ARGUMENT: THE POLITICIZATION OF THE FBI Making a Scarecrow of the Law: A Former Agent’s Reaction to Recent Events at the FBI
FBI Director Kash Patel’s ongoing campaign of political purges at the FBI leads former FBI agent Michael Feinberg to lament the assault on the Bureau’s integrity, professionalism, and political impartiality. He writes that “Right now there is some new agent trainee at Quantico, going through her paces at the FBI Academy, who will never know the honor of serving a Bureau unblemished by the taint of political weaponization. Her loss is something worth noting, and it is certainly something worth mourning.”
In 2020, at the height of protests which followed the killing of George Floyd, the FBI’s Washington Field Office was ordered to patrol the streets of the District of Columbia. Michael Feinberg writes in Lawfare that it is still not entirely clear who first ordered agents to march up and down the streets of the city for 24 hours a day, nor what supposed statutes were being enforced, as what little criminal activity occurred tended to be of the municipal variety.
At one point during these excursions, when a group of agents were surrounded by a crowd of angry protestors who closed in on them and blocked any points of egress, the FBI personnel sought to deescalate the situation by dialoguing with their interlocutors. Feinberg writes that “After some discussion, the agents and their supervisors momentarily took a knee, after which the crowd, satisfied with the brief symbolic support from law enforcement, peacefully dispersed. The moment went viral, though, and soon enough, the usual suspects went ballistic.”
The FBI reportedly examined whether political motivations drove the agents’ actions, but in the end, the FBI and DOJ found no policy violations. It should be noted that the agents’ conduct during the protest did cause no small amount of controversy within the FBI ranks and the retiree population.
Feinberg writes that he does not know that he would have made the same decisions as they did, but that he “will also emphatically not insist that I would have acted differently.”
He adds:
But Kash Patel does not suffer the hesitation of the well-informed, and despite his promise, made under oath that “[t]here will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by the FBI,” all of the agents involved in the incident were summarily dismissed this past Friday. This indignity followed months upon months of reassignments, demotions, and demonization. Most of the supervisory agents who bore these burdens are unsurprisingly female or minorities, just like many of the special agents in charge who have been forced out of their positions. But while discerning what motivated Patel might prove difficult, the effect of his decision is easy to pin down: public servants find their lives destroyed in order to throw red meat to a political base.
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We often think about the rule of law in overly intellectualized terms; we root discussions about the idea in concepts drawn from political theory and moral philosophy. But its erosion has a very real human cost, measured in fallen ideals and thwarted principles, and, ultimately, shattered lives. It pains me that agents like the ones fired this past week will inexorably suffer emotional and financial losses. Some measure of grace should be afforded to those who dedicate their lives to protecting their fellow citizens, but the leadership of the FBI seem intent on denying them even that. These people deserve better treatment, and they deserve better leadership. But then again, so does our country.
“I am angry about the destruction of the FBI’s integrity all the time, save for the brief respites when sorrow overtakes the fury,” Feinberg writes, adding:
After ten years [since the firing of James Comey], things have changed. The administration did not even try to find a director with those qualities or a respect for the rule of law. What pains me more to admit, though, is that a bit of that attitude toward the very concept may have seeped into the actions of individual investigators. Perhaps the apathy for democratic and constitutional norms is not as acute as I fear, but even so, I know that at least one agent held the potential of being an upstanding public servant, who embodied the best ideals of the FBI, and now will always be associated with an elected official’s unending quest for revenge.
I won’t pretend to know how the rest of the FBI feels about this, including my old squad. But I do believe that there very much is a special providence in the fall of even an individual sparrow, and right now there is some new agent trainee at Quantico, going through her paces at the FBI Academy, who will never know the honor of serving a Bureau unblemished by the taint of political weaponization. Her loss is something worth noting, and it is certainly something worth mourning.
