Estimates have reached 6,000 FBI employees, who include senior officials, agents, and support staff, raising questions about why more than 15% of the bureau’s 38,000-member workforce was involved in Jan. 6 cases.

The figure first surfaced after a top official at the Department of Justice issued a directive last month, with the subject line “terminations,” to the FBI, demanding a list of all employees who had ever interacted with a Jan. 6 case. President Donald Trump’s DOJ appointees plan to use the list as they vet allegations from Republicans that some Jan. 6 cases were handled in a politicized or aggressive manner.

The order sparked unease across the bureau as staff began to fear for their jobs, and concerns about the list becoming public have since become the subject of a lawsuit between FBI agents and the DOJ. During those court proceedings, a lawyer in the case said the list could contain 5,000 to 6,000 names. He later noted to the Washington Examiner that there is speculation that the list could be flawed, i.e., missing some names while erroneously including others. Some on the Right blasted the FBI for involving what appeared to be so much valuable manpower in the one incident.

Elon Musk, who owns X and leads a Trump advisory board called the Department of Government Efficiency, elevated the misleading notion that the Jan. 6 riot was entirely peaceful and that 5,000 “agents” were “focused” on targeting protesters.

“That is an insane misallocation of resources!” Musk wrote in an X post that gained 30 million views as of Friday.

The riot involved a mixed bag of offenders. Nearly 1,600 faced charges during a four-year span, and while hundreds of those either assaulted police officers, obstructed law enforcement, or stole or damaged property, most of the others faced only minor trespassing violations.

A retired FBI agent, who worked at the bureau for two decades, explained that a single agent typically opens a case but that any employees who touch the case thereafter for any reason could have their names associated with it.

A mild case “about criminal trespass could end up having multitudes of people’s names inside that case file,” the retired agent told the Washington Examiner.

He noted that anyone in the FBI, including those who are not agents, who helps with surveillance on a case, analyzes toll records or bank statements, or offers forensic analysis, for example, could end up seeing their names in a case file.

The Jan. 6 cases were intermixed with what he viewed as more serious cases involving drugs, terrorism, fraud, violent crime, and more, the retired agent said. He noted that while he viewed some of the Jan. 6 cases as reasonable, others were “uninspiring,” such as those about a “guy jumping over a fence at the Capitol,” and yet those cases still took up an “ungodly amount of time” for FBI staff.

The retired agent attributed this to what he viewed as overzealous leaders at the DOJ or those working on the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters. Most of the others involved were following orders through a “military-style hierarchy,” he said, noting the bureau became more centralized in Washington, D.C., after 9/11.

The FBI Agents Association, whose members include active and retired agents, declined to comment on Musk’s characterization of the Jan. 6 cases and instead pointed to the group’s statement about the list of employees, which multiple people have indicated has dampened morale across the bureau.

“Put simply, Special Agents who risk their lives protecting this country from criminals and terrorists are now being placed on lists and having their careers jeopardized for carrying out orders they were given by their superiors in the FBI,” the FBIAA said.

Statistics throughout the FBI’s website offer a glimpse into the wide range of other matters that bureau employees across the FBI’s headquarters, 55 field offices, laboratories, and other facilities tended to during the Jan. 6 investigation. They included high-profile incidents like investigating the two assassination attempts on Trump and a foiled Iranian terrorist plot against the president that led to two arrests ahead of the election.

In fiscal 2022, federal authorities across all agencies (all of which the FBI has assisted at times), made nearly 97,000 arrests, which means Jan. 6 arrests comprised less than 1% of that figure. A large fraction of arrests involved immigration and drug offenses, while others involved violence, weapons, and fraud.

Agencies housed under the DOJ were responsible for referring 45% of suspects that year to U.S. attorneys.

The Society of Former Agents of the FBI, which comprises 8,500 members, including a couple of hundred current FBI agents, recently vouched for the critical nature of the FBI’s work in the face of threats about a mass culling of employees. The society’s president, Mike Clark, told the Washington Examiner that losing possibly hundreds of FBI employees would be “disastrous.”

“Do you know what that would do to national security alone?” Clark said.