FBI agents who are out actually working cases day after day have a time-proven adage.
“Despite headquarters, the field survives.”
“Headquarters” meaning the office of the director and those who report directly to him on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Hoover was the FBI’s first director. The current director is Christopher Wray, but he will soon be replaced by Kash Patel if President-elect Donald Trump has his way. Patel has spoken of purging the FBI of Trump foes and using it to in turn purge the supposed “deep state.”
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A retired FBI agent who spent 30 years in the field going after lawbreakers told the Daily Beast that he had been hoping the new director would be somebody more familiar with the bureau’s workings as a law enforcement agency.
“You have to know what the street agent is thinking, what he’s doing on a daily basis,” he said. “And in all my years there, even when it was election time and stuff, I don’t remember anybody really talking a whole lot about the politics.”
The agents in the field are focused on policing rather than policy and are guided more by their own instincts and smarts than by whatever the big shots at HQ have to say.
“You come to work every day and you have 10 or 12 or 15 cases assigned to you, and you and your partner figure, ‘All right, we’re gonna cover this today,’” the retired agent said. “And you go out.”
The divide such as that between those who seek to become bosses on the seventh floor and those who just want to do the work is common to all law enforcement organizations. But because FBI agents often do not sign on until their late twenties and have to retire when they turn 57, they must decide relatively early on which way they want to go.
“If you want to go up, if you want to get onto the seventh floor, you got to move quick.” the agent said. “You put in two or three years on the street and you start moving up. And by the time you get to the seventh floor, you haven’t been a street agent for 15 years.”
Too often, the agent said, those who eschew the field for headquarters get there by ingratiating themselves with the bosses in power at the moment.
“They roll with whoever’s in charge,” the retired agent said. “If you have coffee with a director who hates Trump and is saying, ‘Oh, my God, what’s gonna happen if he wins?’ and all that sort of stuff, well you start saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right, boss. Yeah, I feel the same way.’”
That means that if Patel does become director, he can expect to be surrounded on the seventh floor by sycophants who chose advancement over enforcement and have not been in the field in years. Patel apparently plans to clean house of anyone he deems insufficiently loyal to Trump. The retired agent predicts this will prove harder to achieve than it would in the private sector.
“It isn’t an IBM where you can walk in and say, ’Oh, clean out your desk, you’re gone,’” the retired agent said. “These are career government employees, and you can’t fire them on the spot.”
The priority of most of the agents who have chosen to be in the field will no doubt remain investigating actual violations of the law just as they did under previous directors. But, from what Patel has said, agents who would otherwise be going after organized crime or foreign spies may find themselves assigned to investigating left-leaning journalists and other supposed operatives of the “deep state.”
The retired agent figures that this will also be more complicated than Patel may imagine.
“There’s a bigger process to it than just, ‘Go lock this guy up,’” the retired agent said. “By the time it gets to the point where somebody signed off on an arrest warrant for a guy, there had been at least some sort of investigation.”
When asked what might happen should Patel decide he wants several people from CNN in New York arrested, the retired agent figured, “Kash would call the assistant director in charge of the New York office and say, ‘I think these CNN people have broken the law and these are the violations.’ The assistant director would take the case to whatever squad would handle that type of investigation and say, ‘This is coming from the top. Open a preliminary investigation, find out if there’s anything to proceed with.’”
A preliminary investigation would give the squad 90 days to do a basic investigation and prepare a report.
“You send it to headquarters, and then they say, ‘OK, we’ve got enough here to open up a full investigation,” the agent said. “More things are open to you. You can get involved with wiretaps, that type of thing. Then, after six months, or however long it takes you to complete the investigation, then you either say, ‘Alright, we got enough to take this to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for prosecution’ or, ‘There’s nothing here. We’re gonna close the case administratively.’”
The retired agent added, “If it’s coming from the director, it gets a little more complicated than that. But—I obviously never had a case that went to that level—but that’s kind of the way it would go.”
At some point, the FBI would take the case to the United States Attorney. And, if prosecutors deemed there was enough to proceed, the retired agent figures the squad would go ahead and make the arrests.
“Take a 42-year-old agent who’s got eight years till he retires, and he’s looking at the money that’s in his 401k and he’s going, ‘I have my 401k. My family likes living here. I like having a good-paying job that pays six figures. You know what, I’ll do what I gotta do,’” the retired agent figured. “I think if that got to me, that’s the way I would approach it.”
He then added, “If it was something completely outrageous, then you take it up the ladder, you know?”
Whatever happens, the agent is certain the field will survive even Patel.
