FBI agents are seen near a Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, New York, on May 15, 2022. (Usman Khan – AFP / Getty Images)
WESTERN JOURNAL | Published February 6, 2025
In the latest move indicating the federal bureaucracy is resigning itself to the prerogatives of the Donald Trump administration — as opposed to fighting them — the FBI has agreed to turn over the details of the roughly 5,000 FBI agents who played a role in investigating cases relating to Jan. 6.
According to a Tuesday CNN report, bureau officials complied with a demand from the administration to provide the details after a memo with the subject line “Terminations” was sent Friday.
That memo, from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, said that officials with the FBI had until noon on Tuesday to submit the details or face termination.
Bove had previously been involved in the termination of eight other senior FBI employees.
The tactic worked: “More than 5,000 employee details were submitted, including employee ID numbers, job titles and their role in the January 6 investigations, sources said, but not their names,” CNN reported.
“There are more than 13,000 agents and 38,000 total FBI employees.”
The move is already the subject of a lawsuit by FBI employees against the DOJ, accusing it of violating both their Constitutional rights and federal privacy laws by painting the demand — and requiring them to take a survey about what role they might have played in the investigation — as part of a “purge.”
The survey asked them about whether they testified before grand juries or trials, executed arrests, or had specific roles in Jan. 6 investigations.
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SOURCE: www.westernjournal.com
RELATED: FBI agents sue over Justice Dept. effort to ID employees involved in Trump-related investigations
The FBI turned over the names of 5,000 employees it says worked on U.S. Capitol cases stemming from the Jan. 6 riot to the Department of Justice. (CNN, DOJ)
FIRST ALERT 4 | Published February 6, 2025
WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI agents who participated in investigations related to President Donald Trump have sued over Justice Department efforts to develop a list of employees involved in those inquiries that they fear could be a precursor to mass firings.
Two lawsuits, filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington on behalf of anonymous agents, demand an immediate halt to the collection and potential dissemination of names of investigators who participated in probes of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. One of the complaints says agents were also asked to fill out surveys about their participation in the investigation into Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The suits mark an escalation in a high-stake dispute that burst into public view on Friday with revelations that the Justice Department had demanded from the FBI the names, offices and titles of all employees involved in Jan. 6 investigations so that officials could evaluate whether any personnel action was merited. Thousands of FBI employees were also asked over the weekend to fill out an in-depth questionnaire about their participation in those probes, a step they worry could lead to termination.
Responding to the Justice Department’s request, the FBI turned over personnel details of several thousand employees but identified them only through their unique identifier code rather than by name, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter and internal communications seen by The Associated Press.
The prospect of demotions, discipline or even termination for career agents has unnerved officials inside the FBI.
Natalie Bara, the president of the FBI Agents Association, which also sued, told reporters Tuesday that one agent who had spent hours recovering body parts from the Potomac River following last week’s plane crash “had to return to the office — not to debrief, not to work on cases, but to fill out a mandatory survey on any involvement in investigations related to Jan. 6.”
“This is the reality for our agents today. They’re being scrutinized, placed on lists, and facing the possibility of losing their jobs,” she said.
The scrutiny of career agents is highly unusual given that rank-and-file FBI agents do not select the cases they are assigned to work on, do not historically switch positions or receive any sort of discipline because of their participation in matters seen as politically sensitive cases and especially because there’s been no evidence any FBI agents or lawyers who investigated or prosecuted the cases engaged in misconduct.
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SOURCE: www.firstalert4.com
