An unprecedented campaign by FBI leaders to force senior bureau officials out of their jobs has disproportionately hit women and people of color, according to public records and an unofficial tally by current and former FBI officials.
In the most recent example, FBI leaders last week forced the resignation of a decorated female Pakistani American counterterrorism agent who was appointed in February to run the Salt Lake City field office, one current and two former FBI officials tell MSNBC.
At least 18 of 53 special agents in charge — who run FBI field offices around the country — have been pushed out under the Trump administration — and among them, half have been women, people of color or both, according to data provided by current and former FBI officials who declined to be named, citing fear of retaliation.
In addition to the SACs, as they are known, other top bureau officials have been removed or forced to retire, including top managers at headquarters and elsewhere around the country.
The purge in the FBI’s leadership ranks is without precedent in its modern history.
The purge in the FBI’s leadership ranks is without precedent in its modern history, current and former officials say. FBI executives, including special agents in charge and other senior managers, are career civil servants who typically are promoted or transferred based on internal bureau requirements — regardless of who sits in the White House.
The latest moves are undoing decades of work by the bureau — across administrations — to diversify top ranks, which top officials long argued would build public trust and offer different perspectives during an investigation, something former FBI Director James Comey called "orbiting a situation." Improving relations with the American Muslim community has also been a priority given high-profile controversies over the agency's counterterrorism surveillance.
As of last year, women comprised around 21% of the heads of the 56 field offices, according to the FBI, up from 7% in 2002. (Three field office leaders hold the title of assistant director.) Currently, it’s unclear what percentage of SACs are women.
Some current and former officials say they see a clear pattern.
“If an agency’s political leaders have antipathy toward diversity and inclusion, as we know the FBI’s do, it’s fair to assume they believe that women and people of color in top career positions got there because of identity,” said Stacey Young, executive director of Justice Connection, a nonprofit organization advocating on behalf of FBI and Justice Department employees. “Women and people of color in very senior career roles — top performers with stellar records —have been pushed out at disproportionately high rates. We fear discrimination is at least part of the reason why.”
The FBI also brought back a requirement — decades after it was dropped — that agent trainees complete at least one strict pullup, a movement that even many strong and athletic women can’t complete even with training because of the differences in weight distribution in male and female bodies. That requirement would create constraints in other areas of national security; in a study of about 300 more-fit-than-average female U.S. Marines, just 43% could do a single pullup without specific training. Critics say this mandate will inevitably reduce the number of female agents.
In a statement to MSNBC, FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said the agency makes personnel decisions "based on merit and job performance" and does not comment on individual cases.
“The suggestion that Kash Patel — the first Indian-American to ever be confirmed as FBI director — is somehow targeting minorities in the Bureau is one of the most absurd claims I have ever heard," he said.
Current and former officials say the leadership purge is being driven by additional factors that they see as equally problematic.
Other current and former officials say the leadership purge is being driven by additional factors beyond race and gender that they see as equally problematic. They say Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have created a climate within the bureau that demands absolute loyalty from senior leaders in which any hint of dissent is considered risky.
Several current and former officials say the bureau has been administering polygraph tests to employees suspected of leaking stories to the news media that have been embarrassing to Patel and Bongino. (The agency has declined to comment on polygraphs, citing its refusal to discuss internal and personnel matters.)
One FBI agent told MSNBC about a recent meeting in which a career FBI leader with a good reputation went out of his way to effusively praise Patel and Bongino, whose lack of experience and past criticism of the agency have made them unpopular among its rank-and-file officers, current and former officials say.
“It was like watching a hostage video in real life,” the agent, who was present at the meeting, said. "He couldn’t repeat Kash’s talking points enough. I felt sad for the guy.”
One female leader who was among those forced out told MSNBC: “What’s more concerning to me is that they are getting rid of anyone with the experience and knowledge that allows them to push back.”
By design, the FBI is supposed to be free of day-to-day partisan politics. The only political appointee is the director, who is intended to serve a 10-year term. Senior leaders are rarely removed from their jobs absent allegations of serious misconduct.
Trump has struck several blows against FBI independence. In his first term, he fired then-Director James Comey just three and a half years into his term after Comey declined to pledge loyalty to Trump. After Trump was elected again last year, he signaled to then-Director Christopher Wray — whom he had appointed in his first term to replace Comey — that he would replace him, leading Wray to retire seven and a half years into his term. Trump then installed Patel and Bongino, who have spent years baselessly describing the FBI as a corrupt institution infected with political bias against Trump.
Even before Patel was confirmed as director, the acting DOJ leadership fired all six executive assistant directors, senior leaders who worked under Wray in Washington. Current and former FBI officials say the Trump team initially planned to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of FBI agents who investigated criminal cases against Jan. 6 rioters — but pressure from inside and outside the FBI staved that off.
Since Patel took office, his team has undertaken a series of more targeted removals outside of public view, current and former officials say. In other cases, senior agents and analysts have left on their own, fearing they could no longer be effective in an environment that they perceive demands absolute loyalty to Patel, Bongino and Trump.
Some of the ousters impacted people who had worked on hot-button political issues.
Patel disbanded the FBI’s anti-corruption squad in the Washington field office, which had investigated Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. That squad has also been in charge of investigating congressional corruption and its absence leaves a void, especially since the DOJ also fired most of the members of its Public Integrity Section — the prosecutors who supervised those investigations.
Tonya Ugoretz, who ran the bureau’s intelligence collection and analysis directorate, was placed on administrative leave in July after documents released by congressional Republicans spotlighted her alleged role in getting recalled a dubious and unsupported intelligence report alleging that China had tried to influence the outcome of the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Earlier this year, seven FBI leaders were forced out of their jobs in the course of a few days.
Earlier this year, seven FBI leaders — six special agents in charge and a head of intelligence in a field office — were forced out of their jobs in the course of a few days, including senior agents in Los Angeles; San Diego; St. Louis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Birmingham and Mobile, Alabama, according to current and former FBI officials and LinkedIn posts. They were two white women, two Black women, one Black man, one Asian American man and one white man. A female head of intelligence in Washington was also asked to leave, the sources said.
The special agent in charge in Salt Lake City, Mehtab Syed, is being forced out just six months after being appointed in February, for reasons that are not clear, the sources said. Associate Deputy Director J. William Rivers, who works for Bongino and Patel, told Syed she wasn’t a good fit for the office, which covers Utah, Idaho and Montana, the sources said. He offered her a lower-level job in the FBI’s Huntsville, Alabama, facility, but she has decided to retire, the sources said. She did not respond to a request for comment.
“She’s absolutely the best — truly a humble servant leader who treats co-workers like family,” said former FBI agent Christopher O’Leary, an MSNBC national security contributor who worked with Syed. “And she’s a legendary case agent who was involved in some of the most significant national security cases of the last two decades.”
Syed has served in a variety of consequential FBI jobs, including head of cyberterrorism and counterterrorism in the Los Angeles field office, a section chief in the counterintelligence section at FBI headquarters, and assistant legal attaché in Pakistan during the height of the U.S. war against Al Qaeda in that region. She also worked in counterterrorism in the New York field office and served in Amman, Jordan, during the U.S. fight against the Islamic State terrorist group, or ISIS.
Born in Pakistan, Syed moved to the United States at age 17, and joined the FBI after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“You feel shame first because you’re Muslim, you see someone doing something so bad, and it kind of reflects who you are,” she told KSL.com, a local television station in Utah, in a May interview. “But then I got angry, and I was like, ‘Uh-uh, that’s not happening.’”
