“You need leadership that
believes in the nonpartisan independence of the agency.”
David Sundberg, former assistant
director in charge of the Washington field office
“I said, People in the
F.B.I. will follow the facts. We were waiting and waiting for that to happen.”
Blaire Toleman, former supervisory
special agent for the public-corruption squad CR-15
“We’re losing the ability
for agents to conduct their work without fear or favor because the F.B.I. won’t
protect you.”
Walter Giardina, former CR-15 agent
A Year Inside Kash Patel’s F.B.I.
Forty-five current and
former employees on the changes they say are undermining the agency and making
America less safe.
By Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser
When he returned to office last year,
President Trump called the F.B.I. a “corrupt” agency in need of overhaul. He
had by then been the subject of three F.B.I. investigations: Agents examined
his 2016 campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, his retention of classified
documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office and his attempts to overturn the
2020 election. Though all three inquiries took place in part or entirely under
Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director Trump appointed, he repeatedly accused
the bureau of mounting a partisan attack against him.
To replace Wray, Trump chose Kash
Patel, a former public defender and intelligence official who had never worked
for the F.B.I. and had spun conspiracy theories about the bureau. Since Patel’s
confirmation last February, the F.B.I. has undergone a transformation that has
upended its nonpartisan rules and norms, deeply rattling many of its 38,000
employees.
Patel has fired agents who worked on
the Trump investigations and radically changed the bureau’s mission. More than 20 percent of the F.B.I.’s work force has
been assigned to immigration enforcement, pulling agents and analysts away from
investigating public corruption, cybercrime, white-collar crime, drug
trafficking and terrorism. Patel has also been embroiled in controversies over
his use of government resources, his temperament and missteps in high-profile
investigations.
We interviewed 45 employees who work
at the F.B.I. or who left during Trump’s second term, as well as many other
current and former government officials. Beginning with Trump’s selection of
Patel, our sources narrated the events that most troubled them over the last
year. Many details of what we learned are reported here for the first time.
The F.B.I. is a rule-bound and
tight-lipped institution. Bureau policies prohibit active employees from
speaking to the news media without authorization. Even for former employees,
speaking out is a sign of serious alarm. Some of our sources shared their
stories anonymously because they feared retribution from the administration.
(To protect their identities, we are not indicating whether the people we quote
anonymously are still employed by the F.B.I.) We corroborated their
descriptions of specific events and conversations with colleagues,
contemporaneous notes and internal records.
Patel and other F.B.I. leaders named
in this article declined our requests for interviews, and we followed up with a
detailed list of questions. In response to a request for comment, Ben
Williamson, an F.B.I. spokesman, wrote: “This story is a regurgitation of fake
narratives, conjecture and speculation from anonymous sources who are
disconnected from reality. They can whine and peddle falsehoods all they want —
but it won’t change the facts that the F.B.I. under this administration worked
with partners at every level and delivered a historic 2025.”
We also asked the White House for
comment. “President Trump and F.B.I. Director Kash Patel are restoring
integrity to the F.B.I. by returning its focus to fighting crime and letting
good cops be cops,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a
statement.
Many current and former employees
fear, however, that the F.B.I. has become a weapon of the White House, and that
the firings and the diversion of resources to immigration enforcement have left
the country vulnerable to attack.
Three weeks after winning re-election,
Trump named Patel as his nominee for F.B.I. director. On a podcast, Patel had
promised to shut down bureau headquarters on his first day in the post and
reopen it “as a museum of the deep state.”
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division: I assumed Congress
would see how uniquely unqualified Kash Patel was for the job. I assumed the
Senate would do its due diligence and decide not to confirm him.
Michael Feinberg, former assistant
special agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Va.: When Kash Patel was nominated, we all knew in our bones
that the bureau was going to be a very different environment than any of us had
experienced before. He regularly referred to us as government gangsters. He was
also the author of three children’s books in which he’s a self-styled wizard
who saves King Donald Trump from the evil forces of the Justice Department.
Michael Bovin, former intelligence
analyst: A lot of people in the F.B.I.
have faith in the country and in the job. They may come from police or military
families. They think they’re doing the right thing and it will all work out.
And you know, there was a kernel of truth in what Patel was saying: There are
too many people in headquarters. Let’s get more people back into the field.
Human-intelligence agent: I wanted the White House to succeed. For 20 years, I
collected information for the president’s daily briefing. I listened to Kash
Patel on a podcast, and the way he viewed Jan. 6 aligned with the F.B.I. rank
and file. Agents always thought if you assaulted officers on that day, yes,
absolutely, we should investigate and prosecute you. For the rest of them, it
was a massive misuse of resources.
But then I heard Patel was thinking of
a mass purge of the leadership and dismissing agents wholesale.
The Trump administration decided that
until Patel was confirmed, the F.B.I.’s acting director would be Rob Kissane, a
veteran counterterrorism agent. The acting deputy director would be Brian
Driscoll, the special agent in charge of the Newark field office. But in its
announcement, the White House accidentally named Driscoll to the top position.
Though it was an error, Driscoll became the acting No. 1 and Kissane became the
No. 2.
Jacqueline Maguire, former executive
assistant director: The White House
reversing the announcement added to this uncertain, uncomfortable feeling — it
doesn’t bode well if they didn’t get that right. But I’ve known Brian and Rob a
long time, and some of the other executive assistant directors did as well.
We’d all grown up in the bureau, and we wanted to work together.
“They said we were being
fired because we could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.”
Jacqueline Maguire, former executive
assistant director
At his Senate confirmation hearing,
Patel was asked whether he would fire the F.B.I. agents who worked on the
investigations that led to the special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of
Trump. Patel responded that “no one will be terminated for case assignments.”
Later in the hearing, he also promised there would be “no retributive actions”
against employees.
The next day, Trump administration
officials, including Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general and Trump’s
former defense attorney, forced out the bureau’s top six executives, along with
the heads of the F.B.I. field offices in Washington, D.C., and Miami.
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division: Those firings sent
shock waves.
Senior executive 1: It was hundreds of years of experience in one brutal swoop.
It made it easier to bring their people in, yes, but there are no people to
bring in with that level of experience, because it’s so specialized. You have
to cut your teeth. It’s just like the military. To lead, you have to understand
headquarters and the field.
David Sundberg, former assistant
director in charge of the Washington field office: I came back to D.C. to run the office at the end of
2022 when two special counsels, Rob Hur and Jack Smith, were appointed to
investigate Biden and Trump. I did not direct those cases, but it was my job to
manage the agent and analyst resources for them.
We conducted factual and effective
investigations into two presidents from two political parties at the same time.
To do that, you need leadership that believes in the nonpartisan independence
of the agency. When I was told to retire or be fired, I was frustrated that I
couldn’t protect my analysts and agents from partisan interference. I wanted to
be their shield.
Jacqueline Maguire, former executive
assistant director: At the hearing,
Patel made it sound like he didn’t know they were getting rid of all the top
leaders. But if he really had nothing to do with it, he would have shown up and
asked, Where’d everyone go? But he didn’t ask.
They said we were being fired because
we could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda. I asked if there
was any allegation of misconduct. They said no.
This was my life, my career, my
identity, my calling. It was a privilege to serve the American people. To end
it so quickly, it still upsets me.
While Patel waited to be confirmed,
Bove ordered the acting F.B.I. leadership to create a
list of all employees assigned to Jan. 6 investigations “to determine whether
any additional personnel actions are necessary.” In response, Driscoll and
Kissane sent a survey to employees asking about their roles in those cases.
Maria Ricci, former assistant special
agent in charge of the Washington field office: The news hit about the list and the survey, and it was mass
chaos. People who worked on real sensitive cases — Jan. 6, the special-counsel
investigations, the public-corruption side of the Trump investigation — were
packing up their bags and assuming they were about to be fired. People were
crying, taking down family pictures from their desks because they were afraid
that they wouldn’t be let back in on Monday. This was at the same time that
some of the people who worked on those cases were working on the plane crash in
the Potomac. They were diving out there finding dead bodies and being told that
they were going to be fired.
Northwest special agent: If you really dig deep down, it’s not just the case agents.
Those cases involved a whole host of other people, like surveillance,
negotiators, SWAT teams. It’s hard not to have touched one of those cases in
some way. Maybe even more so than 9/11, because Jan. 6 was the largest
investigation in the history of the bureau.
Michael Feinberg, former assistant
special agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Va.: Emil Bove did not care that individual agents have no say
in what matters they work on. You get assigned investigations. There were many
agents who ended up on that list who had misgivings about how aggressively Jan.
6 was investigated. So there was a real sense that there was a sort of random
persecution going on rather than actually figuring out who was making
operational decisions and assigning responsibility to senior executives.
Bove was viewed by the F.B.I. work
force not only as somebody whose integrity could not be trusted but as this
almost cartoonish figure halfway between a mob enforcer and the grim reaper.
(Bove did not respond to a request for
comment.)
‘It’s a Culture
Now of Fear’: A Year of Chaos Inside the Justice Department
In response to Bove’s demand, Driscoll
and Kissane handed over a list of thousands of employees, identified by only
their bureau ID numbers, who worked on the Jan. 6 investigations. In response,
current and former F.B.I. employees sued the Justice Department, arguing that
compiling the list was a violation of privacy that would endanger agents and
their families. As a result of the suit, the Justice Department agreed not to
release the names of the people on the list.
Senior executive 3: Bove wanted some scalps; he asked for a short list of the
main folks. Driscoll and Kissane decided to give them all case participants —
everybody got lumped in. They were trying to protect people by flooding the
zone.
Human-intelligence agent: A source called me after Jan. 6 saying they saw
people they knew posting photos on social media of themselves at the Capitol. I
put this in the pipeline at the time through my squad support secretary. Now
she’s on the list for pressing send to get this information to the right place.
Field-office leader 1: The entire F.B.I. received a bizarre email from Emil Bove. The email described
“insubordination” by Acting Director Driscoll and Acting Deputy Director
Kissane regarding their refusal to provide names of the Jan. 6 agents. This is
part of why Driscoll is a folk hero.
“‘Defend the homeland’ was
now on your screen when you logged in. To me, that sounded like a far-right
political slogan.”
Michael Bovin, former intelligence
analyst
The Senate voted 51 to 49 to confirm
Patel. Almost immediately, he changed the F.B.I.’s priorities. Under Wray, the
bureau had eight stated goals: combating terrorism, organized crime, espionage,
public corruption, white-collar crime, cybercrime and violent crime, as well as
protecting civil rights. Now Patel stressed four: defend the homeland, rebuild
public trust, crush violent crime and ensure fierce organizational
accountability.
Michael Bovin, former intelligence
analyst: “Defend the homeland” was now on
your screen when you logged in. To me, that sounded like a far-right political
slogan that betrays the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan mission.
We also had posters on the wall of the
F.B.I.’s core values. Someone pulled the diversity poster down. A photo made
the rounds of them painting over “diversity” and the other values at
Quantico, the F.B.I. academy.
That was very frustrating, because we
spent time on this in training at Quantico. Diversity meant the F.B.I. cared
about having people from all walks of life. In Hoover’s time, it was all
accountants and lawyers. Now it’s not like that. One of my classmates was a
manager at a major appliance company. Others came from D.C. consulting groups.
And then there were the military and the police officers.
Philip Fields, former counterterrorism
analyst: The first thing they did was
they disbanded our Foreign Influence Task Force. They said that we had to pull
back on investigations under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which applies
to people who might be working at the direction of a foreign government without
disclosing it. People that I worked with in the counterintelligence program
were very upset about a lot of the investigative tools being taken away.
Kayla Staph, former cyber special
agent: Shifting priorities away from cyber
means less time tracing illicit cryptocurrency transactions, unmasking the
identities of cybercriminals and determining their locations around the world,
and disrupting nation-state adversaries who target critical infrastructure.
When former F.B.I. Director
Christopher Wray went before Congress in January 2024, he said that even if we
shifted every single F.B.I. agent and analyst to working China cyber, we would
be working with one person to 50 Chinese hackers or cyberthreat actors. That’s
an insane statistic — and that’s just China.
Tonya Ugoretz, former assistant
director of the directorate of intelligence: I
was responsible for the morning intelligence briefing. Every director gets to
choose how they want to receive information — how often and in what form. I did
everything I could, leading up to Director Patel coming on board, to provide
options for how those meetings would run. What type of information do you want?
Do you like graphics? Do you like to read? All of that. I wanted to set him up,
from Day 1, to make effective decisions.
Field-office leader 1: Patel had his first director’s call with the heads of all
the field offices. He had no agenda, no organized thoughts, no strategy or
leadership philosophy or priorities to share. I specifically remember him
saying at one point, “I don’t read.” He explained he didn’t read briefing
materials.
Senior executive 2: There was a feeling among many in the F.B.I. that the
bureau needed to change. Some believed HQ had gotten too big; metrics and
bureaucracy were inhibiting investigations, and resources needed to be better
aligned to the threats.
But what Kash said was basically that
every process at the F.B.I. was de facto wrong and would no longer be followed.
It came across as contempt for the way former directors had done business and a
statement that the former structures would not apply to him.
With Patel installed, Trump named his
pick for deputy director. Rather than choosing a career agent, which had been
the practice for most of the F.B.I.’s history, the president selected Dan
Bongino, a right-wing podcaster and former Secret Service agent who had
described F.B.I. agents as “thugs for the Democrat Party” and called for disbanding
the bureau.
Kayla Staph, former cyber special
agent: The deputy director oversees daily
operations, so it has always been someone who knows the bureau, who has worked
their way up, knows the culture, knows policy. Patel had explicitly stated to
the F.B.I. Agents Association that he would appoint an in-house F.B.I. special
agent, as had been the case for over 100 years.
Michael Feinberg, former assistant
special agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Va.: When we found out that Dan Bongino was going to be the
deputy director, concern reached a fever pitch. We were going to have two
people who it would not be an exaggeration to say were conspiracy theorists
with very little experience in federal law enforcement.
Senior executive 3: Patel stopped having his weekly meetings with the leaders
of the field offices on Wednesdays. There were phone calls from one individual
to another, and things were getting missed, things were getting dropped,
because they didn’t want to have an email chain.
Tonya Ugoretz, former assistant
director of the directorate of intelligence: Routine
internal communications stopped. The director and the deputy got frustrated
with media leaks, and they wouldn’t send anything out about people retiring and
new people filling their roles or reorganization of the work force. People had
to go to social media to see what was going on and who might be next on the
chopping block.
(In response to questions about this
article, Bongino wrote in an email: “A ‘media’ enterprise that viciously
propagated the most destructive political hoax in American history? You guys
are jokers, relying on people we likely removed for misfeasance or malfeasance,
to feed your ignorant audience the nonsense gruel they crave.”)
Patel directed the F.B.I., which has
no immigration-enforcement authority, to support Immigration and Customs
Enforcement in conducting raids and making arrests. Field offices began
assigning F.B.I. agents and analysts to work immigration shifts, pulling them
away from other priorities like counterterrorism, public corruption and
white-collar crime.
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division: We’d been told that when
Trump watched footage or saw a picture of a raid, he got mad that he didn’t see
F.B.I. raid jackets.
ICE was saying they wanted their teams
to commingle with our teams. Tactically, you don’t commingle units that haven’t
trained together. My bosses said, If we work on immigration, we use our teams
and our case info. They put together a list of people already in F.B.I. files
we had concerns about, so we’re not just targeting people over their
citizenship status.
They also had to juggle Kristi Noem,
the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who wanted to ride in our
tactical vehicle to do her TV stuff. That makes all the operators uneasy, and
it makes them less safe.
(The Department of Homeland Security
did not respond to a request for comment.)
Human-intelligence agent: I had 20 years’ experience. I was involved in
undercover sensitive operations. The bureau hired me for national security, to
prevent threats from Al Qaeda and other groups throughout the Near East — not
to sit in a parking lot arresting immigrants.
Midwest case agent: I was a grunt agent. I enjoyed trying to take apart
large criminal organizations piece by piece.
They relabeled task forces from drugs
to immigration and pushed us toward focusing on deportation versus convictions
for actual drug offenses.
Unfortunately, what used to be our
focus, long-term investigations, are now short-term hits. You hit the guy
carrying the bag, not the guy who made the call, because that’s how you drive
up the arrest and prosecution numbers. But the guy carrying the bag, you can’t
flip anymore, because he’s getting deported.
Because F.B.I. agents are posting up
with Homeland Security, citizens think we’re part of ICE, which disrupts other
investigations. It used to be that you could sit in front of a house, watching
another house, and a lot of the time, people were OK with that. They might help
you. Now they’re scared.
Jill Fields, former supervisory
intelligence analyst for violent crime in the Los Angeles field office: They decided they were going to do a big immigration
push for one week at the end of February. L.A. is a major transshipment hub for
drugs, and you’re going to take people off of cartel cases? They wanted three
times the normal number of people in the command post on each shift. I was
like, This is too much. I was told that we’ve got to do it for optics. It was
to make a show for the president.
I was ordered to have members of my
team run a preassessment on some anti-ICE protesters who allegedly had impeded
an immigration arrest. F.B.I. policy says that an investigation can’t be opened
based on First Amendment-protected activity. The investigative team who
analyzed the video determined that the protesters had done nothing wrong; the
officers told them to stay back, and they did.
I was told they had to open an
investigation anyway. I pushed back, and they said, Jill, you can either get
fired today, or you can get fired in four years — meaning when another
administration comes in and starts looking into constitutional violations. And
I was like: Then fire me today. I’m not doing something that is fundamentally
wrong.
I had my squad taken away from me. I
was told I was a problem. I was told that the seventh floor was aware of me —
the seventh floor means the F.B.I. director’s office. My squad depended on me,
and now they have absolutely no top cover anymore. When they took my squad, I
was done.
“I was told that we’ve got
to do it for optics. It was to make a show for the president.”
Jill Fields, former supervisory
intelligence analyst
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, sent
a letter to Patel accusing the F.B.I.’s New York
field office of holding back thousands of pages of documents in the Jeffrey
Epstein case. Hundreds of bureau employees were diverted from their regular
duties to review and process more than 100,000 pages, flagging references to
Trump and other well-known people as well as redacting information about
victims.
Michael Bovin, former intelligence
analyst: We got this email about a big
redaction project — all hands on deck. I thought it was the J.F.K.
assassination. Nope. It’s Epstein. Our job is to go through and make sure the
computer got the right stuff redacted. We’re working around the clock.
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division: A member of the
redaction team asked me, “Can I not work on this anymore?” They’d had a team
call, and Patel jumped on the call and yelled at everyone, telling them to work
faster — that he’d fire everyone who worked on the redactions if he didn’t have
it when he wanted it.
The F.B.I. ordered field offices to devote a third of their
time to immigration enforcement. Ramping up deportations was the highest
priority for Stephen Miller, one of Patel’s key allies.
Field-office leader 1: Kash and Dan seemed to have no control over the immigration
demands being placed on the F.B.I. Emails sent to F.B.I. field leaders with
immigration staffing requirements were forwarded directly from D.O.J.
ICE did not have the requisite data or
any semblance of a strategic plan to make the F.B.I.’s efforts effective. Each
F.B.I. field office was simply told to provide the designated number of F.B.I.
agents to the immigration effort.
I remember praying that we didn’t have
a terrorist attack, mass shooting or cyberattack slip through the cracks
because my agents, who were highly trained to protect against such threats,
were assigned to immigration enforcement.
Tonya Ugoretz, former assistant
director of the directorate of intelligence: When
you’re taking an agent or analyst who is an expert on the Russian F.S.B. and
you have them focused on name checks for immigration enforcement, what
investigations are sitting because they’ve been diverted?
Kayla Staph, former cyber special
agent: The immigration push grew immensely,
and it grew fast. Leadership was like, This isn’t going away, and all of you
will now participate. HQ informed our field offices that the agents out with
ICE needed to be taking pictures so they could post them to social media. I had
never been asked to do that during an arrest operation before. It’s
inappropriate and tactically unsound.
Field-office leader 2: I am a conservative. I believe in tightening our borders. I
just had an issue with the execution of it. My counterparts at D.H.S. were
constantly getting yelled at, being threatened and fearing for their jobs.
That’s not the way to work. They literally had quotas. Each region had to have
a certain amount of arrests every single day. It was completely asinine.
This is how things go sideways. For
me, the No. 1 priority was agent safety. I don’t want my agent to be killed or
to be responsible for somebody else getting killed. I did everything I could to
make sure that headquarters is happy, but at the same time, I’m not
jeopardizing my agents or my morals or the Constitution either.
Northwest special agent: In Minneapolis, agents were surveilling a bunch of
Somali-run autism centers because it was a kickback scheme. The centers were
recruiting kids from the community, falsely diagnosing them and giving the
parents a cut of the federal dollars they received for treatment. This became
front-page news when the criminal indictments came down, but back in February,
agents had to stop investigating for weeks to work immigration. I did not go to
law school, go to Quantico and work counterterrorism operations overseas to be
doing traffic control for arrest-a-brown-person day.
Central U.S. case agent: I was working an undercover operation on a neo-Nazi group
with a long history of criminal activity. The F.B.I.’s niche in the federal law
enforcement community is these specialized investigations, and now we’re being
pulled away from those. If I’d wanted to be a cop, I would have just done that.
When I resigned from the F.B.I., I was told they’d have to close the
investigation — there was no one else around to pick it up.
Patel traveled to Britain to attend a
secret conference of the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance formed after
World War II among the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and
New Zealand.
Senior executive 2: Every May, there’s a Five Eyes conference with the
head of every intelligence agency. This year it was in the U.K. Kash Patel is
going. In the lead-up to that, his detail starts making crazy requests. He’s
got special requirements on everything. And the Brits are getting pissed.
Before the conference, his staff says
he’s unhappy because he doesn’t like meetings in office settings. What he wants
is social events. He wants Premier soccer games. He wants to go jet skiing.
He’d like a helicopter tour. Everyone who heard about this was like: Hold on.
Is he really going to ask the MI5 director to go jet skiing instead of meeting?
The schedule is set, and every Five Eyes partner is doing this. They can’t just
say that he’s not participating and instead he wants to go to a Premier soccer
game. This is a job, guys.
His staff only cared about three
things: what his meals were, when his workouts would be and what his
entertainment would be. The biggest plan is how he’s going to get his
girlfriend in there so she can go to Windsor Castle. He’s got Nicole Rucker as
his assistant, like a true executive concierge. And when she’s not getting the
food or the workout she wants, she’ll just start screaming at people, Make it
happen!
His staff was briefed multiple times
that the Brits were going to want to talk about an F.B.I. position in London
that has been pulled. The F.B.I. is arguably their most important partner. MI5
is 5,000 people. The F.B.I. is 38,000. If MI5 ceased to exist, it would be very
bad for us. If we cease to exist, it would be an existential threat for them.
That person was working on a ton of sensitive stuff, including embassy
penetrations and technology, and they want this position back. So Ken McCallum,
the MI5 director, goes to Kash Patel at the conference and says: Hey, we really
need this position. It’s so important for our mutual benefit. And Kash says:
Yep, that person’s going nowhere. She’s absolutely staying. And the Brits
rejoice.
Two weeks later, he reverses himself
and removes her. The Brits are outraged. Kash will make promises and he will
break them, and he doesn’t worry about that.
On that trip, the heads of
intelligence for the Five Eyes went to Windsor Castle and met with the king.
There was a photo taken of all the Five Eyes people, some of whom are
nondisclosed, meaning their affiliation with the British intelligence service
isn’t public. The Brits forwarded that picture as a keepsake for the
individuals. They prefaced it with, This isn’t to be shared. But Kash has
decided he wants to post it on social media. They have people trying to
negotiate with the Brits about whether that’s possible. They’re fighting with
the director’s office, like: You cannot post this. Do not do that. And they’re
arguing, He wants a picture out.
(The F.B.I. did not respond to
questions about this trip.)
“The feeling I have more
is unremitting anger at the executives who have taken an oath to the
Constitution and are making moral compromises on a daily basis.”
Michael Feinberg, former assistant special
agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Va.
Michael Feinberg, a leader of the
F.B.I.’s field office in Norfolk, Va., was forced out after Bongino discovered
he was friends with Peter Strzok, an agent fired in 2018 for disparaging Trump
while investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia. In a text exchange, Strzok
called Trump an “idiot,” and he responded to another text about Trump’s
presidential run by saying, “We’ll stop it.” (In response to a request for
comment, Strzok noted that the Justice Department’s inspector general found
that political bias did not influence decision-making in the Russia
investigation.)
Michael Feinberg, former assistant
special agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Va.: I was at the field office working out in the gym on a
Saturday, and I got a phone call from Dominique Evans, my newly appointed
special agent in charge. She was on a cruise in Europe, and I was leading the
office in her absence. She told me that Dan Bongino had somehow found out that
I was friends with Pete Strzok. I explained to her that Pete and I had worked
together in the counterintelligence division before there was any scandal
associated with his name. We discovered we were into the same bands and became
friends. I wasn’t breaking any policy by going to see Nick Cave and Warren
Ellis with him.
Dominique says she’s going to get back
to Bongino. When she calls me back, she says that Bongino is not satisfied with
my explanation and that he’s going to talk with Patel about it. She calls me
back again later, and I ask her just to be square with me. I explain I love my
job, I care deeply about the organization and, personally, I have a wife in the
middle of a high-risk pregnancy. What exactly is going to happen to me?
And she says: You’re probably going to
be demoted. You should expect to get polygraphed or investigated about your
relationship with Pete. And I am immediately removing you as acting special
agent in charge in my absence.
Within 30 seconds of hanging up with
her, I knew that I was going to quit. I took an oath to the Constitution, as
idealistic as that sounds, and the point of an oath is that you follow it
regardless of personal consequences. I was being targeted for blatantly
political reasons. I don’t want to sound like a boy scout, but we have to be an
apolitical organization that does things by the book. We have the power to
deprive people of their freedom. And in some circumstances, we have the power
to deprive people of their lives.
(An F.B.I. spokesman said employees
have been forced out only for behaving unethically or failing to deliver on the
agency’s mission. He declined to comment on specific firings, including
Feinberg’s.)
To be hired by the bureau and receive
a security clearance, most F.B.I. personnel must pass a polygraph test, during
which they are asked about foreign contacts, drug use and serious criminal
conduct. The bureau also administers polygraphs to agents working on highly
classified investigations and to agents accused of misconduct. The New York
Times revealed that Patel was ramping up the F.B.I.’s
use of polygraphs to crack down on media leaks and ensure loyalty to him
personally. One question frequently asked was whether employees had said
anything negative about the director.
Senior leader for
counterintelligence: I worked
counterintelligence and espionage cases my entire career. The polygraph is
voodoo science. The bureau doesn’t predicate cases on a polygraph — it’s just
an indicator. People fail a poly for lots of reasons. It puts somebody in the
position of being very nervous. It’s purposely stressful.
Tonya Ugoretz, former assistant
director of the directorate of intelligence: They
were polygraphing their own senior leadership team because they were so mad
about media leaks. Each assistant director, as head of division, had to
identify two people in our division to polygraph. Many of us volunteered
ourselves and then asked one of our deputies so we wouldn’t have to put it on
our people.
Dawn E. Morrow, former senior
human-resources manager: One of my employees got
polygraphed for being in a meeting where apparently something was leaked. The
way they were being used when I left was as a weapon, almost a punishment.
A gunman opened fire outside
CrossPointe Community Church in Wayne, Mich. He shot and wounded one person
before being killed by the church’s security staff.
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division: Bongino called the field office in Detroit. In the normal
course of business, if the deputy director calls at a moment like that, they’re asking: How can we help? What do
you need? They can turn on all the resources of the organization. But Bongino
called and asked, What can I tweet about this?
The field office has to be careful —
this is their boss. But the body was still there. They said, We’ll get back to
you. But Bongino kept calling back, asking, What can I tweet?
(Bongino declined to respond to
questions about this specific event and others.)
Tonya Ugoretz, the head of
intelligence at the F.B.I., was removed from her position.
Her dismissal came after Senator Chuck
Grassley — an Iowa Republican and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, which conducts oversight of the intelligence agencies — requested
information from the F.B.I. about a years-old intelligence report. The report
contained a secondhand tip that the Chinese government was creating fake IDs to
cast votes for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
The F.B.I. provided Grassley
with emails from agents debating the report, which was
ultimately withdrawn amid doubts about its credibility. In one email, an F.B.I.
employee wrongly identified Ugoretz as the official who ordered the withdrawal.
In another email, an analyst expressed
concern that the report might have been suppressed for political reasons.
Marshall Yates, the head of the F.B.I.’s office of congressional affairs, who
provided the emails, wrote to Grassley endorsing the idea that the report was
suppressed.
Tonya Ugoretz, former assistant
director of the directorate of intelligence: For whatever reason, my name was mentioned as one of two
officials who told the Albany field office, which issued that report, to recall
it. It wasn’t true. I was in the cyber division then, so it wouldn’t have been
my role. When I found out, I spoke to my supervisor. We met with Bongino that
day. I was told it was out of his hands. I wasn’t sure what that meant.
The next afternoon, I was placed on
administrative leave. I was told that was because the F.B.I. didn’t want to
have to explain to Grassley’s office why the person named in the emails was the
current head of intelligence.
I heard that other F.B.I. leaders were
stunned and asking for some kind of due process. Our inspection division
contacted me and said they were going to conduct a strategic review — an
internal investigation of the Albany field report and whether senior leadership,
above me at the highest levels, directed this intelligence to be buried. I was
interviewed twice for that and polygraphed.
In October, I got a call to discuss my
options. I had to ask — What did the review show? The official I met with said
he hadn’t read it, but his understanding was the review found no misconduct by
me or related to the recall of the report.
I asked, If the review found I did
nothing wrong, why can’t I return to my position? I was given the standard
line: It’s at the director’s discretion to reassign senior executives, which is
true. The only options I was given were demotions. I decided to leave.
I’m just one person in a series of
senior officials who were disappeared. I can’t think of a better word for it.
Heads of field offices would be there one day and gone the next.
I’m a firm believer in the oversight
function of Congress. Conducting intelligence missions in a democracy, as the
F.B.I. does, requires oversight and accountability. It’s hard to say that providing materials to Congress is bad.
But in my case, sharing the documents without having done any work to explain
whether an allegation was true or false — how does that help Congress in its oversight mission?
What it does do is create fear among
the work force. They lose the trust in their own agency to have their back.
“They were polygraphing
their own senior leadership team because they were so mad about media leaks.”
Tonya Ugoretz, former assistant
director of the directorate of intelligence
Patel fired Brian Driscoll, the former
acting director who had been leading the crisis-response group after Patel’s
confirmation, and Spencer Evans, the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas
field office. Evans had been brought to Patel’s attention by Kyle Seraphin, a
podcaster and former F.B.I. agent who was suspended by the bureau in 2022.
After Evans was fired, Seraphin posted screenshots of a text exchange he had with
Patel months earlier. “THIS guy is the dude in charge of HR who personally
denied my request to not take a Covid test every 2 days in order to keep my
job. And removed me,” Seraphin wrote. Patel responded: “He’s fucked.” (Driscoll
and Evans have alleged wrongful termination in a pending lawsuit against the F.B.I.)
Public-corruption agent: Seraphin and other agents who have been suspended are
out there on social media with the credibility of being former F.B.I. agents.
If you can say, I’m the victim because of this guy Spencer Evans, and then he
gets fired, it increases your credibility. People see that and think, Maybe
they’re correct, and the whole system is corrupt — even if most of it is
nonsense.
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division: The downside of
having folks scared about losing their jobs is that you go from being an
organization where people come in and do the work to spending time keeping
their head down or on LinkedIn looking for jobs.
I want to sound the alarm about how
this affects Americans’ safety. I’ve seen it up close, where we have stopped
stuff Americans will never know about. The F.B.I. doesn’t do a good job, in my
opinion, of highlighting the number of things it stops. There’s a concern about
scaring people; you don’t want to make people feel under dire threat all the
time. But thousands of attacks stopped over a few years is normal. That
depends, though, on people doing the work.
“I assumed Congress would
see how uniquely unqualified Kash Patel was for the job.”
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division
Patel fired Walter Giardina, an agent
from the elite public-corruption squad in Washington known as CR-15 that ran
Arctic Frost, the investigation into Trump for interference in the 2020
election.
Two months earlier, Grassley had sent
Patel and Bondi a letter containing misconduct allegations against Giardina
made by unnamed whistle-blowers. They included a claim that Giardina had
corroborated the Steele dossier, a set of later-discredited memos about Trump’s
ties to Russia in 2016.
Grassley named Giardina in the letter
despite the bureau’s standard practice of protecting case agents by asking
Congress to redact their names from sensitive disclosures. (Clare Slattery, a
spokeswoman for Grassley, said in a statement that it is his “longstanding
office policy to leave names unredacted in public document productions” because
“Americans deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”)
Giardina tried to meet with Yates, the
head of the office of congressional affairs, to contest the allegations and
explain that he never had access to the Steele dossier.
Walter Giardina, former CR-15 agent: I took a lot of pride in
being trusted with difficult assignments. Until this year, public corruption
was the No. 1 criminal priority of the F.B.I. The people you’re going after may be powerful, and
they can come after you in asymmetric ways.
When Senator Grassley wrote a letter
naming me to the director as the person behind the Steele dossier, that was
punching all the way down. I don’t know of any other time that a senator wrote
a letter attacking an individual street-level agent. I’m begging my managers
and the office of congressional affairs to meet with me to sort out this
situation — for me personally, but also for the F.B.I. as a whole. It would
take one second to look at the case access history and see that I never even
had access to the Steele matter. I had nothing to do with that.
My wife was in and out of the hospital
from June 5 to July 15, when she passed away. During that time, I kept trying
to meet with the office of congressional affairs about responding to Grassley’s
letter. On June 19, we had a meeting set at the Hoover Building. My wife had
just started a new chemo medication. She had a terrible adverse reaction, and I
said I was having family health concerns and asked to do the meeting via Teams,
which would be pretty normal. They immediately canceled it. When I asked why, the
answer was that Marshall Yates wanted to do the meeting not as an interview but
as a mock hearing.
I didn’t know my wife was about to
pass away. I reserved a conference room at the hospital to meet the office of
congressional affairs next to her room, so they could interview me. They didn’t
show up. She died the next day.
At my insistence, I was finally
interviewed two days after her funeral. I said: I don’t want anyone to tell me
it’s too soon. I won’t be emotional. I want to get this over with. I knew the
interview was messed up because Marshall Yates wasn’t present. I had a prepared
statement with all the facts. I gave it to them. They didn’t ask any questions.
I sent all the records they asked for. Then it was over. They’d already decided
to fire me, so no one was taking the interview seriously except me.
In CR-15, we worked the cases we were
assigned. It was not my idea to open Arctic Frost. We were detailed to Jack
Smith. The supervisors came to us and said, You’re going to do this. We’re
losing the ability for agents to conduct their work without fear or favor
because the F.B.I. won’t protect you.
Maria Ricci, former assistant special
agent in charge of the Washington field office: Walter was one of the most heartbreaking ones, because it
was the week after he buried his wife. She had cancer, and then he gets hit
with this. I was at a happy hour at the Irish Channel, sitting outside with
some other agents. And it was like: Oh, my god. How do we support him? How do
we get food to him? Because he’s on his own with three kids.
Blaire Toleman, former supervisory
special agent for CR-15: My team always did
the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. But the F.B.I. fired
some of them for no reason, with no internal
investigation we knew of. To fire my colleagues like that was shocking. I
thought, Shouldn’t it just be me, not the people I assigned to work on a case?
I had huge grief about them.
We all worked in an agency where the
truth was paramount. I said, People in the F.B.I. will follow the facts. We
were waiting and waiting for that to happen.
David Sundberg, former assistant
director in charge of the Washington field office: CR-15 is a storied squad. Walter and Blaire, like
others, were chosen for the squad because they were exceptionally talented and
experienced investigators. They could not tell you the breakdown of the
political affiliations of the subjects they investigated. They were two of the
best agents I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of great ones.
The F.B.I. is accountable for what it
accomplishes or fails to accomplish as an agency. We don’t attach
responsibility to individual case agents, who don’t even get to choose what
cases they’re working.
Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while
speaking at a university in Utah. Hours later, Patel told his 1.8 million
followers on X that a suspect had been detained, only to backtrack shortly afterward. Patel then flew to
Utah to personally oversee the investigation.
John Sullivan, former section chief in
the intelligence division: I’ve run so many
command posts for major attacks. You don’t know in the initial aftermath what’s
going on, but you should be able to say to bosses, “We think there are five
suspects,” or “We think it’s this one person,” and know that the information
won’t leave that conference room. Because it could be wrong. Often, in the
beginning, it is wrong.
Human-intelligence agent: Now social media dominates and controls the
perception of what we should be doing. It’s incredibly hard — whether you’re an
operational support technician or a special agent or op assistant director
— not to let it get to you. It’s all we’re hearing.
Senior leader for
counterintelligence: When he landed in Salt
Lake City, Patel didn’t have a raid jacket and reportedly
ordered people to go find him one. He needed a size medium. They found him a
female’s jacket that didn’t have the patches that he wanted, so he had the SWAT
team taking their patches off to put on his jacket before he would go to the
press conference. I haven’t worn my raid jacket since Quantico, in 20 years of
my career. You just don’t wear it, especially in a leadership position.
Senior executive 2: Whenever there’s a critical incident, one of the first
things that happens is a conference call with everybody — all the executives,
most of the field offices dial in. The director rarely speaks, because someone
with situational awareness is leading the call. They’ll say: Here’s what
happened. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we need. But we get on, and it’s
just Kash berating the special agent in charge in Salt Lake. He’s super
emotional.
And then it turns surreal. He and
Bongino start talking about their Twitter strategy. And Kash is like: I’m gonna
tweet this. Salt Lake, you tweet that. Dan, you come in with this. Then I’ll
come back with this. They’re literally scripting out their social media, not
talking about how we’re going to respond or resources or the situation. He’s
screaming that he wants to put stuff out, but it’s not even vetted yet. It’s
not even accurate.
When I was an agent, I did hundreds of
these cases. The initial information that comes in is always wrong. There’s too
much coming in, and it takes time to vet. And it was obvious that Kash can’t
understand that and doesn’t want to understand that.
Everyone on the call is just like:
This guy is completely out of control. On another call, he said: When a crisis
happens, the only thing you need to do is call me. The most important thing in
any crisis is controlling the narrative. I was like: No, no, no. We actually
have to do some work here. We’re going to have to investigate, to solve this.
In a congressional hearing, Patel was
questioned about his and Bongino’s decision to change the bureau’s fitness test
for new agents, replacing situps with pull-ups. Senator Mazie Hirono, a
Democrat from Hawaii, pointed out that the increased emphasis on upper-body
strength could make the test disproportionately harder for women because of
differences in physiology. Patel replied that the new test was appropriate for
agents in the field who “have to chase down bad guys and do really hard work.”
The F.B.I. went forward with adding pull-ups to the test, scoring men and women
differently.
Senior executive 3: Bongino wanted to establish a new physical-fitness test
without any evidence-based research. He wanted to have men and women do the
exact same pull-ups, which all of the data said would lead to losing a number
of female recruits and potentially female agents that hadn’t been tested for
pull-ups before.
When he was informed of that, Bongino
said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our
history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she’s out of shape or overweight,
that’s going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they’d look
good on a doorbell camera. He said it’s the way these times are.
Kayla Staph, former cyber special
agent: I score really high on the
physical-fitness test. I coached sports. I can do pull-ups when I train for
them. But there was still a feeling of diminished value. The test should
actually be reflective of our daily duties.
“Our motto is ‘Fidelity,
Bravery, Integrity.’ I hope and pray one day they will have upper leadership
that embodies that.”
Kayla Staph, former cyber special
agent
The F.B.I. fired a group of agents who were photographed kneeling during a Black Lives Matter
protest in the summer of 2020. A dozen of those agents later sued the F.B.I. for wrongful termination, claiming
that the crowd had backed them against a wall and was throwing objects. They
knelt, they said, “to defuse a volatile situation, not as an expressive
political act.”
Maria Ricci, former assistant special
agent in charge of the Washington field office: Three of the people in that picture had worked for me.
We’re not cops, despite what Kash Patel says. We’re investigators. We gather
evidence and build cases. That summer, we were put on the street to handle
riots. And we were never, ever trained to do that. Cops have batons. They have
pepper spray. They have all sorts of other tools for crowd control. What we
have are our voices and our guns. These agents were surrounded and made a
decision to de-escalate the situation. And that was, in my opinion, the right
choice.
Senior leader for
counterintelligence: The firings were a
reaction to people online calling them Kneel Team Six. That incident was
investigated by F.B.I. leadership, and the agents were cleared. Then Kash Patel
comes in and reopens the whole thing. They were cleared again, but Patel fired
them anyway.
Patel dismissed David Maltinsky, an
F.B.I. agent in training, who had displayed a Pride flag at his desk when he
worked for the bureau as a tactical specialist in Los Angeles. Maltinsky was
three weeks from his graduation at Quantico.
David Maltinsky, former tactical
specialist and agent trainee: My aunt and uncle
are in law enforcement — my aunt is a retired special agent — and I aspired to
carry out that same mission. So when I applied and was accepted at Quantico, I
was accomplishing my life’s goal.
I was in the dorms with my squad when
I heard that my supervisor needed to talk to me. She and I were led into a
conference room. Then the executives walked in and sat down. One of them said,
David, there’s no other way to say this, but you are being terminated effective
today. He handed me a letter that said I had “exercised poor judgment with an
inappropriate display of political signage” in my work station in Los Angeles.
In 2021, the F.B.I. approved Pride
flags to fly in front of federal buildings. At the end of Pride month that
year, the flag that had flown outside the L.A. field office was given to me by
bureau leaders to maintain. Other gay F.B.I. employees texted me to say how
incredible it was to see it up there. It wasn’t that long ago that being gay
meant you couldn’t get a security clearance — you couldn’t have a job at the
F.B.I. It was 1993 before you could serve openly.
Reading the letter, I was thinking
this may be connected to a complaint that my supervisor got after the
inauguration. An employee who worked on another floor claimed the flag was now
in violation of President Trump’s executive order banning D.E.I. The flag had
been on my desk for years at that point. My supervisor reassured me that it
didn’t violate anything in his view. He said: Keep it up. You don’t need to
take it down. But somehow word of the Pride flag reached Kash Patel.
One of the executives asked me where I
was going to go that night, and I told him I had nowhere to go. It was so quiet
in that room. You could see in their faces that they thought this was awful.
They said, You could stay another night if you need to plan and pack. I
appreciated that, but if the directive was for me to leave, I’m going to leave.
Grassley released documents showing
that F.B.I. agents working on Arctic Frost subpoenaed the Jan. 6 call logs
of nine Republican members of Congress. The logs did not
include the content of the conversations, but Grassley said that the subpoenas amounted to spying and
that Arctic Frost was “arguably worse than Watergate.”
Patel then fired two more agents who worked on Arctic Frost. He
also shut down the CR-15 public-corruption squad.
“You’re darn right I fired those agents,” Patel said that night on Fox News.
“You’re darn right I blew up CR-15.”
Public-corruption agent: “Vendetta” is the best word for what they’re doing.
I’ve tried to figure out where the vitriol comes from. I think it’s
partisanship.
From a basic investigative standpoint,
if you’re looking into a possible conspiracy and you want to know who that
person might have reached out to on a particular date or time, then seeking
subpoenas for call records is a reasonable and logical step. We’re talking only
about the in-and-out numbers and the date, time and length of the calls.
Obtaining that information is such a basic tenet of an investigation. And
sometimes you get it and you find out it means absolutely nothing. It helps you
rule something out.
Jacqueline Maguire, former executive
assistant director: There are rules
surrounding grand-jury material to protect the integrity of an investigation as
well as people’s privacy and civil liberties. These proceedings are normally
kept secret. Documents in a case file are part of a pending investigation, and
more action is needed to corroborate the evidence. It’s problematic to release
this material without context.
Patel flew on an F.B.I. jet to a
wrestling event in Pennsylvania, where his girlfriend, the country singer
Alexis Wilkins, was performing the national anthem. The pair then took the
plane to Nashville, where Wilkins lives. That weekend, Patel again used the jet
for personal travel, this time for a trip to Boondoggle Ranch, a hunting resort
in Texas that is owned by a major Republican donor.
Kyle Seraphin, the former agent and
podcaster who previously supported Patel, posted some of the flight records on
X and criticized him for flying at taxpayer expense during a government
shutdown. Patel reportedly blamed Steven Palmer, an agent who oversaw the
bureau’s aviation assets, for the bad publicity and fired him.
Field-office leader 2: There’s a $545 million budget cut for the bureau.
Meanwhile, you’re spending millions of dollars just gallivanting. How do you
justify that?
Senior executive 2: Whenever the girlfriend is going to sing the national
anthem at some wrestling event or some National Rifle Association or Turning
Point event, they’re calling the local SWAT team, saying, You’re going to guard
her. Meanwhile, in Nashville, those poor bastards — their SWAT team has
actually been converted to her protection. They’re not even doing their own
SWAT arrests anymore. They’ve got to bring in other teams to do that, because
they’re guarding her all the time.
David Sundberg, former assistant
director in charge of the Washington field office: This is among the reasons William Sessions lost his job
when he was F.B.I. director — for allegedly misusing government planes and
having agents run errands for his wife. That was the 1990s. Since then, having
a SWAT team protect an F.B.I. director’s family member or girlfriend — to my
knowledge, that didn’t happen when the director wasn’t present. And I spent
more than half my career in tactical positions, including three years in which
I had programmatic control of every F.B.I. SWAT team.
Patel fired four more agents who
worked on Arctic Frost after Grassley released documents from whistle-blowers
naming them.
Coordination between Grassley and the F.B.I.’s office
of congressional affairs was unusually close throughout the year. Marshall
Yates, the head of the O.C.A., and his team combed through the F.B.I.’s files
to identify agents they thought were biased, according to congressional aides.
Former law-enforcement officials believe these agents are among those whose
names Grassley is making public, bypassing the F.B.I.’s protections for
employees. (A Grassley spokeswoman said his disclosures followed the rules and
were thoroughly vetted over months or years.)
Yates and Rosemaria Marketos, a former
CR-15 agent working with him, were also members of the Weaponization Working Group, a task force created by
Bondi to address “abuses of the criminal-justice process” during the Biden
administration.
Christopher O’Leary, former senior
executive in the counterterrorism division: The
irony of the name “weaponization group” is rich. They are doing what they said
the Biden administration did. If the weaponization group and the office of
congressional affairs have merged at a certain level, that is very problematic
for two reasons. First, this merger abandons the F.B.I.’s history of being
unbiased. Second, O.C.A. becomes another bullhorn for this administration’s
political narrative. The people paying the price are the public servants in the
F.B.I. and D.O.J., and more broadly, the American people.
David Sundberg, former assistant
director in charge of the Washington field office: It’s concerning to me that senior officials are
saying agents from the Department of Homeland Security need to wear masks to
avoid being doxxed, while the names of F.B.I. agents are being read aloud in
Congress, which can lead to the same risks. I’ve not seen a public defense of
these agents, which may be the unfortunate result of the removal of so much of
the F.B.I.’s senior leadership.
In a final blow to CR-15, Patel fired
Blaire Toleman, who was in charge of the squad when it investigated Trump.
Blaire Toleman, former supervisory
special agent for CR-15: In my years of
service, I never so much as got a stern talking-to. I got a call saying I’d
receive a letter by the end of the day that I was no longer employed with the
F.B.I. I was at a training. I asked if I had to drive to the office to turn my stuff
in. Yes, I did. My squad helped me pack up my office. My wife picked me up.
Quite a few people, around 40, walked me out.
On the way home, I got a call that I
might not be getting fired. Then I got another call two hours later: You’re
definitely not fired. Then the next day, I got fired again. My letter of
termination said I was being fired due to my lack of judgment, leading to the
weaponization of the government. In reality, they were firing us because they
didn’t like the case we worked.
A lot of people in the bureau are
pissed about what’s happening, but they will step up to try to make sure the
American people remain safe, because that’s our job. When I was getting walked
out, I told my squad and the other people with me: Keep your heads up. Don’t
let the American people suffer.
In a leaked memo, Bondi tasked the
F.B.I. with compiling a list of “domestic terrorism organizations” in response
to a presidential memorandum in September that ordered federal law enforcement
to prioritize domestic threats, particularly antifa.
“Common threads animating this violent
conduct,” the presidential memorandum stated, “include anti-Americanism,
anticapitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United
States government; extremism on migration, race and gender; and hostility
towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and
morality.”
At a congressional hearing in
September, Patel testified that the bureau had increased the number of domestic
terror investigations opened that year by 300 percent.
Philip Fields, former counterterrorism
analyst: Antifa is not an organization.
It is a loosely formulated ideology. Designating antifa as a domestic terrorist
organization blurs the lines between investigating national-security threats
and First Amendment-protected activity. The broadness of the language suggests
that the lines could get blurred between left-wing extremist groups and
advocacy groups for left-aligned policies.
National-security intelligence
analyst: The bureau is still dealing with
the reputation it acquired under Hoover, when he oversaw a vast domestic
surveillance network and the F.B.I. maintained dossiers on huge numbers of
people not suspected of crimes. The malfeasance of the ’60s and ’70s is really
drilled into us at Quantico. I think a lot of people reading Bondi’s memo very
reasonably interpreted it as meaning they want a return to Hoover. I know that
across the institution, people are very uncomfortable with that language.
“People that I worked with
in the counterintelligence program were very upset about a lot of the
investigative tools being taken away.”
Philip Fields, former counterterrorism
analyst
As the Trump administration approached
its one-year mark, Patel promoted the bureau’s success in fighting crime under
his leadership. On X, he claimed a “100% increase” in year-to-year arrests
and a “210% increase” in the disruption of gangs and criminal enterprises.
“This FBI is saving lives,” he wrote, “protecting innocent kids, and taking
deadly drugs off our streets at levels not seen in decades.”
Senior executive 3: The F.B.I. is bilking their numbers. F.B.I. agents are
walking around providing support for local police and ICE. If the local police
or ICE makes an arrest, the F.B.I. is counting it in their stats. One example I
heard: An F.B.I. agent was walking around with a couple cops who arrested
someone for shoplifting, and the F.B.I. claimed it as an arrest. It used to be
that the main thing that we would capture in our own arrest stats was if the
F.B.I. was the lead agency and it was a federal charge. It hurts me to say it,
but they’re bullshit numbers.
Central U.S. case agent: Let’s say the Highway Patrol pulls somebody over.
There’s a gun in the car. Well, then all of a sudden an F.B.I. car shows up, a
D.E.A. car shows up, an A.T.F. car shows up. They run the gun and see if it’s
stolen. They run the person and see if he’s a felon. Oh, he’s a felon? OK,
great. Now the F.B.I. and the A.T.F. and the D.E.A. are all going to say that
they got an arrest because they showed up just to balloon the numbers.
Field Office Leader 1: When you make F.B.I. agents street cops, you get
street-cop numbers. We didn’t used to count immigration arrests, because we
didn’t do immigration. Now we do. We didn’t do street patrols in D.C. in the
past. Now we do.
In the past, we mostly worked the
complex investigations the F.B.I. is famous for. Complicated work with wires
and sophisticated techniques — all aimed at taking out the entire criminal
enterprises or national security threats. Now, under Kash, we are counting
stuff that has been historically left to local police departments and other
agencies and saying, Wow, look at us.
(An F.B.I. spokesman disputed these
accounts. “The FBI ONLY counts state arrests when we work cases jointly from
partners,” he wrote. “Since becoming director, Patel’s focus has been on
partner engagements and joint operations, we do it together.”)
In the days after an ICE agent fatally
shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration blocked state and
local officials from reviewing the evidence. Justice Department officials,
including Patel, steered the F.B.I. away from a civil rights investigation into
whether the ICE agent used excessive force. Instead, Patel ordered an
investigation into local activist groups and Good’s wife. Six federal
prosecutors resigned in protest. The Justice Department
also began criminally investigating Democratic
officials in the state, including Governor Tim Walz and the mayor of
Minneapolis, Jacob Frey.
David Sundberg, former assistant
director in charge of the Washington field office: The F.B.I. has closed and cleared civil rights
investigations without officers being charged when there’s no evidence to
substantiate a charge. The way to ascertain the truth is to conduct a fair and
impartial investigation. But when government officials communicate on social
media about their perception of the events, and many agents have been fired
over the outcome of cases they worked, that could have negative impact on this
investigation.
Jill Fields, former supervisory
intelligence analyst for violent crime in the Los Angeles field office: I’ve seen multiple videos of protesters being arrested who
aren’t impeding immigration enforcement. Yes, they’re yelling, they’re
taunting, but that’s their right. This is what I was worried about and why I
pushed back when the L.A. office was asked to investigate protesters last year.
It was unthinkable to me then, and now it’s happening. If you start arresting
or investigating people for exercising their First Amendment rights, then they
don’t have those rights.
The F.B.I. will literally open an
investigation into a bureau car accident, so the idea that they haven’t opened
a civil rights investigation after an agent-involved shooting — that’s
shocking.
Christopher Raia, a career agent who
was previously in charge of the New York field office, was named to replace
Bongino, who stepped down in December. Raia shares the role of deputy director
with Andrew Bailey, a former Missouri attorney general who moved to the F.B.I.
in September. Later, Raia posted on X: “I know the FBI will continue to
accomplish great things in the year ahead.”
Michael Feinberg, former assistant
special agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Va.: What I feel is not just disappointment at the way Patel and
Bongino have changed the bureau. The feeling I have more is unremitting anger
at the executives who have taken an oath to the Constitution and are making
moral compromises on a daily basis to advance their careers. I know some of
them are undoubtedly thinking that we need to make some compromises in order to
save the F.B.I. as an institution. But the F.B.I. doesn’t matter because it exists as a
building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The F.B.I. matters because of the ideals and
principles it is supposed to uphold. And if the building continues to exist but
those principles and ideals are thrown aside, the victory in saving the F.B.I.
has been completely Pyrrhic.
Kayla Staph, former cyber special
agent: I resigned when it became clear to me
that F.B.I. leadership was undermining the bureau’s mission and pursuit of
justice. But I don’t expect anyone to make the same decision that I did. I have
the most profound respect for my colleagues that are still there. Our motto is
“Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” I hope and pray one day they will have upper
leadership that embodies that.
Senior executive 1: I was one of the F.B.I.’s top recruiters. I can’t do
that right now. I just got a message from someone I’d talked to about applying,
saying, Wow, I got an interview. I had to say, I can no longer recommend that
you go work for the F.B.I.
This isn’t my F.B.I. I don’t recognize
this F.B.I.
