred to the agent only as a “then-FBI Supervisory Special Agent.”
Representatives from the FBI and Justice Department headquarters did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Supervisory special agents are the FBI’s first line of managers, typically overseeing teams of special agents.
The allegations add to an emerging picture of a culture within the FBI in which agents freely paid for sex while working overseas.
A report made public this year in response to a lawsuit by the New York Times described agents partying and having sex with prostitutes in Cambodia, the Philippines and Thailand between 2009 and 2018.
A brief summary of the information in the report – similar to the summary published Tuesday — was first released in 2021 by the inspector general. The watchdog said at the time that four FBI officials had accepted commercial sex overseas, and that a fifth had solicited sex overseas. A sixth official committed misconduct by failing to report the behavior, the inspector general found. The document also described an FBI official giving another official “a package containing approximately 100 white pills to deliver to a foreign law enforcement officer.”
The Times sued in 2023 seeking the inspector general’s full internal report. Justice Department leaders under President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump fought the disclosure, saying it could violate employee privacy, the Times reported. The inspector general released a redacted version of the internal report last year before releasing the more complete document this spring.
According to the Times, FBI officials solicited prostitutes during an event in Bangkok in 2017. At another event in Manila in 2018, FBI employees accepted prostitutes paid for by a local law enforcement agency, the Times reported. Some of the activity took place in the presence of multiple FBI employees and, in at least one instance, a supervisor.
Two of the FBI officials resigned, two retired, and one was removed — all while the inspector general’s investigation was ongoing, according to the 2021 summary.
In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that several FBI employees had been recalled to Washington from cities across Asia as the inspector general investigated the prostitution allegations.
Justice Department policy bars employees from paying for sex. Violators can be suspended or fired, and supervisors who fail to report misconduct can be disciplined.
Eric Holder, the attorney general under President Barack Obama, said in a 2015 memo to staff that soliciting prostitutes “threatens the core mission of the Department, not simply because it invites extortion, blackmail, and leaks of sensitive or classified information, but also because it undermines the Department’s efforts to eradicate the scourge of human trafficking.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have said combating sex trafficking is a priority. They highlighted what they said were some of their early achievements on this front in news conferences in May, touting a large scale operation involving the arrest of 205 alleged sexual predators in less than a week.
Other federal law enforcement agencies have faced investigations in recent years after their agents solicited prostitutes overseas.
The Justice Department’s inspector general found in 2015 that federal drug enforcement agents allegedly had sex parties with prostitutes hired by local drug cartels; some of the agents under investigation still received bonuses worth thousands of dollars. About two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following for their roles in a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia.
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