A Battle for the Soul of the FBI

I used to worry that the danger was a return to Hoover's FBI. Now I worry that it never will.

A worker paints over the FBI’s core values at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia to be in compliance with the President’s executive orders

On May 9, 2017, FBI Director James Comey was at the Los Angeles FBI field office, meeting with employees. He was scheduled to attend a diversity event later in the day to recruit more women and minorities into the Bureau, an agency which has historically been predominantly (as in, about 80%) white, and male — one of Comey’s priorities upon becoming Director was to diversify the agency. This was, of course, when “DEI” was considered value-added to organizations, particularly in national security where, say, being able to speak a foreign language, or more easily get information from a particular ethnic group because of your familiarity with it, could offer the U.S. a comparative advantage over its more homogenous adversaries.

That was also the day that Director Comey learned he was fired — by reading the chyron on the TV screen running silently behind the audience as he spoke. It’s easy to forget now, after eight years of boiling in the Trump-infested news pot, the shockwaves his firing created not only across the FBI, but the country. Comey may be the FBI Director Everyone Loves to Hate on both sides of the political spectrum (for different reasons), but at least on that day, almost everyone — including most Republicans! — were gobsmacked. It was unprecedented.

That snapshot in time is a good reference point against which to measure where we find ourselves today, with acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove seeking to fire approximately 6,000 Special Agents, simply because they participated in some way in the lawfully predicated (and almost universally successfully prosecuted) January 6 cases. That represents about 42% of the entire agent workforce, including agents across all 56 field offices with various levels of expertise in criminal, cyber, terrorism, and counterintelligence investigations. As I write this, however, the Acting FBI Director, Brian Driscoll (a.k.a. “The Drizz”) has refused to comply with Bove’s request to provide a list identifying these agents, telling the entire workforce in an email that “we are going to follow the law, follow FBI policy, and do what’s in the best interest of the workforce and the American people — always.”

In so doing, The Drizz and the other senior leaders of the FBI have held the line on maintaining the fundamental character of the Bureau — professionalism, independence, and adherence to the rule of law. But those attributes — the soul of the FBI—will drastically change for the worse, if not disappear, if Trump’s Justice Department succeeds in its efforts.

The values that define the Bureau as it exists today has a direct thru-line from J. Edgar Hoover to now. This might seem like a surprising, even provocative, claim, given that Hoover is most popularly known for his abuses of civil liberties, leverage over members of Congress (and even presidents), and, of course, being a racist. However, as Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (and Freedom Academy Book Club guest) Beverly Gage has detailed in her biography of the OG (no pun intended) director, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, Hoover was a complicated man, and wasn’t beholden to anyone, even the president (he wasn’t registered with a political party, and he never voted). Rather, his singular mission was to establish the image of the Bureau as non-partisan, above reproach, and most importantly, as a defender of the rule of law — and his obsession with this public perception shaped his choices. Some of the lesser known (and perhaps more surprising) positions Hoover took during his tenure was his opposition to Japanese internment camps, his refusal to hand over FBI files of suspected Communists to Joseph McCarthy, and his aggressive tactics against the KKK. (Even Hoover wasn’t against diversity efforts if it helped the Bureau: He recruited a Native American agent to work undercover to help solve the Osage murders in Oklahoma in the early 1920s.)

My point in explaining all of this is not to defend Hoover. It’s to point out that the threat he posed — an overreach of authority and abuse of power — is wholly different than the threat posed by the kind of FBI, and director, envisioned under Trump. Ironically, the Church hearings, which exposed the FBI’s abuses in COINTELPRO, help illustrate this most clearly. What COINTELPRO revealed was that under Hoover, law enforcement was operating in a grey zone, especially in the arena where civil liberties intersected with national security. Hoover took advantage of the legal vacuum to stretch the limits of the President’s law enforcement authority under Article II to (and perhaps beyond) its limits. And so Congress created legislation and guardrails to fill this vacuum: the Attorney General Guidelines, oversight and reporting requirements, FISA, to name a few. What Congress recognized, and what proved to be true, is that the FBI is, at its core, a rule-following agency. What it needed was clear-cut rules.

Driscoll’s statement to his workforce reflects this rule-following ethos. More importantly, his willingness to refuse to comply with his own bosses at the Justice Department reflects an understanding of the difference between following rules and following orders. That his actions have been heroically backed up by the heads of field offices across the country, who have told their respective agents that they have their backs and will even take the fall if needed, further underscores how deeply this commitment is ingrained into the Bureau’s culture.

Here’s the thing: An agency that is defined by loyalty to a person, rather than principles, can neither be guided nor reined in by rules. It is built around, and driven by, contempt for them. The current Justice Department’s willingness to decimate almost half of its agent workforce without due process protections owed to those employees and despite the danger to Americans that will result from the vacuum left by agents no longer investigating and monitoring critical threats, is already signaling a step in this direction. And if the firings are successful, it won’t end there: Those 6,000 vacancies will be filled — and you can bet that it won’t be with Hoover’s G-Men. Not to add to your nightmare fuel, but there is literally nothing stopping a future FBI director from welcoming any (or all) of the pardoned January 6 offenders — including violent offenders or members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — and handing them a badge and a gun in the “new” FBI.

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As a new agent at Quantico, I was one of the first classes that went on a field trip to the Holocaust Museum, a part of the Academy curriculum that (as far as I know) has remained in effect until this day. The purpose of the visit was for agents to recognize the immense responsibility they carry as law enforcement officers and the terrible consequences when an organization like the FBI loses its moral footing. Sadly, not too long ago, I learned that the agents who were dismissed for (among other things) refusing to participate in January 6 investigations questioned the purpose of this trip in a letter to then-FBI Director Christopher Wray. Those same individuals now have the ear, as well as the sympathy and support, of Trump’s director nominee, Kash Patel.

This past weekend James Dennehy, the Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) of the New York field office, where I worked as an agent, joined his field office counterparts and vowed in an email to his office that he would “dig in” and defend the Bureau’s independence. He observed that in defying the Justice Department’s request, the Bureau was in “a battle of [its] own.”

Make no mistake: the winner of that battle will make, or break, the soul of the FBI as we know it.