The FBI’s Leaders ‘Have No Idea What They’re Doing’
Michael Feinberg had not been planning to leave the FBI. But on May 31, he received a phone call from his boss asking him about a personal friendship with a former FBI agent who was known for criticizing President Donald Trump. Feinberg, an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia, realized right away that he was in the crosshairs of the bureau’s leadership at an unusually chaotic time. If his 15-year career at the bureau was coming to an end, he wanted to depart with at least some dignity rather than being marched out the door. By the following afternoon, he had resigned. The FBI has long seen itself as an organization built on expertise. Its founder, J. Edgar Hoover, was an early and devoted advocate of professionalizing the government bureaucracy, to the point of mandating that agents wear a dark suit and striped tie. Now, however, the bureau is in the early stages of something like a radical deprofessionalization. The most important quality for an FBI official to have now appears to be not competence but loyalty. The exiling of Feinberg and others like him is an effort to engineer and accelerate this transformation. Feinberg’s boss, Special Agent in Charge Dominique Evans, didn’t allege any misconduct on his part, Feinberg told me. Rather, as Feinberg set out in his resignation letter the following day, Evans explained that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino had found out that Feinberg had maintained a friendship with the former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, a longtime target of Trump’s ire. During Trump’s first term, Strzok was fired from the FBI—and became a recurring target of Fox News segments—after the Justice Department released text messages in which he’d disparaged the president. Trump has repeatedly attacked him over his work on the bureau’s 2016 investigation into Russian election interference (a topic of renewed interest for the president these days). The association between Feinberg and Strzok was enough for the bureau to cancel a potential promotion for Feinberg, he told me. Evans, Feinberg said, suggested that he might face demotion, and that he would soon have to take a polygraph test about his friendship with Strzok. He quit instead. (The FBI declined to comment on what it characterized as a personnel matter; when I reached out to Norfolk in hopes of speaking with Evans, the field office declined to comment as well.) [Listen: The wrecking of the FBI] In his resignation letter, Feinberg lamented the “decay” of the FBI. “I recount those events more in sorrow than in anger,” he wrote. “I love my country and our Constitution with a fervor that mere language will not allow me to articulate, and it pains me that my profession will no longer entail being their servant.” Since leaving the federal workforce, he has decided to speak out—because, he told me, agents still at the bureau who fear retribution asked him to. Feinberg is now planning to spend time writing about these issues while he—like many other government employees forced out by this administration—figures out what to do next. In a recently published essay, he argued that the FBI has become obsessed with “ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce,” which “makes us all less safe.” Feinberg’s background is not that of an anti-Trump crusader. He was vice president of the Federalist Society chapter at Northwestern Law School, from which he graduated in 2004, and considers himself a conservative; today, he often uses the work of the conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke as a conversational reference point in discussions of politics. He joined the FBI in 2009, he told me, because he saw it as the “best vehicle” through which he could help “protect both United States interests in the world and the rule of law on the domestic front.” When he and I first met, sometime around the beginning of the first Trump administration, Feinberg was working on counterintelligence investigations against China. Such was his commitment to the job that he refused on principle to go visit the giant pandas loaned by the Chinese government to the National Zoo. Feinberg once trained as both a gymnast and a boxer, and still carries himself with a scrupulous economy of motion. He didn’t talk about the details of his job much, but we turned out to share an interest in film noir and indie rock, subjects he approached with the same focus and intensity that he applied to matters of national security. I came to consider him a friend. At that point, he was already struggling to understand a conservative movement that seemed to have abandoned many of the principles that had attracted him in the first place. Trump, in his second term, has intensified his efforts to transform ostensibly apolitical institutions into tools of his own personal power. This is a dangerous strategy in whatever form it takes: Eating away at government expertise, whether at the National Weather Service or the Food and Drug Administration, places lives at risk. But Trump’s personalist approach is particularly dangerous when applied to the agencies that can detain, prosecute, and imprison people. In a recent conversation, Feinberg recalled the sociologist Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. “Organizations like the FBI are the tool by which that force is exerted,” he said. “So you need them to be politically pure.” Otherwise, the risk grows that the government’s violence will be brought down on people who are disfavored by those in power. The FBI does not have an impeccable track record in this area. In addition to his focus on technocratic institution-building, Hoover left behind an unsettled legacy of paranoia and bureaucratic power politics as well as a willingness to harass political enemies, from which the bureau has never quite managed to disentangle itself. Former FBI Director James Comey kept on his desk Hoover’s approved application to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr., which the bureau
