President Trump was asked on Thursday if Americans needed to worry about the possibility of terrorist reprisals by Iran inside the United States. He responded, not quite reassuringly, “I guess.”
His follow-up response was even colder comfort. “Some people will die,” he said.
His remarks did not go unnoticed inside the Justice Department and the F.B.I. — especially among agents and prosecutors who handle national security and terrorism cases. After a year of constant firings, resignations and other disruptive distractions, elite counterterrorism and counterintelligence units have been stretched thin and left short-handed, current and former officials say.
There is widespread concern about the capacity of these units to deal with threats unleashed by Iran in particular, an adversary known for its willingness to combine espionage, cyberwarfare and attacks in the real world in bringing the fight overseas.
A succession of hardball personnel and policy directives, often at the command of the Trump White House, has led to an exodus of experienced investigators and prosecutors, according to current and former officials. The priority placed on Mr. Trump’s directives has also diverted agents from national security matters to immigration enforcement or other ancillary tasks, including scouring the investigative files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“The more D.O.J. and F.B.I. leaders fire public servants and force principled resignations by doing the president’s bidding, the more they remove institutional muscle memory and relationships from the national security apparatus,” said Troy Edwards, the former deputy chief of the national security section of the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia. “The loss matters when seconds can make all the difference in countering terrorism threats.”
The most vivid illustration of this remarkable brain drain came days before bombs from the United States and Israel began raining down on Tehran.
Last week, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, fired about a dozen members of an elite counterintelligence unit based in Washington whose agents and analysts specialized in stemming threats of terrorism in the Middle East. The reason for their termination: They had also been involved in the investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, after he left office in 2021.
Some of those let go included agents who worked on efforts to stem Iran’s ability to operate stealthily in the United States, according to officials familiar with the situation. At least one was part of an interagency task force based in McLean, Va., known as the Iran Threat Mission Center. Some of the agents were thrown out so quickly, according to one person familiar with their work, that they were unable to hand off their most sensitive and knowledgeable sources to their successors.
The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a social media post, Ben Williamson, Mr. Patel’s spokesman, said that the agents “acted unethically and violated the mission,” although he did not specify any wrongdoing.
The firings and forced resignations at the bureau and the Justice Department began almost the moment that Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. From the start, leaders in both organizations began dismissing agents involved in the investigations into Mr. Trump, or those deemed insufficiently loyal to him, without any justification other than the president’s unlimited power to hire and fire under Article II of the Constitution.
Doing so essentially drained a reservoir of veteran supervisory agents and prosecutors with expertise in counterterrorism and national security, sapping morale and leaving many units in bureau headquarters and the Washington field office with a dearth of experienced leadership, according to former agents, who described the situation as dire.
The Justice Department’s elite national security division, which is responsible for many of the most complex and sensitive cases, was decimated by firings, forced transfers and retirements.
The division lost between a quarter and a third of its leadership, according to former division officials. That includes its interim director, who was sent packing after Attorney General Pam Bondi berated him for not taking down a framed photo of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during her first visit to the unit early last year.
The division’s counterterrorism section has lost about half of its line prosecutors in the past year, dropping to fewer than 20, from about 40. Another unit in the section, the counterintelligence and export control section, which oversees cases involving sanctions against Iran and the seizures of Iranian oil tankers, has had similar losses, former officials said.
Moreover, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, which has long had a tradition of bringing high-profile terrorism and national security cases, has been especially ravaged by firings and resignations. Many of those who have been forced out or have left — including Mr. Edwards, a son-in-law of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director — lost their jobs after the White House sought to force prosecutors in the office to build criminal cases against Mr. Comey and another one of Mr. Trump’s adversaries, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.
Chad Gilmartin, a spokesman for Ms. Bondi, said that the Justice Department’s national security division was still functioning at full capacity, and that any suggestion otherwise was “an outright lie” intended to fuel a media narrative.
Beyond the serious attrition of counterterrorism experts inside the Justice Department and the F.B.I., the Trump administration, beginning in January, also pulled out of several international organizations with vital counterterrorism missions.
Among them was the Global Counterterrorism Forum, which was founded in 2011 and brought together law enforcement officials and policymakers from more than 30 countries to share best practices on fighting violent radical extremists.
The State Department during Mr. Trump’s first term issued a report praising the work of the forum and other organizations that he withdrew from in his second term.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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