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Senior FBI Leaders Told To Leave Agency By Monday

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At least six senior FBI leaders have been ordered to retire, resign or be fired by Monday, CNN reports. The senior officials are at the levels of executive assistant director or special agent in charge and include those who oversee cyber, national security and criminal investigations. Trump transition officials have signaled plans to push aside leaders promoted by former FBI Director Christopher Wray. The leadership changes have drawn internal consternation because these officials didn’t have anything to do with prosecutions of Donald Trump, which have been the focus of the president’s ire. The personnel moves come as hundreds of FBI agents who were assigned to investigate the January 6 U.S. 6 Capitol attack and Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents are bracing for the possibility that they could be forced out or punished, as has happened to dozens of career Justice Department lawyers.


The changes highlight how the Trump administration has moved quickly to deliver on the president’s vow to strike back at so-called weaponization at the FBI. Trump has falsely accused agents of abuse in their court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago home and of their treatment of Capitol rioters. Agents say that they and their supervisors can’t choose which assignments they are given. The FBI workforce is broadly conservative, and many agents initially had qualms about being assigned to the Capitol attack and Trump cases, viewing the prosecutions as heavy-handed. Some Justice Department lawyers leading January 6 cases complained that they believed agents sometimes slow-walked some of their work. The FBI Agents Association met with FBI director nominee Kash Patel in recent weeks to raise those concerns, urging him to protect agents who did their work investigating violent crimes with oversight from judges, FBI supervisors and Justice Department lawyers. Patel offered no reassurances.

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