Longtime FBI agent condemns Trump admin's immature and reckless leadership

A veteran FBI special agent claims the agency is “consumed by politically motivated revenge and conspiracy theories, distracting the F.B.I., once again, from the danger of terrorism.”

Writing in The New York Times, Jacqueline Maguire said the spreading war with Iran significantly elevates the regime’s threat to Americans at home and abroad.

That means, she claims, “the F.B.I. must return its focus to its core work: protecting Americans from terrorists and cyberattacks and halting foreign intelligence operations and espionage.”

But nothing in the age of Trump 2.0 is ever that simple.

Although the FBI in her 2000-era tenure was admittedly “distracted from the threat by Al Qaeda that had taken root in the United States,” the agency quickly got up to speed after 9/11. It bolstered its national security work, she claimed.

However, the author of the piece was among those “pushed out” of the FBI last year when the Trump administration started its second term in January 2025. Among the dozens who departed were Iran specialists.

Iran “is the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism and, through its proxies and its own direct recruitment abroad, culpable for the deaths of hundreds of Americans,” Maguire writes. “In recent years, it has increasingly targeted Americans at home, using its own direct network controlled by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the external operations branch of the ayatollah’s powerful military force.”

“Their agenda (included) a plan to assassinate Mr. Trump,” Maguire claims. Iran also poses a cyber threat to water and wastewater systems in this country, disabled bank websites, and prevented logins to various accounts. Those actions cost American businesses millions of dollars to neutralize.

“Against that backdrop, the current sophomoric leadership of the F.B.I. is concerning,” Maguire writes. Particularly disturbing, she notes, was “a nonsensical partnership with the Ultimate Fighting Championship” recently enacted.

The firing of veteran agents is “particularly harmful now,” Maguire concludes. “Dismissing personnel out of spite, for no valid reason, makes the United States less safe — especially when some of those fired employees were steeped in the sort of counterintelligence work that prevents Iranian attacks.”