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The newly-elected felon Trump moves to eviscerate the FBI [1]
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Date: 2025-01-26
On Sunday, The New York Times published a story: Hiring Freeze Creates Confusion and Concern at F.B.I. ( CLICK HERE . The paywall should be down)
The subtitle explains that the newly-elected felon was trying to thread the needle between his compulsion to exact revenge and his need to preserve his standing with the independent voters who swung the election to him. He is trying to fund the FBI´s divisions that will benefit him politically. And defund those on his voluminous enemies list. It reads:
President Trump’s directive is supposed to exempt national security and public safety positions, but the F.B.I. has put an immediate hiring freeze in place.
The article starts
The F.B.I. has taken drastic steps to comply with President Trump’s hiring freeze, causing deep uncertainty in the bureau’s ranks and rattling new employees. The moves appear at odds with the executive order that the president issued hours after taking office, which specifies that such a freeze would not apply to national security or public safety officials. Given that one of the F.B.I.’s core missions is to safeguard against terrorism and the possibility of other threats, it remains unclear why the bureau would not be exempt. Regardless the steps are all but certain to hobble the agency’s efforts to recruit, retain and train employees.
Here’s the backstory. Criminals do not like law enforcement. Trump is no exception. He would love for his former FBI antagonists to be ground up and spat out. But he cannot tear down the entire temple to exact his revenge. This is why the freeze on new hiring by the FBI was supposed to be nuanced. But that subtlety does not account for the bureaucratic brain.
The FBI´s role is bifurcated. They are the national police for such federal crimes as bank robbery, kidnapping, classified document theft, and insurrection. They are also mandated to fight foreign and domestic terrorists on US soil and preserve public order. The administration needs the FBI fully staffed to thwart attacks against Americans — it doesn’t look good for the President when his administration allows the murder of American citizens by international terrorism or homegrown radicals.
However, a reflexively retributive Trump would like to burn down the section of the FBI that dragged him to justice, Even if that dragging was so delayed it resulted in zero penalties for him.
But that is not how bureaucracies work.
Trump’s rabid rhetoric against the deep state and government expenditures has the federal bureaucracy frozen in fear. Bureaucrats are so terrified of putting a foot wrong that they have shut down all hiring. And have left new hires in limbo. The career functionaries will stand pat until they have a Trump guy giving orders. In the FBI’s case, they are waiting until an administration appointee — Kash Patel is the current nominee — is confirmed as the new director.
Patel’s previous rhetoric against the FBI is not helping. The NYT reports:
Employees’ concerns have only been compounded by the deep suspicion and relentless attacks President Trump and his pick to be the agency’s director, Kash Patel, have leveled at the bureau over its previous criminal investigations that ensnared Mr. Trump. Mr. Patel has promised to turn F.B.I. headquarters into a museum of the “deep state,” dismantle the bureau intelligence cadre and slash the general counsel’s office, which provides the director with key legal advice. Already on edge, current F.B.I. employees wonder whether the directive signals the administration’s intent to gut parts of the country’s premier law enforcement agency, even as Mr. Trump has pushed to rapidly overhaul the federal bureaucracy.
Adding to the FBI’s paranoia is the administration’s request for the names of new hires. Lists make people nervous. And God only knows what the White House intends to do with the names.
Among the moves that have stoked concern at the F.B.I. is a request by the White House for the names of probationary employees, or employees who joined the bureau in the last two years — some of whom are military veterans. The list encompasses nearly 1,000 agents in field offices around the country.
Adding to the anxiety is the fact the White House probably has no idea what will happen to the people on the list. The instructions from the top will dispensed according to the mood of the boss. Trump is the worst kind of leader — unpredictable.
The FBI is reportedly already in bad shape. At a time when it would benefit from some support from the executive, it will get the opposite: The article ends:
In June, Christopher A. Wray, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump and resigned before the inauguration, told a Senate appropriations subcommittee that the agency was already stretched thin from previous budget reductions. He warned that the threats to the country had never been greater. “Our adversaries are not scaling back their efforts because of the constrained budget environment,” he said. “In fact, threat actors may try to take advantage of federal budget reductions to conduct nefarious activities.”
Republicans won’t do a damn thing. The GOP says it is the “Party of Law and Order”. In the MAGA era it is not — if it ever was. Any more than it is the “Party of Family Values”. America’s enemies, and crooks across the country, must be feeling optimistic about the success rate of their future crimes and misdemeanors.
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