The F.B.I. has had many missions in the more than half-century since its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, died. It has chased spies, foiled terrorist attacks, ushered in a modern era of innovation and decreased crime rates.
But under its current chief, Kash Patel, the bureau has added payback to its portfolio. Agents now scour the F.B.I.’s vast holdings to root out negative information about President Trump’s perceived political enemies, according to current and former officials, lawmakers and lawyers representing some of those targeted.
Administration officials say it is an essential task in ending what they denounce as the “weaponization” of law enforcement by Democrats. Critics say it is little more than using federal law enforcement to carry out a partisan opposition research operation.
Almost from the moment Mr. Patel took over the bureau in February, F.B.I. personnel have been poring over case files, internal Justice Department correspondence and other sensitive materials to find documents intended to expose and discredit federal law enforcement officials who investigated Mr. Trump and his allies.
The material appears to be coming from at least three streams. There is the bureau’s production of files in response to longstanding inquiries by Republicans on Capitol Hill; documents Mr. Patel’s team has found through self-generated searches; and self-described whistle-blowers, including at least one from the F.B.I., who have passed on sensitive documents from Trump investigations, including grand jury information that by law is supposed to remain confidential.
It is not clear how wide-ranging this effort is, or how closely Mr. Patel is coordinating with those outside the bureau. But one of those overseeing the searches was Mr. Patel’s former deputy, Dan Bongino, who worked with a handpicked group of agents and supervisors known internally as the directors’ advisory team, according to current and former officials.
The material, once gathered, has typically been distributed through various channels to Trump-allied media and to Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Much of it has related to Arctic Frost, the investigation the F.B.I. led into efforts by Mr. Trump and others to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That inquiry ultimately formed the core of the election interference case brought in Washington by Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted Mr. Trump and is a frequent target of the president’s calls for retribution.
“Arctic Frost was a runaway train that swept up information from hundreds of innocent people simply because of their political affiliation,” Mr. Grassley said last month.
Mr. Grassley has requested information about Mr. Smith’s inquiry since 2022, and repeatedly expressed frustration with the Biden administration’s refusal to turn over internal documents. That padlocked door has been kicked open by Mr. Patel.
Mr. Smith and his deputies have repeatedly claimed that they acted lawfully and apolitically, and that they buttressed their cases with overwhelming evidence of Mr. Trump’s guilt.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Justice Department officials had an uneasy, at times fraught, relationship with congressional Democrats, with both sides refusing to turn over investigative materials related to their concurrent investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
That has changed. In a Jan. 9 cover letter accompanying a fresh batch of documents related to Mr. Smith, Patrick Davis, a former Grassley aide who now runs the Justice Department’s legislative affairs office, said his goal was “to uncover the Biden administration’s weaponization of law enforcement against its political opponents.”
Bureau officials have described these disclosures as laudable and as long-delayed acts of transparency intended to reveal efforts by the Biden administration to turn the justice system against Mr. Trump and those around him.
Ben Williamson, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that any suggestion that the bureau’s disclosures were “manufactured, planted or cherry-picking” was false.
“Director Patel and his leadership team have overseen the most transparent F.B.I. in history — turning over 40,000 documents to Congress in just one year, a nearly 400 percent increase over both his predecessors during their entire tenures combined,” he wrote in an email. “We are proud of our work with the committees of jurisdiction on the Hill and make zero apologies for opening the books of the F.B.I. for the American people.”
But in their frequency and political pointedness, the disclosures have become a weapon of their own. Batches of anti-Smith material have often been released ahead of congressional hearings in an effort to shape the narrative and maximize outrage. Republicans have hinted at new disclosures before Mr. Smith’s public testimony in front of a House committee this week.
Last October, just before Attorney General Pam Bondi was set to be questioned before Mr. Grassley’s committee, the senator released material showing that Mr. Smith obtained the phone data of eight senators in an effort to document efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to block the congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.
Mr. Grassley claimed that agents under Mr. Smith had “spied” on lawmakers, even though Mr. Smith’s team had no way of determining the content of the calls, and obtained approval from a judge to keep the matter secret.
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, went further, falsely claiming that his phone had been “tapped,” even as he sat in front of a facsimile of the document that showed the material obtained through a subpoena was metadata, not recorded conversations.
Months later, Mr. Grassley released F.B.I. emails indicating that some agents in the bureau’s Washington field office had doubts about conducting the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, for classified documents that he took from the White House after leaving office.
Mr. Grassley said the emails showed the search was “a miscarriage of justice.” He never mentioned that the agents who had been concerned about the search eventually agreed to it, or that the validity of the F.B.I.’s actions was scrutinized, and approved, by a Trump-appointed judge.
Much of the material recently turned over by the bureau and Justice Department has come in the form of answers to requests from Mr. Grassley and his counterpart on the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio.
The official go-between is Mr. Davis, the former Grassley aide. He has also been the main intermediary between the department and Mr. Smith’s legal team, providing guidance on what the former special counsel can and cannot say at hearings.
A number of revelations, often promoted as bombshells, have come through a more opaque conduit: one or more whistle-blowers who have provided Mr. Grassley with documents.
Some appear to contain information arising from grand jury proceedings. The disclosure of that material by federal employees is illegal and subject to criminal prosecution.
In October, Mr. Grassley posted 197 subpoenas Mr. Smith and his team issued to hundreds of Republicans and Republican-aligned organizations to determine the extent of a possible conspiracy to reverse the election.
The material came from a “legally protected whistle-blower,” he said at the time.
But two former prosecutors on Mr. Smith’s team were concerned enough about the disclosure that in early November, they asked the Justice Department’s internal watchdog to investigate, worried that it contained grand jury material, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The New York Times.
“If the records that Chairman Grassley published are authentic, the only individuals with access to such records are Justice Department officials,” the prosecutors, J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston, wrote, adding that “disclosure of any such records” would violate grand jury secrecy laws.
Mr. Grassley’s spokeswoman, Clare Slattery, said the senator had the legal right to publish such information under a federal law passed in 1978, which grants federal employees broad authority to send information to Congress without interference from their agencies. He came to that conclusion after consulting with the Senate’s legal counsel, she added.
Ms. Slattery said that Mr. Grassley’s staff carefully vetted whistle-blowers. All of the recent material, she added, was intended to release “facts that the Biden administration hid from Congress and the American people.”
Still, a December 2020 opinion from the Justice Department’s legal policymaking office issued during Mr. Trump’s first term determined that “unauthorized disclosures about lawful prosecutorial decision-making are not likely to be protected” by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
Federal law prohibits the public disclosure of such material primarily to protect witnesses and targets who may not ultimately be charged.
And even though the whistle-blower law was written to provide protection to employees who reveal information about wrongdoing that could expose them to reprisals, Mr. Grassley’s critics say that the disclosures he has made since Mr. Trump returned to office are unlikely to provoke retaliation under a president who has, in public statements and executive orders, called for the release of proof that he was persecuted.
“There’s no risk of retaliation,” said David Seide, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Project, which represents whistle-blowers facing retaliation.
Mr. Grassley and his team deny the disclosures are politically motivated, pointing to his four-decade track record of protecting whistle-blowers. They claim many of their sources either predate Mr. Trump’s election or required anonymity to allay fear of retribution.
“They stick their necks out and risk their careers, livelihoods and reputations to report government misconduct,” Ms. Slattery wrote in an email. “It’s disgraceful to insinuate that these brave men and women only expose government misconduct because they’re somehow a part of some broader conspiracy.”
There is no indication that either the F.B.I. or Justice Department have opened a leak investigation into the disclosure of grand jury material, despite an administration-wide push to root out people who pass along information without authorization.
Mr. Grassley’s critics say that the whistle-blower designation has provided him with a valuable way to release information that Justice Department officials could not otherwise make public. Without the whistle-blower conduit, sensitive material that many Republicans would like to put under a spotlight could remain buried, said one Republican senator who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters.
The campaign against one F.B.I. agent, Walter Giardina, suggests how the pipeline of information from the bureau to Capitol Hill can have consequences in the real world.
In June, Mr. Grassley said that an unnamed F.B.I. whistle-blower had contacted his office to question the impartiality of Mr. Giardina, who worked with Mr. Smith and for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Mr. Trump’s potential ties to Russia. He had also served as the agent who arrested the Trump adviser Peter Navarro after he was indicted in 2022 on charges of contempt of Congress.
In a letter to Mr. Patel and Ms. Bondi, Mr. Grassley accused Mr. Giardina of openly making known “his animosity toward President Trump,” and suggested that he may have destroyed records on a government laptop during the investigation overseen by Mr. Mueller.
Mr. Giardina vehemently denied those allegations in a meeting with bureau officials last July, two days after the funeral of his wife, who died of adrenal cancer at 49.
Mr. Giardina was targeted by Mr. Trump on social media and subsequently fired by Mr. Patel, in a move that he said was without cause.
Lawyers for agents fired by the F.B.I. say their clients are victims of a double standard, publicly accused of political bias by partisans hiding behind a bulwark of anonymity.
Mr. Smith broached the fate of his former team during closed-door testimony last month before a House committee.
“These dedicated public servants are the best of us, and they have been wrongly vilified and improperly dismissed from their jobs,” he said, according to video of his testimony.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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