President Donald Trump is using FBI employees’ financial precariousness to pressure them into doing his bidding, according to two experts.
“My family and friends regularly remind me that only a moron would walk away before their pension vests,” Michael Feinberg, a former Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the FBI, told MS NOW’s Katy Tur on Wednesday. “So it is very much true that they are putting people into these positions who they know are over a financial barrel and are not going to give objective advice based on operational necessities, DOJ and FBI policies, and frankly, the Constitution. I think the longer this goes on, the more you're going to see the FBI involved in frankly outrageous investigations and prosecutions.”
Feinberg added, “We already have a flavor of what that's going to look like, because we've seen the multiple indictments of Jim Comey — most of which failed — the attempted indictments of Letitia James, the failed indictments of various Democratic congressional members who simply stated the fact that soldiers do not have to follow illegal orders, which is actually Department of Defense doctrine. They're getting over their skis because the senior ranks of the organization are in a position where they are unwilling or financially unable to say no to the more outlandish ideas that cross their desk. And it's making Americans less safe in terms of violence and foreign threats. And it's making Americans less safe in the simple fact that they cannot rely on the objective rule of law and its enforcement like they have for the past 250 years.”
Before Feinberg’s comments, Ken Dilanian — a journalist who has broken stories about Trump’s FBI persecuting the president’s perceived political enemies (in fact FBI employees merely doing their assigned jobs) — elaborated on the case of one of Trump’s targets, former Deputy Assistant Director Tonya Ugoretz.
“They already fired the number one person, a woman named Tonya Ugoretz, a few months ago, because she was involved in essentially withdrawing a bogus intelligence report, thinly sourced, suggesting that China was flooding the United States with fake driver's licenses in order to facilitate fraud in the 2020 election,” Dilanian told Tur. “She and others at the FBI thought that never should have been published. They tabled it, and she paid the price for that.”
He added that another employee, Emily Morales, “is out because of her involvement with this intelligence analysis from nine years ago — this 2017 shooting” at a congressional baseball game.
Dilanian ultimately characterized Trump’s behavior toward FBI employees as a former of psychological torture.
“You're putting your finger right on a very interesting human psychological experiment,” Dilanian told Tur. “Some of these people are doing it — and Michael put his finger on a very important point that I didn't quite explain. It isn't just that these people would lose their job — it's that they would lose their pension. And when you're a government official, you take less salary because you know that at the end of 20 or 30 years, you can retire with a very healthy pension that most of the rest of us will never get.”
Dilanian added, “But in order to do that, you have to reach your number of years. And if you've put 15 years in and you have five to go — imagine the pressure that puts on you to go along. But then there's also — look — there's a group of people inside the FBI who are very sympathetic to what Donald Trump is wanting to do. And they've managed to find a lot of those people and elevate them.”
In terms of the Morales firing, Dilanian reported on Tuesday that “it was unclear whether the letter cited her role in the 2017 assessment, but the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a personnel matter, said her removal was widely perceived inside the bureau as the latest in a series of firings of nonpartisan FBI agents who did their jobs in a way that drew disfavor from President Donald Trump or Republicans.”
Ugoretz responded to the news of Morales’ firing by arguing that it would put American lives in danger.
“Tactical reports give an understanding of information as it’s known at the time. Anyone with crisis response experience knows that information can change, and usually does,” Ugoretz explained. “The FBI’s actions are choking the capabilities that help it stop criminals, spies, hackers, and terrorists before they act. I don’t know if they’re doing it intentionally or out of ignorance, and I don’t know which is worse.”
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