The Purges: FBI Edition
The MAGA feedback loop continues to decimate the senior career ranks of the FBI.
A quick refresh: Kash Patel provides Hill Republicans with internal FBI documents from the Trump investigations->Hill Republicans cull them for the names of agents->the agents get put on blast by the MAGA propaganda machine->the White House orders the agents to be fired->Patel races to comply.
This is what Trump’s long-threatened investigation of the investigators looks like.
The firings are not being publicly announced, making it more difficult to get a grasp of exact numbers, but from various reports it appears another another five senior agents have been fired. Reuters identifies four of them: Jeremy Desor, Jamie Garman, Blaire Toleman, and David Geist. NBC News identifies one: Aaron Tapp.
At one point, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro reportedly intervened in four of the latest firings, but that apparently only had the effect of getting them fired Monday and then fired a second time Tuesday.
“The actions yesterday—in which FBI Special Agents were terminated and then reinstated shortly after, and then only to be fired again today—highlight the chaos that occurs when long-standing policies and processes are ignored,” the FBI Agents Association said in a statement. “Director Patel has disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.”
A few reflections:
- By being brought under the thumb of the Trump White House, the FBI has lost its independence, esprit de corps, and significant functional capacity. The senior agent ranks — where taxpayers see the return on years of training and experience — have been ransacked. Agents can’t be quickly replaced, and loyalty will the decisive factor for new hires.
- Combined with the dismantling of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, the FBI purges have hamstrung the investigation and prosecution of complex white-collar crimes, especially public corruption cases. That’s no accident.
- It can’t be said often enough that before this year, the FBI had one political position: the director. Everyone else held career positions. The purging of career FBI employees without cause or due process is unlawful. There have been dozens (and maybe more) unlawful firings.
It sometimes feels like the public reaction to the politicization and weaponization of the DOJ and FBI is to compartmentalize it as something happening to people like former FBI Director James Comey, who signed up for or maybe deserve such retribution. (He didn’t and he doesn’t.) But everyone is a potential victim of a federal crime, and no one can count on the FBI to be there now. Once the loyalists are in place, you may not want the FBI involved.
Election 2025: Top Lines
- NYC mayor: Zohran Mamdani trounced Andrew Cuomo in a high turnout race that was called at 9:34 p.m. ET.
- NJ guv: Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D) decisively defeated Jack Ciattarelli (R) despite rumblings of a GOP surge.
- VA guv: Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) romped over Winsome Earle-Sears (R).
- CA Prop 50: Democrats’ counterpunch to the GOP’s red state redistricting blitz passed overwhelmingly, clearing the way for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to draw a new congressional district map for the 2026 midterms.
Election 2025: Down Ballot
- VA: Democrats flipped at least 13 seats in the House of Delegates to expand their narrow majority.
- GA: Democrats won two seats on the Public Service Commission, their first statewide wins in non-federal races in Georgia since 2006.
- PA: Three incumbent justices on the state Supreme Court were retained, preserving a liberal majority for another two years.
- ME: A ballot initiative mandating voter ID was resoundingly defeated.
- CO: A ballot initiative to raise taxes on high earners to fund free school breakfasts and lunches passed overwhelmingly.
Election 2025: Headlines
- Punchbowl: Dems Romp: What that means for Washington
- HuffPost: The Backlash To Trump Is Here — And It’s Big
- Politico: Democrats didn’t just rebound. They dominated.
Election 2025: Bottom Lines
- TPM’s Josh Marshall: DC Conventional Wisdom Goes Down to Defeat in State after State
- David Weigel: Blowout state elections offer something for every Democrat
- Jamelle Bouie: Trump Is an Albatross
Taking the Minority Out of Minority Scholarships
Confronted by President Trump’s anti-DEI jihad, universities across the country have been capitulating by revamping, retooling, and rebranding minority scholarships to take out the minority component — but this particular case stands out for bitter irony.
UC San Diego and the San Diego Foundation — sued by a student under the federal anti-KKK statute dating to 1871 — settled the case last month by renaming the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund and making it available to all students, the WaPo reports.
16th Lawless U.S. High Seas Attack
Two people were killed in another U.S. attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced. The death toll from the U.S. campaign of lawless attacks off the coasts of Central and South America now stands at 67.
Dick Cheney Remembrances
Let me gently steer you away from the sanitized Dick Cheney obituaries to the ones that tell it like it is:
- Spencer Ackerman: His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies
- Cheney experts Barton Gellman and Marc Fisher: “Former vice president Dick Cheney, who recast an understudy’s job into an engine of White House power, becoming chief architect of a post-9/11 war on terrorism that involved bypassing restrictions against torture and domestic espionage, died Nov. 3.”
- TPM: I dug up an old draft obituary for Cheney that Brian Beutler wrote way back in 2012, shortly after Cheney’s heart transplant. It, like Cheney’s new heart, held up better than I expected.
A Chicago Pope Still Blows My Mind
“Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.”–Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, asked by reporters about immigrants detained at the ICE facility in Broadview being refused the opportunity to receive holy Communion
Quote of the Day
“I could smell the onions and mustard.”–Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore, testifying in the trial of the D.C. sandwich thrower
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