A top FBI official tasked with carrying out President Donald Trump’s political retribution campaign is reportedly stepping down from his role.
Marshall Yates, who led the FBI’s congressional affairs office, is expected to step down from the FBI on Friday, CBS News reported.
A person briefed on Yates’ intentions told CBS News that he plans to step aside to focus on his family and is assisting in the search for a successor.
The news came after a report that FBI Director Kash Patel, who has already pushed out multiple agents involved in Biden-era investigations, had this week fired at least 10 employees connected with the investigation into Trump’s storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Yates was a representative on the Interagency Weaponization Working Group, a U.S. government task force formed under the Trump administration after the president’s 2025 inauguration to coordinate multiple federal agencies in reviewing and addressing what his allies call the “weaponization” of government power against him and his supporters.
The group consists of dozens of government officials from at least 12 different government offices and has been involved in investigating criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, as well as efforts to restore former FBI agents who say they were dismissed under the Biden administration over objections to COVID-19 policies, their handling of Jan. 6 investigations, and other internal disputes.
As head of the FBI’s congressional affairs office, Yates also worked closely with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley.
Grassley released a batch of internal documents related to the FBI’s probe code-named “Arctic Frost,” an investigation that began in April 2022 into alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and later became the basis for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against President Trump.
The probe used subpoenas and records requests targeting Trump, Mike Pence, Republican lawmakers and conservative groups to investigate possible election interference.
When Grassley made those records public without redacting the names of FBI agents involved, several employees named in the documents faced public exposure and, in some cases, were fired by the bureau.
The FBI fired at least two agents who worked on Smith’s cases—one of them just months away from retirement—and disciplined a third after their names appeared in the files released by Grassley.
FBI Director Kash Patel also removed up to six agents in Miami linked to the FBI’s 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The FBI’s Washington Field Office also shut down its public corruption squad, the unit that supported Smith’s two federal investigations into Trump after the 2020 election —the Jan. 6 probe and the classified documents case.
Trump pleaded not guilty in both cases and repeatedly called the investigations politically motivated “witch hunts.”
The prosecutions effectively ended after his 2024 election victory, as longstanding Justice Department policy bars criminal cases against a sitting president.
The Trump administration has rejected accusations that the president is weaponizing the Justice Department.
“It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice, and nobody knows what that looks like more than President Trump,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a press briefing in September.
“We are not going to tolerate gaslighting from anyone in the media or from anyone on the other side who is trying to say that it’s the president who is weaponizing the DOJ.
“It was Joe Biden and his attorney general who weaponized the DOJ. Joe Biden abused this sacred American institution to go after his political opponent in an election year,” she said.
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