Among the many problems that have emerged in federal law enforcement during Donald Trump’s second term is the campaign against key personnel. Indeed, there’s been an unsubtle campaign to purge federal law enforcement of prosecutors and FBI officials for unsubtle political reasons.
As The New York Times reported, those efforts are ongoing.
The F.B.I. has targeted another round of employees who ran afoul of conservatives, forcing out two veteran agents in Virginia — one of whom is friends with a critic of President Trump — and punishing another in Las Vegas, according to several people familiar with the matter. Two of the men, Spencer Evans and Stanley Meador, are senior agents who ran F.B.I. field offices in Las Vegas and Richmond, Va. The third, Michael Feinberg, a top deputy in the Norfolk, Va., office, had ties to a former agent whom Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, identified in his book as part of the so-called deep state.
The rationales behind the reported moves have varied. Evans, for example, apparently became a target after a stint at the FBI’s human resources department, where he was reluctant to approve exemptions for Covid vaccines. Republicans didn’t like Meador after his office issued a memo in 2023 related to possible threats from anti-abortion activists.
As for Feinberg, the Times’ report added that he issued a statement a couple of weeks ago, explaining that he was threatened with an investigation and the possibility of a demotion because of his friendship with Peter Strzok — who appeared on FBI Director Kash Patel’s infamous “enemies list.”
On his way out, Feinberg added that the FBI as an institution had begun “to decay,” and it’s easy to understand how and why he came to that conclusion.
For years, the public has been bombarded with hysterical rhetoric from Republican conspiracy theorists who insisted that the FBI — one of the most politically conservative institutions in the federal government and an agency that has literally never had a Democratic director — had secretly become “weaponized” by rascally liberals hellbent on targeting poor, unsuspecting victims on the right.
The baseless claims never made sense, though the FBI’s Trump-appointed leadership is now engaging in many of the same political efforts that Republicans long claimed to oppose.
On the 11th day of Trump’s second term, for example, NBC News reported, “Trump administration officials have forced out all six of the FBI’s most senior executives and multiple heads of FBI field offices across the country,” in part as retribution for the president having faced federal criminal charges in 2023 and in part to punish officials involved in Jan. 6 cases.
It was the first such purge on Team Trump’s revenge tour, but it was hardly the last.
The Times added in a separate report earlier this week, “Behind the scenes, [Patel’s] vision of an F.B.I. under President Trump is quietly taking shape. Agents have been forced out. Others have been demoted or put on leave with no explanation. ... The actions have obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the F.B.I. and raised questions about whether the agents taking over such critical posts have the institutional knowledge to pursue cornerstones of its work.”
I don’t know if the bureau will ever recover from the efforts to Trumpify it, but I know that recovery won’t happen anytime soon.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.