The FBI As We Knew It is Gone

It took a hundred years to create the Bureau as we knew it. And it took one dinner at the White House to destroy it.

In February, I wrote a piece for Substack called “A Battle for the Soul of the FBI.” That battle is (pretty much) over, and I’m sad to say that the FBI — at least the one we knew — lost. Weirdly, I’m writing this on the same evening that William Webster, the FBI’s third director, died at the age of 101, a little more than a century after the FBI’s first and longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, was appointed to lead the agency. It is sort of a fitting marker of an end of an era, given that as I write, FBI supervisors across the country are receiving letters from current FBI Director Kash Patel informing them that they are being “summarily dismissed” in what is widely seen as an agency-wide purge of agents deemed insufficiently loyal to President Trump.

The purge comes on the heels of a “strategy session” about how to deal with the Epstein fallout that took place at the White House last Thursday with Trump, Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Vice President JD Vance. Here is a sample letter sent to one agent, a Marine combat veteran whose wife died of cancer last month (Giardina worked on the Russia investigation in 2016 and was involved in the arrest of former Trump adviser Peter Navarro for refusing to testify to Congress):

In my last piece on the FBI, I noted that there were three defining features of the modern Bureau: professionalism, independence, and adherence to the rule of law. That last aspect was the one that took some time to establish and what we talk about the most: Hoover wasn’t exactly constrained by rules — there really weren’t any — and so most of the focus of the FBI since his death has been on creating guardrails, from congressional oversight to the Attorney General Guidelines governing investigations to legislation like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to make sure that the FBI can’t go rogue again. Indeed, this was Director Webster’s main focus when he became director; the New York Times obituary quotes him observing that he wanted more guardrails, because he “did not want to turn the bureau into a Gestapo organization.”

Here’s the thing: Webster, and any other director after Hoover, could have totally turned the Bureau into exactly that. They didn’t. And that’s largely because even while they jettisoned some of the practices that led to the worst abuses under Hoover and instituted rules to cabin them, these directors had the good judgment not to throw out the baby with the bathwater and kept the professionalism and independence that Hoover had also cultivated during his 48-year tenure. Over time, we came to take that for granted. We shouldn’t have.

Hoover looms so large in the Bureau’s history that it’s easy to forget that it existed before he became director. I recently gave a three-hour presentation to a group of Chinese executives visiting Yale on “The History and Evolution of the FBI, 1908-Present” which gave me a chance to review those early days. (My entire, 70-slide presentation was translated into Chinese and yes, I basically omitted the fact that China is the FBI’s #1 threat to make things a little less awkward.) A few details from researching those early years really brings home that history doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes.

The Bureau was originally created in 1908 by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte during a period of politically-motivated violence (President William McKinley had been assassinated in 1901) and an increase in interstate crime that state and local law enforcement couldn’t address on their own because of jurisdictional constraints. Still, Congress was wary of the idea of a “national” police force — the Gestapo did not yet exist but I think most people could sense where a national police force could lead. The “Bureau of Investigation” started out with only 34 agents who mainly focused on a narrow set of crimes, dealing with things like land fraud and federal regulatory violations. Agents had very limited authority — they didn’t even have arrest powers (they could gather evidence and write reports, but arrests had to be made by U.S. Marshals).

World War I was a game changer, thrusting the Bureau into the national security space to weed out would-be spies and sabateurs. But, as you might imagine with an agency that is authorized to investigate threats to national security without any guardrails, this led to overreach — the Palmer Raids, which resulted in the arrest and deportation of thousands of suspected “radicals,” most of them immigrants, was a bad look for the new Bureau as it faced public and congressional scrutiny in the aftermath. Alongside rampant public corruption in the government like the Teapot Dome scandal, the Bureau didn’t have a lot of credibility with the American people.

I lay all this out to provide some background on the context in which Hoover became director. Hoover, who was then a Justice Department attorney leading the General Intelligence Division of the Bureau (and who had been in charge of the Palmer Raids but had somehow managed to survive the backlash), was appointed director in 1924 with marching orders to restore the public’s trust in federal law enforcement.

One of the ways he did this was to professionalize the agency — agents had to be lawyers and accountants, maintain strict discipline, and be above reproach in character and integrity. (When I was an agent, there was still a Hoover mantra often repeated: “Never embarrass the Bureau.”) The other was ensuring that it was politically independent. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage, author of G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century, notes that even while serving under eight presidents — four Democrats and four Republicans — Hoover never cast a vote nor affiliated himself with either political party. His efforts were successful — the Bureau earned public trust from across the political spectrum and expanded its authority as a result, including obtaining congressional authorization for special arrest powers (hence, “special agent”) and the ability to carry firearms in 1934.

Whatever other shortcomings Hoover had (and he had a lot), it's hard to overestimate the impact of these two features on the culture of the Bureau for the next century. The FBI had to be competent. It had to look and act professional. It had to have the public’s trust. And most importantly, it had to be free of political influence. All of these were choices — they weren’t and aren’t required by statute (the FBI has no legislative charter) or the Constitution. And just by virtue of the fact that Hoover stuck around so long, they became institutionalized as “norms,” ones that (almost) every director that followed Hoover until now has kept in place (not including here L. Patrick Grey III, appointed as acting director by Nixon and who participated in the Watergate coverup). They were refined even further — the FBI instituted background checks and polygraphs, visits to the Holocaust museum for new agents to understand the responsibility they hold to the public, and recruitment for specialized skills to match the current threat landscape.

But these were still all choices, which reflected a belief that a national police force should, in fact, be professional and independent. For the last one hundred years, we have trusted the Justice Department and the President to prioritize these values, along with adherence to the rule of law, in lieu of enshrining them into law (Director Webster apparently tried to get Congress to establish a legislative charter for the Bureau, to no avail). Well, we now have a director who doesn’t value these things. And we have a President who doesn’t either. So guess what, we are going to have a very different agency. And it is probably going to look a lot like the pre-1924 years of the Bureau, when there were not only no rules, but also no standards and no independence. Oh, except fifty times larger and with guns and arrest powers.

I wish I could say that I think the Bureau can make it through this, as it has other crises and low points in its history. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say that I don’t think it will, at least in its current form. In fact, precisely because of the ethics and professionalism and independence of the existing cadre of FBI agents, I think that the ones who don’t get fired will quickly leave, because the vetting process ensures that they are people who value their integrity over most anything else.

In short, what we are witnessing is the FBI morphing, 117 years later, into the kind of nightmare national police force that Congress and the public feared the Bureau could turn into when it was first created in 1908, and which Director Webster and every other director made their mission not to let happen. The real question is how, if at all, we will be able to rebuild it again — if we are fortunate to have the chance to do so on the other side of this national nightmare.