- The Washington Times - Thursday, November 7, 2024

The brass on the seventh floor at FBI headquarters in Washington have been in a daze and wary of a housecleaning since Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday, inside sources say.

The Washington Times learned through several anonymous bureau sources that senior agency executives were “stunned” and “shell-shocked” by Mr. Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“You know the fit test? How they let the standards slack on the fit test?” said the first FBI source, referring to the agency’s physical fitness requirements. “Everyone’s going to have a real problem when they’re running for the door.”

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate have little chance of remaining at the bureau by the time Mr. Trump is inaugurated, sources say.

FBI employees recall Mr. Trump firing Director James B. Comey five months after taking the oath of office in 2017.

“It’s a countdown for Wray because [people here] don’t think he will stay to get fired after what Trump did to Comey,” the first source said. “Trump will say, ‘Yeah, fire his a—. Don’t let him take the plane home.’”

Mr. Comey learned about his termination while flying to California on the bureau’s airplane.

Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Wray as FBI director in 2017 after firing Mr. Comey. The director’s term is 10 years, depending on the president’s confidence.

Sources say others on the seventh floor of the FBI are so concerned about their jobs that they are likely to flood Washington’s private security job market.

Most of the sources said no one’s job in the FBI at a GS-14 level or higher is safe, and they fully expect Mr. Trump to “smash the place to pieces when he gets in” and that it will be a “bloodbath.”

Former FBI whistleblower George Hill told The Washington Times that people in the agency say the state of the FBI is “frazzled.”

“I have friends still at the bureau telling me that no less than 50 senior executives (SES) are scrambling to retire ASAP,” he said.

The Times reached out to the FBI for comment.

The FBI and Mr. Trump have had a tense history since the 2016 presidential campaign. Under Mr. Comey, the agency launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia in July 2016.

Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey in 2017 raised suspicions in the Justice Department that the president was obstructing justice, leading to special counsel Robert Mueller’s long-running and costly investigation. Mr. Mueller ultimately found no evidence that Trump campaign officials conspired with or were connected to Moscow.

A subsequent government watchdog investigation found that FBI officials made numerous errors or omissions in secret warrant applications for surveillance of a Trump campaign aide.

More recently, The Times exclusively reported about an FBI whistleblower’s protected disclosure to Congress that Mr. Comey launched an off-the-books undercover criminal investigation against Mr. Trump in June 2015. The operation was not predicated on any particular case and was not connected to Russia.

Mr. Trump also clashed with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired in 2018 hours before his retirement. Mr. McCabe became a cable news analyst who was highly critical of Mr. Trump.

In August 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida and seized documents. Subsequent criminal charges accused him of mishandling classified materials. That prosecution is now in jeopardy because of Mr. Trump’s reelection.

Many at the FBI remembered when Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan, a longtime FBI official, resigned six months into 2017 after Mr. Trump took office. Mr. Trump later hired him to head Immigration Customs and Enforcement.

Many on the seventh floor of the FBI are also concerned about billionaire technology executive Elon Musk, owner of X and Tesla, joining the Trump administration as head of a government efficiency commission.

“When he tries to do efficiency at headquarters, the place is going to have five people … if he’s talking about a lot of dead weight,” a second FBI source said.

“Try to find a person that’s actually working,” the source said. “That may be the biggest problem there — that there’s no efficiency. So that’s actually the bigger threat. If you’re going to try to make the government efficient, you would start with the FBI because if you do politics all the time, you’re probably bloated.”

FBI agents spent much of their time during the Biden administration seeking out, investigating and arresting Jan. 6 defendants. Mr. Trump has pledged to pardon them at the beginning of his second term.

A third FBI source said some bureau personnel tired of the Jan. 6 investigations are amused “at the fact that Trump [likely] pardons everybody involved in Jan. 6.”

• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.

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