Featured Image Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Topics: Donald Trump, Florida, Crime
William Morgan
Topics: Donald Trump, Florida, Crime
The Trump administration has stepped up its crackdown against federal employees who were involved in investigating potential criminality by the president during his first term in office, today firing a number of FBI agents for searching Mar-A-Lago.
FBI Director Kash Patel sacked at least half a dozen of the agency's employees who were involved in the 2022 raid on Trump's Florida resort on Thursday, with sources telling NBC that the number of people fired could have been in the double digits.
This would include everyone from support personnel to the agents and their supervisors involved in the operation, which uncovered classified government documents being stored at Mar-A-Lago after President Trump's first term ended in 2020.
Ultimately, this led to Trump and a number of his associates being indicted on federal charges by special counsel Jack Smith, the first-ever federal indictment of a former president. However, after some legal wrangling from a Trump-appointed judge about Smith's selection, the case was dismissed.
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While neither the FBI nor Director Patel would immediately confirm the mass firing of staff for doing their job and investigating Trump for potentially breaching the Espionage Act after leaving for office, the professional body that represents its agents did.
It is understood that all of those employees fired were involved in the classified documents case, and not the various other investigations into Trump that followed the January 6 Capitol riots.
In an excoriating statement that blasted Patel's supposed violation of 'the due process rights' of the agency's 38,000 employees, the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA) said that this would lead to the US being at 'greater risk'.
They said in a statement: “The FBIAA condemns today’s unlawful termination of FBI Special Agents, which—like other firings by Director Patel—violates the due process rights of those who risk their lives to protect our country."
The statement continued: "These actions weaken the Bureau by stripping away critical expertise and destabilizing the workforce, undermining trust in leadership and jeopardizing the Bureau’s ability to meet its recruitment goals—ultimately putting the nation at greater risk.”
But this condemnation from the FBIAA was water off a duck's back to Patel, in a day of pure fury for the FBI boss.
That is because he attacked his predecessors for accessing his phone records while investigating Trump for multiple crimes - which have been dropped since he assumed office.
Reuters had earlier reported that the FBI had issued secret subpoenas for Patel and another figure in Trump's orbit as part of their investigation into the hundreds of classified files found all over Mar-A-Lago, including in Trump's bedroom and a shower room.
Without presenting evidence of wrongdoing, Patel told Reuters: “It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records — along with those of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight.”