FBI Impersonator Went as Far As to Hire An Assistant, Authorities Charge

By Allan Lengel

ticklethewire.com

WASHINGTON — Over the years, many people have impersonated FBI agents, but few have gone as far as Brenna Marie Reilly. She even hired an assistant who worked out of her apartment.

Reilly, 29, of Arlington, Va., now faces a federal indictment in Virginia. She is free but in her mother’s custody in Holyoke, Mass., and has been ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation, court records show.

Authorities alleged that Reilly told neighbors, starting in August 2009, that she was a director of the FBI’s Forensic Division and an assistant director of the FBI., according to an affidavit from FBI agent Kari Alexa Parker.

In November, she offered two people a job as her assistant and asked them to fill out government applications, the affidavit said. One declined the job. The other accepted. The job was to begin Dec. 15.

The person who accepted quit his managerial position at the National Trade Productions so he could start with the FBI, the affidavit said.

The assistant started working out the apartment, transcribing interrogations supposedly conducted by Reilly, the affidavit said.

The assistant also edited condolence letters to families of CIA officers who died in the January bombing in Afghanistan.

Reilly did not pay the assistant initially, but did buy about $800 worth of Christmas gifts for his fiance.

Reilly also took the assistant to two Chantilly, Va. gun shops to supposedly buy him a gun. But instead she bought him a Smith & Wesson knife, the FBI affidavit said.

Sometime in December, she informed the assistant that they would travel to Germany and then Iraq for FBI business around the first of the year. Reilly showed the assistant what looked like an official itinerary for the trip, the affidavit said.

For Christmas, the assistant went to visit his parents in New Jersey. Reilly went up to New Jersey to pick up the assistant to go to Germany. The parents gave her a $50 silk scarf from Rockefeller Center in New York and a set of engraved cards to show their appreciation for getting their son a job with the FBI, the court affidavit said.

On Jan. 3, Reilly called the assistant’s parents and to tell them their son was in Germany and “that although they were not allowed to contact him, they should not worry…”

A week later, he called his parents and told them he never went to Germany and instead stayed in Reilly’s apartment and then a hotel “all under the threat that if he were to contact and tell anybody that he was actually in the United States, Reilly would terminate his employment,” the affidavit said.

On January 20, one of his parents filed a complaint with the FBI.

Reilly’s attorney, a federal public defender, did not immediately return a phone call for comment.