How Trump’s sweeping expulsions have thrown the FBI into chaos

One official had been a lead investigator in the 9/11 attacks. Another ran the investigation into the attempted assassination of President Trump last summer. They all waited for Brian Driscoll, the FBI acting director.

Driscoll arrived from a tense meeting with Emil Bove, the Trump-appointed second in command at the Justice Department. Bove told him to deliver an ultimatum to the senior officials: Resign by Monday or be fired. They had four days to decide. We tried to stop this, Driscoll told the group.

Two weeks into Trump’s second term, the president and his team have moved quickly to gut aid programs, kill diversity initiatives and push out civil servants by the thousands.

Emile Bove, center, outside of court during the criminal trial of President Trump last year in New York. Bove, now acting deputy attorney general, was one of Trump’s defense attorneys.

At the Justice Department and FBI, the expulsions have been swift and far-reaching, targeting investigators and prosecutors involved in the Trump probes. More than two dozen senior career officials across both agencies and dozens more prosecutors have already been pushed out. The Trump administration has set about compiling lists of thousands of others it will review, sparking fears that many more could be fired.

The administration has also signaled it would shift more of the FBI’s 38,000 agents, analysts and technical experts to illegal immigration, which traditionally held a limited role for the bureau.

For the past decade, leaders at the FBI and Justice Department have concentrated on threats from overseas, including terrorism, cybercrimes, as well as Chinese and Russian espionage—including the vast “Salt Typhoon" hack of the U.S. telecom system attributed to Beijing and the Kremlin’s escalating acts of sabotage.

Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to run the FBI, is expected to shrink the bureau’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism work, according to his aides. During a Senate confirmation hearing last week, Patel mentioned China only in passing and didn’t speak about any threat from Russia. Republicans said the bureau had for years unfairly targeted Trump and the GOP.

Patel, a Trump surrogate during the president’s 2024 campaign, will likely move agents from securities fraud, antitrust violations and other white-collar cases to pursue drug-trafficking and violent street crime, according to his aides.

Bove, who was Trump’s criminal defense attorney, has called at least a half-dozen FBI supervisors in several cities, some in the middle of the night, to make sure they were carrying out Trump’s tough-on-immigration agenda and publicizing their role on social media, said people familiar with the calls. In Bove’s No. 2 job at the Justice Department, he has oversight of the FBI, which serves as the DOJ’s investigative arm.

Some agents working on criminal or national-security investigations have been given a list of names and addresses of suspected illegal immigrants, a law-enforcement official said, leaving them confused about their exact roles.

Other FBI officials say agents are trying to juggle current cases with new assignments. One agent who investigates child exploitation was recently directed to help the Department of Homeland Security with immigration work. A supervisor in counterintelligence received similar orders.

FBI agents joined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for an immigration raid Wednesday in Denver.

Bove ordered the joint-terrorism task forces, set up after 9/11 to coordinate federal and state terrorism probes, to join the immigration crackdown, according to people familiar with the matter. He relented after FBI officials told him the reassignment would take agents away from the surveillance of suspected terrorists.

This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former law-enforcement officials and a review of internal government communications.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. On Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, the president signed an executive order to investigate the Biden administration’s alleged “weaponization of prosecutorial power."

Firing squads

More than a dozen federal prosecutors who had worked on Trump investigations received an email on Jan. 27 saying they were fired because they couldn’t be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda. One prosecutor was escorted to his desk to retrieve personal belongings, barred from even sending a goodbye email to colleagues.

On Friday, Bove sent a memo to Driscoll announcing that senior FBI officials had to resign or be fired to ensure “responsiveness to the leadership and directives of President Trump." In the memo, the acting attorney general also requested the bureau provide a list of everyone who had worked on the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The federal probe had involved personnel in every FBI field office, including Driscoll, fueling fears of mass purge.

Also on Friday, roughly 30 prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington were dismissed. All of them had worked on Jan. 6 prosecutions. Bove sent a memo saying they had been inappropriately hired as part of “subversive personnel actions" by the Biden administration.

Thousands of FBI agents were ordered to answer a 12-question survey about their work on the Jan. 6 riot. Agents paused field work to complete the survey, including one who had been helping recover bodies from wreckage of the collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a passenger jet over the Potomac River.

The central question asked, “What was your role in the investigations or prosecutions relating to events that occurred at or near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021."

The J. Edgar Hoover Federal Bureau of Investigation, right, and the Justice Department buildings in Washington, D.C.

Driscoll, who had served on the FBI hostage-rescue team, said Tuesday in an email to employees that the bureau had complied with Bove’s request for the list but that some 5,000 FBI personnel had been identified only by title, office and role—not by name.

Bove called Driscoll insubordinate on Wednesday, saying the acting FBI director had refused to turn over names of the “core team" in Washington who had worked on the Jan. 6 probe. Driscoll’s refusal prompted Bove to demand the bureau-wide list, he said. The only agents who should worry, Bove said, “are those who acted with corrupt or partisan intent.“

FBI agents who participated in the Jan. 6 investigations filed a pair of lawsuits Tuesday over the Justice Department’s list, saying they feared Trump allies would publish it, putting agents and their families in danger.

Trump administration officials fired Justice Department staff in the Executive Office for Immigration Review with emails that included the word “removal" in the subject line. Staffers were told only that they were terminated under Article II authority, according to people familiar with the matter. Article II of the Constitution, which established the presidency and assigned it executive powers, traditionally hasn’t been understood to give the president unlimited authority to fire career civil servants.

The FBI Agents Association said some employees were so worried about being fired that they packed up their desks in preparation. At 2:15 p.m. on Saturday, seeking to quash a fast-spreading rumor, the FBI released a statement saying Driscoll “continued to serve in his role."

In the chaos, officials said, work at the bureau has slowed. The daily threat briefing for senior FBI leaders has been scaled back, and, for the first time in years, an official from the cyber team had for several days nothing to report, giving the impression work had stalled.

Equal protection

Last Thursday, when Driscoll told the senior FBI officials about Bove’s orders to retire or be fired, Patel’s FBI confirmation hearing aired on TV screens in the bureau’s 7th floor leadership suites.

Patel told lawmakers that FBI employees would be protected from political retribution. “Every FBI employee will be held to the same standard and no one will be terminated for case assignments," he said under oath, adding that he had no idea “what’s going on right now over there."

On Saturday, the FBI agents association in a note told its members not to resign or offer to resign: “While we would never advocate for physical noncompliance, you need to be clear your removal is not voluntary."

The agents association followed up with another message Sunday, telling members to answer the Jan. 6 survey with a response that included the sentence, “I have not been advised of my rights in this matter."

On Monday, the association and other advocates in a letter to Congress said the Justice Department’s actions risked disrupting the bureau’s work, “creating dangerous distractions" and imperiling investigations.

The senior FBI executives given the Justice Department ultimatum last week had by the Monday deadline cleared out their offices and turned in their badges.

Together, they represented close to 200 years of FBI experience.

‘Great failure’

At 3 p.m. on Inauguration Day, several senior government officials in top criminal and national-security roles, including some that overlapped with Trump investigations, all received the same email. It said only, “see attached," according to a person who viewed it.

The accompanying file was a memo assigning the officials to a position on a new task force targeting U.S. cities with policies that bar cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The memo gave the federal officials 15 days to accept the assignment, a steep demotion for most of them, or face disciplinary action.

Trump administration officials have “declared war on their own workforce," said Stacey Young, a litigator in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who resigned last month and set up an outside group, Justice Connection, to help employees navigate the workplace confusion.

Few government offices have felt the administration’s hand as much as the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which spearheaded the nearly 1,600 prosecutions from the Jan. 6 attack. Law-enforcement officials have described the investigation as the largest in U.S. history.

On his first day in office, Trump granted broad clemency that eviscerated those cases and installed Ed Martin as interim U.S. Attorney in Washington. Martin, a Missouri lawyer and former chair of the state’s Republican Party, said he, too, was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I’m at the Capitol right now," he posted on social media that day. “Rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand. Ignore the #FakeNews."

Martin served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a group that supported people charged in connection with the Capitol riot.

On Martin’s first full day as interim U.S. attorney, he turned his attention to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Martin wrote a letter to Schumer, asking him to clarify comments the Democratic lawmaker made in 2020 about Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Schumer had said, "You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price," during a rally outside the Supreme Court on the day of arguments in an abortion-rights case. Soon after, Schumer walked back the remarks, saying he was talking about political consequences for Trump and Senate Republicans if the High Court “stripped away a woman’s right to choose."

In his letter, nearly five years after Schumer’s remarks, Martin warned, “We take threats against public officials very seriously."

Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer speaking at an abortion-rights rally outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments in an abortion-rights case on March 4, 2020 in Washington, D.C.

Martin sent an officewide email later that week saying Trump had been “kind enough" to invite him to a ceremony pardoning two Washington, D.C., police officers who had been prosecuted by the office. A jury convicted one of the officers of second-degree murder. Both were found guilty of conspiring to cover up the circumstances of a chase that led to the death of a 20-year-old man in 2020.

“What a great act by the President to protect our colleagues in these efforts to make DC safe," Martin wrote. “As I stood in the Oval Office, I thought about you all and the great work you do and we will do."

The following week, Martin opened an internal review of prosecutors’ use of a felony obstruction charge in the Jan. 6 cases, calling it a “great failure" in an officewide email. He followed it with a warning that anyone who didn’t cooperate with the inquiry would be viewed as “insubordinate."

In a letter Monday to Elon Musk, Martin said his office was ready to support Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Musk staffers have gotten into standoffs with career personnel after showing up and demanding access to sensitive government agency systems. Confrontations or other actions affecting DOGE work, Martin said, “may break numerous laws."

Some longtime officials at the Justice Department say they are weighing whether to quit. One talked about it Monday with a former colleague.

“I can’t imagine the Justice Department without you," the former colleague said.

“The department is dead," the official replied.

Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who more recently worked as a lawyer for Trump, was sworn in Wednesday by Justice Clarence Thomas as attorney general and head of the Justice Department.

Shortly after, Bondi signed a memo establishing a “Weaponization Working Group" to review cases against Trump brought by local, state and federal prosecutors.

Dave Michaels contributed to this article.

Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com, C. Ryan Barber at ryan.barber@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com