The new FBI

Sam Sifton, NY Times - When President Trump returned to office last year, he declared the Federal Bureau of Investigation a “corrupt” and partisan agency and vowed to clean house. Perhaps that was no surprise. The bureau had investigated him several times.

To run the show, Trump appointed Kash Patel, a former public defender and intelligence official who had never worked for the agency, though he had spun conspiracy theories about it.

Patel immediately began to transform the F.B.I. by undoing its nonpartisan rules and norms, alarming many of its 38,000 employees. He fired people who had worked on the Trump investigations. He assigned 20 percent of the agency’s staff to immigration enforcement, meaning that there are now fewer agents and analysts to stop terrorism, drug trafficking, white-collar crime, public corruption and cybercrime.

One thing that hasn’t changed: Employees still can’t speak to the press without permission. But 45 people who work at the bureau or who left last year talked to my colleagues Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser anyway — a sign, they say, of how unnerved many people there are. This new F.B.I., many current and former employees of the agency told them, has made the United States less safe.  MORE