Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, the FBI has been purging those deemed insufficiently loyal to the president and his agenda, but the campaign reached new depths last month. As part of an unsubtle revenge tour, three experienced bureau officials found themselves unemployed, including Brian Driscoll, a widely respected figure among rank-and-file agents who was fired after he helped prevent a mass firing of thousands of FBI officials who worked on Jan. 6 cases.
Reporting on the chaos, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian noted: “The purge that is ongoing is without precedent in the modern history of the bureau. It raises questions about whether the Trump administration is trying to turn the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency into an instrument of presidential whim — exactly the thing he baselessly accused his opponent of doing.”
A month later, Dilanian and MSNBC’s Carol Leonnig reported on a new federal lawsuit that alleges that FBI Director Kash Patel, a brazen Trump loyalist, “knowingly broke the law when he fired senior FBI executives at the behest of the White House and under pressure from Trump allies.” From the article:
The 68-page complaint was filed by former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll and two other fired FBI leaders who claim they were the targets of ‘politically motivated retribution’ and are seeking ‘to vindicate their constitutional and legal rights.’ The suit cites a series of alleged conversations involving Patel and other senior Trump advisers that, if true, show an FBI leadership consumed by the whims of a Trump White House that targeted employees solely for political reasons.
Patel, you’ll recall, testified during his confirmation hearings that he would never take such steps. The far-right conspiracy theorist declared under oath, “I have no interest, no desire and will not, if confirmed, go backwards. There will be no politicization at the F.B.I. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI, should I be confirmed as the FBI director.”
If the allegations raised in the new civil suit are correct, the director’s claims now appear ridiculous.
“Patel stated that all FBI employees who they identified who had worked on the cases against President Trump would be removed from their jobs, regardless of their retirement eligibility status,” the lawsuit says in describing Driscoll’s account of a conversation with the FBI director. “He then stated that Driscoll needed to understand that ‘the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.’”
The lawsuit added that the director acknowledged that firing FBI agents without cause would violate internal FBI rules and federal law — and he knew that he was opening the door to a likely lawsuit, though that didn’t stop him.
Patel “stated that his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on the cases against the President, regardless of whether the agents chose to work on those cases or not,” the lawsuit says.
The entire MSNBC report is well worth your time and leaves an unmistakable impression: The FBI, according to the lawsuit, has practically become a pitiful extension of the White House, led by Trump sycophants who’ve spent the year taking direction from the West Wing.
Time will tell what becomes of the litigation, but in the meantime, it’s worth appreciating the larger political context. In recent years, Republicans and their allies have insisted that the FBI had become corrupted and weaponized by partisan operatives who quietly aligned the bureau with their political allies. Those claims have long been rather silly, and GOP efforts to substantiate the conspiracy theories have, at least so far, turned up nothing. But it’s against this backdrop that three former FBI leaders, effectively playing the role of whistleblowers, have filed a detailed lawsuit that appears to document the very problem that Republicans intended to prove: The bureau, the litigation alleges, really has become corrupted and weaponized by partisan operatives who’ve quietly aligned the bureau with their political allies. There’s no shortage of questions, but near the top is this one: Will the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, express even the slightest interest in this case? Especially since this appears to be exactly the kind of information they claimed they were looking for? It’s possible that the GOP-led panel will surprise me, act in an even-handed way and schedule lengthy hearings to examine the allegations in more detail, but I seriously doubt it.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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