Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) warned the country on Tuesday that the Trump administration had left Americans less protected against terror attacks by firing veteran national security officials amid a purge of perceived anti-Trump government employees.
Whitehouse made the remarks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which two fired FBI agents testified about being removed from their jobs for working on investigations into the 2020 presidential election and finding no concrete evidence of voter fraud.
“I’ll close by talking about what this hearing should be about. Those counterintelligence agents Kash Patel fired aren’t the only career law enforcement officials forced out by this administration. Nor are they the only ones purged because they were assigned to investigate President Trump’s crimes,” Whitehouse began, adding:
Here’s what has happened at the FBI since President Trump took office. The FBI has lost at least 300 agents working on national security matters, transferred agents out of the domestic terrorism operations section, disbanded the foreign influence task force, and instructed joint terrorism task forces to work on immigration cases.
At DOJ, more than 6,000 employees have left. The National Security Division has lost up to one-third of its leadership, half the line prosecutors in the counterterrorism section, and half the workforce in the counterintelligence section. Attorney General Bondi disbanded DOJ’s task force Klepto Capture, kleptocracy team, and kleptocracy asset recovery initiative.
It is the same story throughout the administration, where conspiracy theories and obsessions with revenge are decimating the career law enforcement who protect us against national security threats. Major cuts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Laura Loomer forcing out the heads of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, DHS gutting its office to prevent domestic terrorism and putting a 22-year-old with no experience in charge, and cutting the workforce of CISA, which protects us from cybersecurity threats from bad actors like Iran.
Americans are made less safe every time this committee holds a hearing promoting fake outrage about Jack Smith and denigrating FBI and DOJ professionals, every time MAGA influencers like Laura Loomer convince the president to fire agency heads, and every time Kash Patel fires FBI experts because he wants to distract from his own incompetence — his wasting of taxpayer dollars to fly around the world on a private jet, his partying at the Olympics, or his undermining of the FBI’s own investigation. Instead of chasing conspiracy theories down rabbit holes, that’s what we should be focused on.
The twenty-two-year-old Whitehouse referred to is Thomas Fugate, who Trump appointed in June of 2025 to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s main hub, known as the CP3, for combating violent extremism and domestic terrorism.
ProPublica reported at the time of Fugate’s appointment, “Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.” Fugate graduated from college a year prior to his appointment.
Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.
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