EXPERT INTERVIEWS – As part of the Trump Administration’s aim to reduce government payrolls, it has taken several actions involving the FBI. More than two dozen FBI officials and prosecutors have been fired, several thousand employees have been asked to submit answers to questionnaires, and the administration has signaled a pivot of the bureau’s overall approach to focus more closely on illegal immigration, drug trafficking and violent crime. What’s unclear – amid a swirl of conflicting media reports – is how far a downsizing of the FBI may go, and whether the shift in institutional focus will mean less attention paid to the bureau’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism work.
Last week, the administration’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, wrote an op-ed saying he would concentrate on “streamlining operations” at the bureau, and while the FBI has been increasingly involved in countering threats from overseas – including terrorism, cybercrime, and Chinese and Russian espionage – Patel stressed domestic concerns during his confirmation hearings. The Wall Street Journal noted that during those hearings, “Patel mentioned China only in passing and didn’t speak about any threat from Russia.”
THE CONTEXT
- The Trump administration has ordered several senior FBI executives to resign or retire, or face termination. Emil Bove, acting Deputy Attorney General, gave the order to acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll to ensure “responsiveness to the leadership and the directives of President Trump.”
- The FBI was instructed to provide the Justice Department with a list of current and former bureau employees who worked on investigations regarding the January 6 attack on the Capitol. More than 5,000 employees were reportedly covered by the directive. Employees were also asked to fill out a questionnaire detailing any work they had done on Jan. 6 criminal cases.
- Acting Deputy Attorney General Bove said FBI agents “who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner” in the Jan. 6 investigations are not at risk of being fired.
- The Senate Judiciary Committee has delayed its vote to advance President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, until next week. He said in his hearing before the committee that “all FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.”
The Cipher Brief spoke with Jill Sanborn and Javed Ali, both of whom held senior positions in the FBI, about the current uncertainty and what it may mean for the bureau and its work in the new administration. Our interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
THE EXPERTS
A question of resources – and current threats
Sanborn: With every change in administration, there's change. And oftentimes we gravitate toward anticipating worst-case scenarios. I don't think there's anything wrong with that; you're always prepared if you're thinking about worst-case scenarios, but over-emphasizing that worst-case scenario when we really don't know can instill some fear, which I think we're seeing right now. We're seeing a workforce that is insecure and worried about what these requests mean, but I would just caution that until we really find out, let's try not to overreact.
I hope they're not going for a mass purge, and I say that largely because of the national security implications. We're worried about a variety of different threats on any given day, and losing a large number of employees in a workforce that's our biggest resource would not be helpful in tackling those threats. Acting Director [Brian] Driscoll put out a video with a variety of things that FBI agents are working on right now: top 10s, helping DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] with rounding up people that are in the country illegally or have violated laws, and they're helping go through the wreckage of the plane crash [in the Potomac River]. So all of a sudden, on top of their normal day-to-day national security duties, it would be really hard to continue all of those things if we lost a large number of employees.
I can see why citizens would be worried and concerned. They want an organization that has the resources and the focus to uphold the constitution and keep the American people safe. That's what they deserve in the FBI. I think citizens just need to pay attention and see where this leads us. We don't really know why some of these things are being requested. It's not to say that we shouldn't think about the worst-case scenario, but until we really hear the reality of what is intended and what happens, I think we just need to be in a wait-and-see mode and hope that we don't lose mass individuals and put the organization at a resource less than adequate to keep up with the threats.
Ali: Every four to eight years, it's normal for administrations and the departments and agencies and the executive branch to look inside themselves and do an assessment of “who are we” as an organization. Are we structured the right way? Are we aligned to the priorities that the administration wants us to now tackle? Do we have the right funding from Congress to go out and pursue those priorities? These are all the questions that happen in those periods of time. But this is an unprecedented moment in at least the modern history of the FBI. I can't remember a time when the bureau was under this much pressure with respect to senior management folks being removed.
It does have the potential to really impact national security if the cuts go much deeper than they have up until now. If there was now going to be a shift in policy from President Trump and his team to make the FBI smaller, what will the impact be to the FBI's mission, either on the criminal side of the house or the national security side of the house? The FBI can't engage in all these missions with a reduced staffing profile, even distributed throughout the field offices and the headquarters element. What would fall off the table? What would get minimized and what would get enhanced, either on that traditional criminal side or on the national security side? These are all the questions that have to be considered.
Sanborn: When I think back on a major incident or case that I was involved in, and I'll use [the 2015 terrorist attacks in] San Bernardino for an example, I was the ASAC [Assistant Special Agent in Charge], and we needed absolutely every resource on hand. For a long time, we thought we had more than just the two deceased shooters, and the Los Angeles field office, every single person, worked that case. The inability to have that same number of resources can really put the organization at risk of being able to keep up with something so important.
I also think as an incoming leader of an organization, when you have mass changes that are happening before you get there, you're entering an organization that is unsteady, for lack of a better way to describe it. It’s unsteady because they're assuming the worst from some of these requests, or unsteady because they have lost numbers. And both of those together will make it hard for the FBI to focus and keep up with the threats.
In the last 10 to 15 years, the amount of threats on the FBI's plate, things that they should be doing to keep America safe, has grown. And so the amount of time and energy and the hours in a day that an FBI employee is putting in to keep America safe is pretty intense and pretty large. Less resources means more hours needed than an employee can give potentially. I'm not sure how much more there is to give.
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A shift to domestic crime?
Ali: One thing that most people don't realize is that there was a pretty significant internal change in the FBI in the mid 2000s, involving something called the National Security Branch. That was driven by recommendations from the 9-11 Commission and the 2003 WMD commission, [which said] the FBI needed to internally restructure these different components of the organization to have a greater focus on national security. So by 2005, the FBI did that. And within that National Security Branch, there's the counterterrorism division, the counterintelligence division, and then the weapons of mass destruction directorate. Now going forward, will that National Security Branch survive? Will there be a consolidation of that? Will some pieces of the branch be reapportioned? And then where will the people and the resources attached to those components go? Those I think are all questions that are probably on the table.
When I got hired in 2007, the position that I came into literally never existed in the FBI. It was called the Senior Intelligence Officer for Counterterrorism. And eventually, there was a much bigger pool of senior intelligence officers. That was a message that the FBI was sending, that we're going to have a focus on counterterrorism. I would argue that counterterrorism really was the FBI's number one mission – not that it wasn't engaged in other missions, but counterterrorism, both at home and abroad, was so significant. The bureau was focused every day on something that was designed to help keep the country safe, either with investigations or disruptions or intelligence collection. So now, if the FBI is going to do less on counterterrorism, what is the tradeoff?
It's just too early to tell. If that national security focus starts to get smaller – it's not going to go down to zero, but again, will there be a renewed focus on sort of more traditional crime, connected to President Trump's major priority on border security and immigration and drugs? The FBI, post 9-11, hasn't really played a role in that because they've had their hands full on all these other issues that we've talked about. But it will be fascinating to see if the FBI is asked to do more on that front, either on its own or in support of DHS operations or missions.
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Concerns about morale
Sanborn: Probably the only thing I can equate it to that I went through in my time in the organization was during large government shutdowns, and employees being uneasy about how long that shutdown would be – would they get paid, the focus and the concern and the worry about personal needs. For others, they put their nose to the ground, they kept working, and they just treated that as, "Hey, I can't control that, so I'm still going to focus on the mission." I think it really depends on the individual. We have some great interim leaders in the organization right now who are very helpful in trying to get the organization to still focus on the mission.
I am hopeful – and I am a “glass is half full" person — that once permanent individuals get into place in the organization, that will be helpful. I really don't think that the transition time is ever easy. Once permanent individuals get in at the Department of Justice, and at the FBI, I would hope to see some normalization of the interaction between the two organizations.
Ali: I would have to imagine that morale is being affected at some level. But at the same time, the agents and analysts and all the other folks who work in the FBI, every day they show up and they have a job to do. And despite all the external pressure, they have to stay focused on these different issues and different missions because there's a lot at stake by being distracted. One would hope there's some ability to deal with the reality of what's happening, but not to also get completely distracted and create more risk when it comes to preventing these threats from materializing or collecting intelligence on them – or even working with U.S. attorneys and other folks at the state and local level to actually arrest people, because that's the day-to-day job of the FBI.
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