President Donald Trump's handpicked leaders for the FBI are essentially cosplaying their roles, according to a veteran agent pushed out by the pair's purge of the bureau's ranks.
Michael Feinberg, a 15-year veteran working as an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia, received a phone call from his boss asking about his personal friendship with former agent and longtime Trump target Peter Strzok, and he recounted to The Atlantic that he decided to maintain his dignity by resigning rather than be marched out the door.
“I recount those events more in sorrow than in anger,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “I love my country and our Constitution with a fervor that mere language will not allow me to articulate, and it pains me that my profession will no longer entail being their servant.”
Feinberg has decided to speak out on behalf of agents still working at the bureau against the FBI's “ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce" under the leadership of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who spent years riling up the MAGA base with Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies only to clamp down on the case once they saw the evidence for themselves.
“They get a kick out of playing dress-up and acting tough,” Feinberg said. “But they actually have no idea what they’re doing.”
Feinberg worries that pushing out experienced and qualified agents in favor of MAGA loyalists will infect the FBI's culture for years to come, which he said “makes us all less safe."
“Newer and younger employees are going to become acculturated to a politicized bureau,” Feinberg said. “That will seem normal to them.”
Feinberg also worries that the bureau has prioritized immigration arrests over other law enforcement duties, and he's concerned about agents assisting ICE roundups and requesting to follow that agency's lead by shielding their identities while making arrests.
“I was absolutely furious,” Feinberg said. “We live in a democracy. We are an organization that serves the public. We do not hide from our actions.”