The New York Times Editorial Board says President Donald Trump has derailed countless investigations on his road to turning the F.B.I. into an “enforcement agency for MAGA’s priorities.”
“Over the past five months, many F.B.I. agents, including top managers and national security experts, have been fired, pressured to leave or transferred to lesser roles. Hundreds have resigned on their own, unwilling to follow the demands of the Trump administration,” the Times writes. “Their absence has left a vacuum in divisions that are supposed to protect the public,” obliterating “decades of experience in national security and criminal matters.”
One former Justice Department official told NBC News the decimation of the senior ranks has left it “completely unprepared to respond to a crisis, including the fallout from the current conflict in the Middle East.” Meanwhile, Trump’s department politicization has left it less able to “combat terrorism, foreign espionage, biosecurity threats, organized crime, online scams, white-collar crime, drug trafficking and more” the board claims.
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Trump’s “first priority” with the F.B.I. is loyalty, the Times says, and this explains why the F.B.I. “looked the other way” instead of investigating when senior officials recently disclosed sensitive information in a Signal group chat. Trump installed political hacks Kash Patel and Dan Bongino as director and second-in-command, and they’ve assigned agents to pursue “long-running MAGA grievances,” including conspiracies that China “helped manipulate the results of the 2020 election.”
“Mr. Trump spent years baselessly accusing the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of being weaponized against him; now he is turning federal law enforcement into the very thing he claimed it was: a political enforcer,” the Times warns.
Along with conspiracy theories, the board says the administration is pulling agents away from areas that present true risks to the country and making them search for undocumented immigrants “who have no criminal record.”
Because of what it does, the Times says the F.B.I. has “a particular need to demonstrate that it deserves the nation’s confidence. And that agents “need to know that their managers and civilian leaders have their backs and don’t consider them to be jackals.”
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“The public — on which the bureau relies for tips and cooperation — has to trust that agents operate without political bias,” the Times adds. “By abusing that trust, Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have put the reputation and effectiveness of the F.B.I. at risk. In doing so, they are risking the safety of the American public.”
Read the full New York Times report at this link.