President Donald Trump on Friday said he intended to fire some of the FBI personnel who worked on Capitol riot cases, asserting without providing evidence that some of them were “corrupt.”
"I will fire some of them," Trump said, in answer to a reporter’s question at a news conference in Washington with the Japanese prime minister. He added: "We had some corrupt agents, and those people are gone or they will be gone, and it will be done quickly and very surgically."
No evidence has surfaced publicly of any misconduct by FBI personnel who investigated Jan. 6 cases, and the vast majority of them resulted in convictions, before Trump pardoned them on his first day on office. Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll has told his workforce in recent days that they cannot legally be fired without due process.
Trump’s comments came on a day when a group of FBI agents suing the Justice Department won an legal agreement prohibiting anyone in the government from publicly releasing the names of the thousands of FBI employees who participated in Jan. 6 cases.
The agreement came after Driscoll told his employees that the bureau had been forced to turn over the names of special agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb signing off on the agreement, which binds anyone within government from releasing the names of the agents who worked on cases related to the 2021 Capitol riot, while a lawsuit over the issue makes its way through the court system.
Nearly three weeks after Trump granted sweeping clemency to rioters convicted for the crimes they committed at the U.S. Capitol, anxiety remains high within the bureau. Multiple sources told NBC News that while there was some internal division over the past four years about the handling of Jan. 6 cases, the actions that the Trump administration has taken against the bureau will leave a lasting mark and have brought much of the bureau’s workforce together.
The turmoil has been a major distraction for the bureau. A number of senior leaders were let go at headquarters and various FBI field offices in the early days of the Trump administration. Then, FBI employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases were told to fill out a survey about their work, which some took as the beginning of an effort to terminate them.
One FBI special agent who spent hours recovering body parts from the Potomac River after the deadly plane crash near Washington, D.C., had to return to the office to fill out the survey, according to Natalie Bara, the president of the FBI Agents Association.
“If their goal was to paralyze law enforcement,” one federal law enforcement official told NBC News, “they’ve achieved it.”
A message circulating among FBI employees and written by an FBI agent, verified by NBC News, described the pain and anger among people who feel targeted for following orders and doing their jobs.
“I was assigned to investigate a potential crime,” the agent wrote. “Like all previous cases I have investigated, this one met every legal standard of predication and procedure. Without bias, I upheld my oath to this country and the Constitution and collected the facts. I collected the facts in a manner to neither prove innocence nor guilt, but to arrive at resolution.”
Driscoll, who is popular within the bureau, told employees that the office of Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove instructed him to hand over a list of names on Thursday. Driscoll wrote that, given FBI leadership’s “significant concerns” about the personal safety and security of FBI employees, the lists were provided “on the classified enclave” and had been labeled as sensitive law enforcement information.
Prosecutors and FBI special agents who worked Jan. 6 cases had already been targeted, and the bureau had worked to give employees tools to protect their personal information and protect themselves from harassment.
Early on in the Jan. 6 investigation, initial FBI affidavits redacted the names of FBI special agents to help avert harassment. Inside the FBI, as bureau employees worried about mass firings, they were also concerned that the public release of the names of FBI agents would continue a pattern they’d seen develop before.
“We also reiterated once again our concerns for the safety of our personnel, and the risks posed to you and your families should the lists become public,” Driscoll wrote in the letter to FBI employees.
Bove has accused Driscoll of “insubordination,” and FBI employees are wondering what his future holds at the bureau, if Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee, is confirmed as director. For now, Driscoll has won praise from within the bureau for standing up to Trump’s Justice Department leadership.
Several sources said the chaos within the bureau has been distracting, with one saying things hadn’t felt this unstable since the Capitol was attacked, which kicked off perhaps the largest investigation in FBI history.
One FBI official said that Thursday was the first day that felt relatively normal at the bureau, with many people “exhausted” from the back and forth. The bureau and its employees aren’t “out of the woods yet,” they said, and many employees are worried they are going to be targeted not due to allegations of wrongdoing but because the cases they worked happened to have supporters of the president as defendants.
The source said that the message that the Justice Department under Trump has been sending is that no one should work cases involving anyone associated with Trump. “The chilling effect has been crazy,” the official said.
NBC News' Tom Winter contributed.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended pardoning violent criminals who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 2021. “Their lives have been ruined.”
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