On May 31 of this year, in a series of phone calls beginning at nine in the morning and ending that afternoon, the newly installed Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Norfolk Field Office, Dominique Evans, made clear to me that, at the direction of Dan Bongino, my career with the organization had—for all intents and purposes—come to an end.
It would be an understatement to say that I had not expected this. In fact, I was in the midst of preparing for a potential move to Washington, D.C. to take on a new position at FBI headquarters.
But, it turned out, I had made a terrible mistake: I had remained friends with someone who had appeared on Kash Patel’s enemies list. How did Bongino find out about this private friendship? I honestly don’t know. What business was it of his? None at all. Was I accused of any sort of misconduct? No. It didn’t matter.
I faced a choice: get demoted or resign. I became the latest of a great many senior FBI special agents to walk out the door.
The specifics of my experience may be unique—details often are—but the broad strokes of the story have become unfortunately common in recent months, as more and more special agents are driven out of the Bureau on mere suspicion of political unreliability. These developments should be concerning to all Americans. In the past six months, the FBI—and, for that matter, the Department of Justice and intelligence community as a whole—has been forcing out a wide range of experienced personnel needed to protect our nation. Under Patel and Bongino, subject matter expertise and operational competence are readily sacrificed for ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce. At a time of simultaneous wars across the globe and a return to great power competition, this makes us all less safe.
On the Saturday morning that I received the first phone call from my SAC, I had been working at the Norfolk Field Office as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for its national security and intelligence programs. For roughly three months at the beginning of the current administration, I had actually been serving as the acting SAC, overseeing every aspect of the field office’s operations. Before my tenure there, I had also been an agent in the Los Angeles Field Office, and a program manager and, subsequently, a unit chief within the Counterintelligence Division at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Immediately before my sojourn in southern Virginia, I had served as a field supervisor over a counterintelligence squad in the Washington Field Office.
Ironically, some of the greatest successes of the first Trump Administration’s efforts against the People’s Republic of China’s intelligence services and their proxies occurred under my leadership: I was the principal investigative architect of the indictment of Huawei Technologies, and the unit I oversaw at FBI headquarters contributed to the FCC’s decision to bar China Mobile a license to operate in the United States. I supervised the case against a Zoom executive who assisted China’s Ministry of Public Security in its campaign against Chinese political dissidents in the United States. All in all, I played a role in many cases pursued under the administration’s China Initiative (I am aware that the China Initiative became controversial for political reasons and that the Biden administration formally ended it. None of the cases I was involved in were among those that gave rise to the controversies.) In short, I was an apolitical civil servant protecting the United States against its most salient near-peer threat.
Indeed, a cursory look at my pre-FBI background would reveal that, far from being some sort of leftist deep state operative, my personal beliefs generally lean right; I was vice-president of my law school’s most conservative organization, and my first clerkship was with a libertarian public interest firm.
By the time of this year’s inauguration, I had been comfortably ensconced in the Norfolk Field Office for approximately fourteen months. There I managed the Bureau’s local counterintelligence and counterterrorism programs, confidential human source recruitment, and all of the office’s intelligence analysis and production. Those operational responsibilities all fell under me on the organizational chart. But as one of only two ASACs in a relatively small office, I also regularly served as the on-scene commander for SWAT and Special Agent Bomb Technician deployments and dealt with office-wide personnel and disciplinary issues on a near-daily basis.
When the new administration’s first executive orders and attorney general memorandums began flooding our in-boxes in late January and early February, I was serving as the acting SAC, the previous incumbent having been promoted to be an Assistant Director.
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