FBI Surrenders Details of 5,000 Bureau Employees and Their Role in Jan. 6 Cases to Trump’s DOJ

In the latest move indicating the federal bureaucracy is resigning itself to the prerogatives of the Donald Trump administration — as opposed to fighting them — the FBI has agreed to turn over the details of the roughly 5,000 FBI agents who played a role in investigating cases relating to Jan. 6.

According to a Tuesday CNN report, bureau officials complied with a demand from the administration to provide the details after a memo with the subject line “Terminations” was sent Friday.

That memo, from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, said that officials with the FBI had until noon on Tuesday to submit the details or face termination.

Bove had previously been involved in the termination of eight other senior FBI employees.

The tactic worked: “More than 5,000 employee details were submitted, including employee ID numbers, job titles and their role in the January 6 investigations, sources said, but not their names,” CNN reported.

“There are more than 13,000 agents and 38,000 total FBI employees.”

The move is already the subject of a lawsuit by FBI employees against the DOJ, accusing it of violating both their Constitutional rights and federal privacy laws by painting the demand — and requiring them to take a survey about what role they might have played in the investigation — as part of a “purge.”

The survey asked them about whether they testified before grand juries or trials, executed arrests, or had specific roles in Jan. 6 investigations.

The suit demands that a judge block release of their information or their answers to the survey.

“The very act of compiling lists of persons who worked on matters that upset Donald Trump is retaliatory in nature, intended to intimidate FBI agents and other personnel, and to discourage them from reporting any future malfeasance and by Donald Trump and his agents,” the suit contended.

FBI director nominee Kash Patel, however, said in Senate testimony that agents wouldn’t face retribution for working on Jan. 6, merely a review of the work agents did — something Bove’s demand for information seems to comport with.

“I think if anyone commits a wrong in government service, the American public deserve to know every absolute detail of that corrupt activity,” Patel said during his testimony before the Senate.

However, the agents involved feared not only that they might lose their job — according to the suit — but would be set upon by violent Trump supporters.

“Plaintiffs reasonably fear that all or parts of this list might be published by allies of President Trump, thus placing themselves and their families in immediate danger of retribution by the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons,” the suit claimed, according to Reuters.

And one FBI employee was worried about merely answering the survey, according to another Reuters’ report.

“I know myself and others receiving this questionnaire have a lot of questions and concerns, which I am working hard to get answers to,” said Chad Yarbrough, assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division at FBI headquarters, in an obtained by the wire service.

Two things can be true at the same time, of course.

First, political retribution for the mere act of participating in an investigation is wrong, and neither the survey nor the information should be used solely to fire people for doing so.

Secondly, we now know enough to know that the FBI’s reaction to the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion was far from commensurate with what it turned out to be: not an “insurrection,” but a handful of chaos tourists who overwhelmed security personnel at an undersecured location.

To the extent that criminality was committed, it should have been investigated and punished accordingly. However, the use of the full power of the federal government to make the Capitol incursion look — wrongly — like an “attack on democracy” that almost succeeded is ludicrous.

If the FBI or any of its agents knowingly took part in the politicization of that day, America needs to know. As it pertains to that, this is very much a step in the right direction.

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