Only 11 days after President Trump was inaugurated for a second term, his administration began a purge of the F.B.I. that now threatens some of the bureau’s most important missions. His appointees ousted eight of its most experienced managers, including the division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity and criminal investigations. Several had worked on prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters or had assisted in the various investigations of Mr. Trump, and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.
That was just the beginning. Over the past five months, many F.B.I. agents, including other top managers and national security experts, have been fired, pressured to leave or transferred to lesser roles. Hundreds have resigned on their own, unwilling to follow the demands of the Trump administration. Their absence has left a vacuum in divisions that are supposed to protect the public. These losses have “obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the F.B.I.,” Adam Goldman of The Times wrote.
Mr. Trump’s playbook for the F.B.I. is plain to see. He is turning it into an enforcement agency for MAGA’s priorities. He is chasing out agents who might refuse to play along and installing loyalists in their place. He is seeking to remove the threat of investigation for his friends and allies. And he is trying to instill fear in his critics and political opponents. Among his many efforts to weaken American democracy and amass more power for himself, his politicization of the F.B.I. is one of the most blatant.
These developments should unsettle all Americans, regardless of party. As one former Justice Department official told NBC News, the decimation of the bureau’s senior ranks has left it “completely unprepared to respond to a crisis, including the fallout from the current conflict in the Middle East.” Mr. Trump’s politicization of the F.B.I. has left it less able to combat terrorism, foreign espionage, biosecurity threats, organized crime, online scams, white-collar crime, drug trafficking and more.
The F.B.I. has a flawed history, of course. J. Edgar Hoover abused his power as the bureau’s director for decades, and Richard Nixon used it to conduct surveillance of political opponents. Yet after the Watergate scandal forced Mr. Nixon’s resignation, the F.B.I., like the rest of the Justice Department, reformed itself to become more independent from the president.
Every president since the 1970s has at times chafed against that independence, wishing that the Justice Department would be more loyal to the White House’s political interests. But those presidents, from Gerald Ford through Joe Biden, largely respected the bureau’s autonomy. As a result, Americans — from the political left, center and right — tended to trust the F.B.I.
Mr. Trump has taken a radically different approach. He has made clear that he considers the F.B.I.’s first priority to be loyalty. Consider the Signal scandal from this spring, when senior officials disclosed sensitive information in a group chat. In any other administration, the F.B.I. probably would have investigated. Under Mr. Trump, the bureau looked the other way.
To carry out this agenda, he chose as its director Kash Patel, whose main qualification is his unquestioning fealty to Mr. Trump. In 2022, Mr. Patel published a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which a wizard named Kash saves the day by exposing a conspiracy against King Donald. The next year, Mr. Patel published a book titled “Government Gangsters.”
His mission at the F.B.I. is to politicize it. He is dismantling key operations and reshaping the bureau into an instrument of Mr. Trump’s political will. Mr. Trump spent years baselessly accusing the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of being weaponized against him; now he is turning federal law enforcement into the very thing he claimed it was: a political enforcer. Under Mr. Patel, the bureau has assigned agents to pursue long-running MAGA grievances. One example: Mr. Patel had his agents dig through documents searching for evidence to support one of Mr. Trump’s and the online right’s favorite conspiracy theories, that China somehow helped manipulate the results of the 2020 election.
Among the people whom Mr. Patel has scapegoated are the agents he now oversees, which damages the bureau’s morale and its effectiveness. Before taking office, he called the bureau “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He has described its employees as “political jackals” who tried to “suffocate the truth” in order to rig the 2020 election for Mr. Biden. Mr. Patel has promoted theories that the F.B.I. paid Twitter to censor conservatives and that it used confidential informants to stir up the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. There is no evidence to support any of this.
For his deputy director, Mr. Patel hired Dan Bongino, a longtime right-wing podcaster. Mr. Bongino has called the bureau “the single most corrupt law enforcement institution” in America and a “full-blown leftist political action committee.” Together they began singling out agents who had worked on prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters or the federal indictment of Mr. Trump for improperly removing documents from the White House. Many of these agents were fired, pushed to resign or transferred.
Several of the bureau’s most experienced managers have been driven out simply because they angered members of Mr. Trump’s coalition. Bureau leaders ordered the transfer of Spencer Evans, who ran the F.B.I.’s field office in Las Vegas, after Mr. Trump’s supporters accused him of denying religious exemptions for the Covid vaccine within the bureau. Michael Feinberg, a longtime counterintelligence agent who served as a deputy in the Norfolk, Va., field office, resigned after being threatened with demotion simply because he was a friend of a counterintelligence agent who had sent a text message disparaging Mr. Trump.
The resulting loss of expertise and experience is chilling. The bureau today has fewer people with the skills to prevent crime, political corruption and foreign espionage.
Under Mr. Patel, the F.B.I. has also reassigned agents from valuable work to showy efforts that bolster Mr. Trump’s political interests. This pattern is clearest with immigration. We acknowledge that an increased focus on border security and deportations is a legitimate change for Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. He won election last year partly because of public dissatisfaction with Mr. Biden’s loose border policies, which contributed to the most rapid surge of immigration in American history, much of it illegal.
Presidents rightly have the authority to shape the bureau’s priorities. But the approach of the Trump F.B.I. is nonetheless alarming because of its extremity. The administration is pulling agents away from areas that present true risks to the country and assigning them instead to search for undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record. The effort is part of a governmentwide effort to meet Mr. Trump’s arbitrary quota of 3,000 arrests a day. “They have cannibalized field offices to create these immigration squads,” one former agent told us in an interview. “They’re taking highly trained agents, many with advanced degrees and military experience, and using them for perimeter security on ICE roundups. And that means fewer people working to prevent foreign influence or public corruption.”
The Trump administration has gone so far as to brag about its decision to deprioritize corporate corruption and white-collar crime. The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Matthew Galeotti, has said that a crackdown on corporate crime burdens U.S. businesses. This shift is another example of Mr. Trump’s effort to protect people he considers his allies — namely, corporate executives. He has been particularly aggressive about reducing investigations into cryptocurrency scams while he has ignored decades of White House precedent by using his office for the profit of his businesses, especially in crypto.
Understandably, the combination seems to be undermining bureau morale. More than 650 bureau employees recently filed for early retirement.
All law enforcement agencies require foundations of public trust, but because of its troubled history and the ease of political manipulation from Washington, the F.B.I. has a particular need to demonstrate that it deserves the nation’s confidence. Agents, for their part, need to know that their managers and civilian leaders have their backs and don’t consider them to be jackals. They need to know that they are enforcing the law fairly, not being used for a personal or ideological agenda. The public — on which the bureau relies for tips and cooperation — has to trust that agents operate without political bias.
By abusing that trust, Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have put the reputation and effectiveness of the F.B.I. at risk. In doing so, they are risking the safety of the American public.
Source photograph by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.
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