During his first presidency, Donald Trump angrily clashed with some of his own appointees to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — including two U.S. attorneys general: Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. And he ended up hating Christopher A. Wray, the conservative Republican he chose to replace James Comey as FBI director.
The fact that Wray enjoyed strong bipartisan support and remained as FBI director under former President Joe Biden intensified Trump’s disdain for him. And when he nominated far-right conspiracy theorist Kash Patel for that position, Trump sent out a loud message that he wanted ultra-MAGA loyalists running the FBI.
In an article published on July 29, attorney/legal expert Quinta Jurecic warns that six months into Trump’s second presidency, the FBI is in total disarray.
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Jurecic points to the resignation of former FBI special agent Michael Feinberg as a prime example of the agency’s dysfunction: Feinberg, according to Jurecic, was under pressure merely for being friends with a former agent who was critical of Trump. Feinberg, like Wray, resigned before Trump had a chance to fire him.
“The FBI has long seen itself as an organization built on expertise,” Jurecic explains. “Its founder, J. Edgar Hoover, was an early and devoted advocate of professionalizing the government bureaucracy, to the point of mandating that agents wear a dark suit and striped tie. Now, however, the bureau is in the early stages of something like a radical deprofessionalization. The most important quality for an FBI official to have now appears to be not competence but loyalty. The exiling of Feinberg and others like him is an effort to engineer and accelerate this transformation.”
Jurecic continues, “Feinberg’s boss, Special Agent in Charge Dominique Evans, didn’t allege any misconduct on his part, Feinberg told me. Rather, as Feinberg set out in his resignation letter…. Evans explained that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino had found out that Feinberg had maintained a friendship with the former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, a longtime target of Trump’s ire.”
Feinberg, Jurecic notes, is lamenting the “decay” of the FBI.
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“An FBI without constraint or apolitical oversight is exactly what Trump wants, and what Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel seem to be working toward,” the attorney warns. “Trump launched his 2024 campaign by declaring to his supporters, ‘I am your retribution,’ and in their previous lives as MAGA influencers, both Patel and Bongino voiced support for locking up the president’s opponents. Citing ‘Justice Department sources,’ Fox News recently reported that the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into former intelligence chiefs who led the government’s assessment of Russian election interference in 2016.”
Jurecic continues, “In the first Trump Administration, such a blatant use of the FBI for political ends would have been an unthinkable breach of law-enforcement independence. But the FBI’s new leadership has been pushing out many of those who might object. So many people have been driven away, in fact, that after his departure, Feinberg found himself adopted by what he calls an ‘exile community’ of former Justice Department and FBI officials working to help one another adjust to post-government life.”
During his interview with Jurecic, the conservative Feinberg — who was active in the Federalist Society in the past — was highly critical of Trump’s politicization of the FBI as well as the way U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with the FBI’s help, is handling deportations. And thinks that wearing masks is a bad idea for ICE agents.
Feinberg told Jurecic, “I was absolutely furious. We live in a democracy. We are an organization that serves the public. We do not hide from our actions.”
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Quinta Jurecic’s full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).