Chris Smith
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to dismantle multiple federal agencies, and no one seems capable of pushing back. Enter a nascent FBI rebellion.
These are dark and strange days in American government. Elon Musk, an unelected mega-billionaire with a fondness for ketamine, and his band of Gen Z coders are ransacking Washington, threatening to shutter entire federal agencies and cut billions in legally appropriated spending, while accessing the personal information of millions of citizens and rooting through trillions of dollars in Treasury payments. The Republican-majority Congress has shown no interest in fighting for its powers or the rule of law.
Instead, and surprisingly, the strongest pushback so far is coming from inside the FBI. Last week Brian Driscoll, the bureau’s “accidental” acting director, known as “Drizz” among friends, heatedly refused to provide top Justice Department officials with the names of employees who had worked on the January 6 investigations. According to The New York Times, James Dennehy, the top agent in the New York field office, sent a defiant email to his staff warning that the FBI was “in the middle of a battle of our own.” Dennehy counseled his employees to stay calm and assured them he wasn’t quitting. “Time for me to dig in,” he wrote.
On Wednesday, the Times reported that Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, fired back, accusing Driscoll and his deputy Robert Kissane, of “insubordination,” and claiming their refusal to identify the “core team” that prosecuted the rioters necessitated a bureau-wide effort to establish who had been involved in the cases.
“Brian is a truly principled leader—thoughtful, well-read, humble, and reflective, and he does the right things for the right reasons. So is Rob,” says Chris O’Leary, who knows Driscoll, Kissane, and Dennehy well from a 21-year FBI career in counterterrorism that ended when he retired last fall. “J.D. learned leadership as a Marine officer and has conducted himself that way throughout his career. He leads from the front, which is desperately what’s needed in the FBI right now.”
Now the rank-and-file are following the example set by Driscoll and Dennehy. This week, after being instructed to fill out a survey describing their roles in the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago documents cases, two groups of FBI agents and staff filed lawsuits against the DOJ.
“When you aggregate information about what people have been doing all over the FBI, you create a system that is easy to either hack or share, for the express purpose of identifying people for retaliation and retribution,” Pamela Keith, one of the lawyers representing FBI employees in a class action suit, tells me. “You can’t ignore the statements of Donald Trump on the campaign trail, who said there was going to be ‘retribution’ and ‘vengeance.’”
Trump has been furious with the FBI since the 2016 campaign—perversely, given that the bureau’s then director, James Comey, inadvertently helped him defeat Hillary Clinton. The subsequent Russia election-meddling probes dialed up Trump’s anger, and the insurrection and classified documents cases stoked his most recent vows to exact revenge. Shortly after returning to the White House, Trump enacted a measure of payback by firing a group of career prosecutors who had worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case.
Now Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Bove, could be laying the foundation to spread the retaliation far wider by attempting to compile a dossier of what is estimated in the lawsuit to be roughly 6,000 FBI personnel who had some involvement in Trump-related cases. It’s unknown whether Bove put his own name on the list, but O’Leary says that Bove, in a previous job as an assistant United States attorney in New York’s southern district, helped design the legal process to pursue people who had allegedly stormed the Capitol on January 6. (Vanity Fair has reached out to the DOJ Office of Public Affairs for comment.)
A mass exodus from the FBI or the CIA—whether through firings or coerced “buyouts”—risks a national security disaster. Not only because of the crimes that wouldn’t be investigated, but in offering American adversaries like China and Russia thousands of potentially recruitable informants. So while the lawsuits have been motivated by a large element of self-protection, the FBI staffers are also standing up for an unselfish, patriotic interest—the thing that drew many of them to the job in the first place. “It’s a strong organization that isn’t likely to be cowed,” says Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor who has deep ties to the bureau. “Part of the reason why people become agents and prosecutors is because they hate bullies. And when presented with an effort to bully them, I don’t think they’re going to run away.”
One irony of the nascent rebellion is that FBI agents, generally, lean more conservative than liberal. They are not the type of people who fight the man—they are the man. The pervasive fear and uncertainty inside the bureau right now is being driven by many worries, but it isn’t ideological. Parochial, relatable civil service concerns are part of the mix: One group of agents is due to hit their pension-vesting 20 years this Thursday, and some are wondering if they will be fired before then. “The last thing the employees in the lawsuit wanted was to be perceived as on some political side or the other. It’s just about their jobs,” says Michael Kortan, a former longtime FBI communications director. “It’s just trying to do the right thing, just trying to stop this madness.”
Yet even if the stands that Driscoll, Dennehy, and the lawsuits are taking are based in apolitical principles, their actions can’t completely avoid making a political statement, given the tumultuous moment. “We have to ask ourselves: What are we prioritizing as a country? The Stewart Rhodeses of the world? Enrique Tarrio?” O’Leary says. “Or somebody who actually is demonstrating what being a citizen is supposed to be like? I mean, it’s not a moral dilemma here. It’s pretty self-evident which side we should be putting our support behind.”
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/fbi-brian-driscoll-james-dennehy-resistance-trump-musk
