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Emails sent to an FBI ombudsman by anonymous employees of the Bureau offer a stunning look inside the culture of the nation’s top domestic intelligence, security, and law enforcement agency charged with investigating federal crimes.
After the FBI’s execution of a lawful search warrant on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in 2022, some Bureau employees bitterly complained to the ombudsman, who forwarded their anonymous comments to the Bureau’s top brass.
“Did this really just happen? Am I dreaming? The FBI served a Search Warrant on a former president? The news is saying it’s about documents. Did this really just happen?” wrote one employee confidentially, as Bloomberg News‘ Jason Leopold reports after obtaining the emails through a rigorous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
SCOOP: 2nd edition of my weekly newsletter, FOIA Files, is out (SUBSCRIBE!), based on FBI docs related to the classified docs Trump took to MAL & how the Aug 2022 search roiled some of FBI’s rank & file
“Did this really just happen? Am I dreaming?
🧵https://t.co/J4GdoIP9Cd pic.twitter.com/nfwOz0sTbU— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) March 15, 2024
“I’ve lost just about all faith in our leadership. Obviously they forgot Crossfire Hurricane,” the employee continued.
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(Crossfire Hurricane was the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russia and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, which was designed to determine if the campaign had been knowingly or unknowingly working to support Russia’s efforts to interfere in the election to help place Trump in the White House.)
That employee apparently was unaware of the extensive efforts and negotiations the National Archives had undertaken to regain possession of what became the 13,097 items recovered during the execution of the search warrant. Those items, removed from the Trump White House, included hundreds of documents marked with various levels of classification, including top secret documents and nuclear secrets.
“If he took documents, give him a call and ask for them back. Like… Seriously? My own agency…. A bunch of democrat political hacks up top,” the employees email continued. “I don’t know how many but they may have lost one here. Is there any plan from leadership to explain these absurd actions? I no longer believe we have real PC based on Crossfire Hurricane and everything else I’ve seen to include targeting parents based on the AG’s letter.”
“They need to explain their embarrassment of the Bu. That used to be a mortal sin. Please convey this message. They owe our workforce an explanation of their overt political antics.”
That was just one of several angry and ill-informed emails published by Bloomberg News.
Another FBI employee was even harsher, characterizing the bureau as a “Banana Republic” and an “embarrassment,” and demanding answers to a series of questions.
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) March 15, 2024
“Taken as a whole, the FBI documents reveal the most detailed view yet of the raw hostility erupting inside an agency that has been in a state of near-constant turmoil ever since June 2015, when Trump rode a gold escalator down to the lobby of the tower that bears his name to announce the start of his presidential campaign,” Leopold writes.
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“Rumors have long swirled that FBI agents at various field offices had been sympathetic to Trump even as the bureau launched investigations into his campaign and his business dealings. The claims were always attributed to anonymous sources. An email I obtained last year after a separate FOIA lawsuit related to the Jan. 6 Capital riots backs up those assertions,” Leopold adds.
“’There’s no good way to say it,’ read the email to deputy director Abbate. ‘So I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol and said it was no different than the BLM protests of last summer,’ the person wrote a week after the [Jan. 6] riots.”
That same agent continued, writing that a retired FBI senior analyst “has a Facebook page full of #StoptheSteal content.”
He “went on to summarize his view of the climate at FBI offices based on his conversations with his colleagues. Agents, especially those who work counterterrorism cases, he said, sympathized with the insurrectionists’ ‘frustration’ and chalked it up to ‘everyone having been quarantined at home for months’ due to COVID, losing their jobs and ‘fake news,’ for example.”
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The Bloomberg News report comports with revelations from one year ago that FBI agents were vehemently opposed to executing the Mar-a-Lago search warrant.
The Washington Post last March reported, “two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.”
“Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.”
See the social media posts with copies of the emails above or at this link.
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