Inside Kash Patel’s F.B.I.

reporter who's watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk in recent years.

Normally, this is why I'd ask you to subscribe to The Times. But today, I'm encouraging you to support any news organization that's dedicated to original reporting. Whether that's

“your local newspaper, a national paper, or The New York Times, what matters most is that”

you subscribe to a real news organization doing firsthand fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you. From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. From the moment he was appointed director of the FBI, Cash Patel has invited controversy and concern about what his leadership would look like, and how it might affect the agency that's tasked with protecting the United States from threats at home and abroad.

Today, my colleagues Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser spoke to dozens of current and former FBI employees about how the FBI has been transformed. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. Emily Bazelon, welcome to The Daily.

Thanks so much for having us. Rachel Poser, first time on The Daily, welcome. Thank you,

“great to be here. So we have talked a lot on the show about all of these dramatic ways”

that the Trump administration has reshaped the role and the function of the federal government. A lot of those results are quite visible. Ice agents in the streets, prosecutors define court orders, but one of the agencies that has been reshaped in perhaps less visible ways is the FBI. The two of you embarked on an enormous and vicious reporting project to try to really get inside the FBI. So tell us what specifically you were trying to understand

about the agency and how it was functioning under the Trump administration. The FBI, since the scandals of Watergate, since those days has really tried to operate independently of the White House and to follow the facts without fear or favor. That's a big deal in the Bureau. And so when Trump was elected, he had a record of calling the Bureau corrupt of being very angry that he had been investigated.

“Well, I think the FBI was a very corrupt institution and I'm a victim of it in the”

true sense. I was able to beat it. And the Trump administration came in and they were really clear about this. The mission of the agency was changing. Our predecessors turned this department of justice into the department of injustice, but I stand before you today to declare that those days are over. And you know, the FBI, much of what it does is secret. Right. But we wanted to see what this transformation looked like. And so we embarked

on this investigation where we talked to 45 current and former FBI employees. And what we found was an agency that was really straining under political pressure where the leadership was transformed into something much more partisan than anyone at the FBI had seen before. And where agents were finding themselves doing work that felt to them like it was different and at odds with their own sense of mission and purpose. And they were

just really beating to worry about the safety and security of the country. Well, let's start with the leadership aspect of this because I imagine that in large part your reporting has to do with Trump's pick for the FBI director, Cash Patel. Patel is a really controversial figure. He's often been accused of pretty erratic behavior. What has your reporting shown about his tenure? So Cash Patel was a highly unusual pick for this

role. He had never worked for the FBI and did not have much experience in federal law enforcement

at all. He'd been a public defender and he worked as an intelligence official in the first Trump term. He's described by people who know him at the time as not particularly hardworking, but very cocky, ambitious, full of bluster. Because the subpoena list that Donald Trump should execute in this proceedings is going to be monumental. I want him to subpoena every government gangster that has ever called him out. We're going to subpoena Garland, Ray. We're going to put

all of them in the hot seat. Most importantly, he's somebody who has spun conspiracy theories about the Bureau in the past. He says that Joe Biden rigged the 2020 election. He thinks that there were FBI agents involved in planning the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Which is part of why Trump picks him. I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. I mean he has this line. He actually talks about shutting down the

bureau headquarters and reopening it as a museum of the deep state. I remember that line and I remember

about who this guy was and what the agency would even look like under his leadership.

“Yeah, and there was a lot of skepticism and concern inside the agency too. You know, people are”

looking at this guy and they're thinking like, how is this person who is so hostile to our agency

gonna lead it? One of the first things I did was go on Amazon and buy his book. I listened to some

podcasts and I tried to understand his background how he approached things where he was. So one of the people we talked to with Tanya Eugoritz. She was the head of the Directorate of Intelligence at the FBI and she sees Patel coming in and she very earnestly wants to set him up for success. Because part of my job as the head of intelligence was going to be, I was in charge of the team that would deliver his morning intelligence briefing. So the same. And we should note that

you do not have recordings of Tanya or your other sources, but we did send a producer from the daily and a fully to call some of your sources back and get some audio that we're playing in this episode. That's right. What did you think of his book? It was enlightening. I certainly was concerned that some of the disparaging remarks that were directed towards FBI and DOJ, but I'll admit I was mainly reading for any insights on his views on intelligence since that was kind of my responsibility

at the time, you know, classic internalist. I'm just trying to gather as much info as I can. So she's coming in super eager, but she can also see quickly that this is not business as usual.

“Can you describe his first day? Like after he came on board, do you remember what it was like for you?”

Yes. I was part of the morning meetings that we would have in which all of the headquarters leaders would assemble in a very large conference room and we would brief the director and typically the deputy director. Then I think everyone was very anxious to meet the new director and to see

what he would have to tell us. And on that very first day, he made an announcement about changes

and staffing to the bureau. And one of the first orders that really got people's attention was a big order to move hundreds of field agents out from Washington into the field offices. And that wasn't necessarily a bad idea. There were a lot of FBI insiders who said, "Yeah, sure, the bureau has become too heavy in DC and we could disperse people and that might be more effective." But the way they did it seemed like kind of random an arbitrary and not a lot of thought was going into, "Well, how do we actually

have these people land all over the country in a way that they're going to really be able to do their jobs?" It showed a lack of understanding of what the bureau at the headquarters level does.

And so this was the first instance I would say of a pattern that we would see after that

of decisions first and then everybody scrambled and figured out how to make it happen later. So this was a signal to Tanya that Patal is not going to be taking detailed briefings and kind of coloring inside the lines. He's going to be moving ahead, making maybe abrupt and sudden decisions that affect how investigations are run without the kind of traditional, very sober and considered analysis that the bureau is used to providing. And it's not just Tanya Egoritz who's concerned

“in these early days. I mean, this is widespread all over the bureau. I remember when it was announced”

publicly that Cache Patal was going to be the nominee. And I remember first thinking, "Who is Cache Patal?" And one of our other sources, John Sullivan, who's also in the intelligence division, he was a section chief there, told us a lot about this period and what he was worried about. That being said, I still held out a little bit of hope that an educated individual who has a law degree and understands the criminal justice system to some extent would understand what we were

faced with. It was more cautiously optimistic in the idea of perhaps this will be okay with Dambon Gino's selection to be his deputy director. I realized in that moment that it was not going to be okay. And a real turning point for him, a big deal in the bureau, generally, was when Patal and Trump choose Dambon Gino as the number two in the agency. He's going to be right under Patal. It's just a few bad apples. Is it? Let's just go to list the names of people

who've been involved in either alleged corruption or documented corruption at the FBI. We got Jim Komi. And Rachel, remind us who Bungino is and why was this a turning point for John Sullivan?

And those are just the people you know about, but it's not one bad apple. It's a rotten

orchard. So in regards to him, he also has a conspiratorial bent. He described FBI agents as thugs for the Democratic Party and called for disbanding the bureau. Dambon Gino struck me as somebody who had really lost his way. You know, you would see clips of his podcast and some of his streaming things, particularly some of the most alarming things he would say would get clicks and kind of work their way into algorithms. It's way past time to clean this FBI house up.

They have burned every last shred of faith and trust. Freedom-loving Americans had it.

“So Emily Bungino is now up a tells number two, what does John make of their tenure in these early days?”

He seen these two new leaders together make a big push for optics.

There was from what I learned on a senior conference was that the president had seen video footage or pictures of the raids that were being conducted around the United States. And with angry that he's not see the well-known FBI flag jackets with the yellow FBI on the back. And so one thing that happened early on is that apparently Trump was watching footage or saw a picture of a raid and he didn't see any flag jackets. And that becomes something

that's a great concern. At the same time, Tash Patel was putting out videos of him at Quantico. Kind of cosplaying as Rambo, being around explosions and people repelling from helicopters, all to kind of give this idea of the FBI's tough and he is tough.

“Which then takes away resources and time and money and energy from those teams so he can film something”

at a training ground or at a Quantico. And to many people, those videos, myself included, looked completely childish. The director, the leader of the FBI, is representing the organization in a juvenile manner and the work that we do and did was supremely serious. We have known for a very long time, of course, the President Trump cares a lot about how something looks on television and what you're describing is that that concern from the

President is trickling down to Patel and Bungino, the basically these two top leaders of the

FBI are essentially prioritizing the politics, the objects, and maybe even the marketing of the FBI over the job itself. Yeah, it's like a performance and you really see this with the Charlie Kirk investigation. Yeah, after Charlie Kirk was shot in September, Patel immediately tries to jump

“into the center of the action, which is very unusual for an FBI director. The first thing that”

often happens when a crisis incident like that takes place is that there's a big call with all of the executives in Washington, most of the field offices, and the director usually says very little because someone who is on the ground and knows what resources they need is leading the call. But when 200 plus agents tune in for this call in the hours after Kirk is shot, they're in the midst of this manhunt trying to find his killer. Patel takes over the call. He's berating the

special agent in charge in Salt Lake, and he starts scripting out his social media strategy. He's telling Bungino and the field office what to tweet. And all of this takes a lot of time and attention away from the investigation. And they're actually making mistakes. They're putting wrong information out into the world because there is such a rush to answer questions and be in front of the press. And for the agents, this is deeply frustrating, right? Because they know the danger of

saying something that's not true, setting an investigation off course. Obviously though, the FBI does care about its image, right? Like that is very clear from its long history of flashy press conferences, whenever it does drug busts or reads or other things that they want to boast about. Spiritually what you've described is not new. And as you're describing, there is a cost to prioritizing that. But I also wonder whether there are virtues to this kind of emphasis on the optics here.

I mean, we did hear from some agents who felt like the Bureau had not been good enough in the past at telegraphing of the work that it was doing to keep the American people safe. But the way that Patel and Bungino were going about this, they didn't feel was solving for that problem. I mean, agents were being told to take pictures for social media while they were out doing raids and making arrests, which they felt just compromised operational security and their safety. So it seemed

to most of the people we spoke to, like this was really putting the politics and the optics over the mission. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's one thing like when you have completed a drug bust to then make a big deal of it and try to take credit. It's another thing in the beginning of an

suspects are to be putting out information into the world, which then, you know, swirls everywhere

and can turn out to be wrong. Yeah, and we saw that this focus on optics wasn't only frustrating agents at the Bureau. It was really frustrating our allies abroad.

“Cash Patel attended a secret intelligence conference last year in the UK with some of our closest”

intelligence partners. And as part of the conference, they all went to Windsor Castle for meeting with the King, where a photograph was taken of all the participants and it was sent around as a kind of keepsake. With instructions, please don't share this because some of the people in that photo were non-disclosed, meaning that their affiliation with the intelligence services was supposed to be a secret. Their faces were not supposed to be in the breast, correct. But Cash Patel is apparently

determined to put this photo out on his social media. And so it creates this minor international incident where the British are saying, "Please don't post that photo. You really can't." And his team is kind of pushing back and we want to put it out. They didn't end up putting it out, but it's just an example of the kind of thing that everyone started to have to deal with when Patel was so focused on optics and social media.

What are Patel or the FBI have to say in response to these anecdotes? Both Patel and Bungino declined our request for interviews, but the FBI spokesman Ben Williams and sent us a general comment in response to our reporting. And I can read it to you. Please, he said, "This story is a regurgitation of fake narratives, conjecture, and speculation from anonymous sources who are disconnected from reality." And to say the obvious, there are plenty of named sources in your story.

Emily, the desire to project a certain type of image though. That seems like from your reporting that was really driven by the fact that Bungino and Patel had an audience of exactly one person,

“right, the president. And as your reporting showed, that's what was ultimately driving this”

leadership style that we're talking about. Yeah, the more people we talked to, the more clear it became, that politics and these questions of image were permeating everything about the agency and really affecting the work every day of the agents and analysts on the ground. We'll be right back. We're opening up Crossplay. I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times.

I'm going to play Stoop, STUPE across the trip forward multiplier square. That's played another move. And she did have an S. She played Stoop for 36 points. I've got a Z, which is 10 points. I can put my X over there. I can make box. I have two A's in St. T's. I'm guessing Tenga is not a word. Let's see.

“Tenga is a word. Oh. Don't know what Tenga means. So I'm going to press down on the word.”

And oh, definition popped up. Former monetary unit. Oh, touchy. A stan. Something every time I play this game. Even though I'm about 50 points ahead,

one thing I've learned in Crossplay is that the game is never over.

I just got a notification in Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close. But I did win. New York Times game subscribers get full access to Crossplay. Our first two player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. Rachel, how does the change in leadership style actually trickle down to the rank and file FBI employees? Well, there were a couple of big trends that we noticed in our reporting.

And one of them was how much the day-to-day work of agents and analysts was being transformed by the Trump administration's emphasis on immigration. The FBI traditionally plays no role in immigration enforcement. But all over the country, agents and analysts were being reassigned from their normal duties to help with the immigration push. So I spoke to one analyst in Los Angeles who became particularly concerned about this when the Trump administration

did a big immigration push there last year. And her story gives us some really good insight into what this transformation really looked like. So tell us that story. So this was an analyst named

Jill Fields. My husband joined the Bureau. And his first week at the Bureau, he came home and he

said to me, "Hey, there's this job that you would really, really like." It's called an intelligence analyst. And the more he told me about it, the more I was like signing up on in. Jill was one of those agents for whom the FBI was really her life. She worked there, her husband worked there. They were true believers. By the time I got in, I had a three and a half year old. So we got him a little FBI jacket. They had the little hoodie jackets that says FBI and got him the junior agent

go people and he'd be like, "POW!" FBI and like, show his little, his junior agent credits. He was

“it was really cute. He had Jill's an analyst who worked on violent crime in LA. And that was really”

her area of expertise. But then as the Trump administration's deportation agenda ramps up early last year, she and a whole host of other agents suddenly get tasked to help with the immigration push. Something they had really no experience in. I was stressed out because was having to pull analysts off of different teams to agents were being assigned to immigration enforcement and pulled away from things like public corruption, cyber crime, white color crime,

drug trafficking, terrorism, things that under the violent administration and for decades before had been core priorities of the FBI. They wanted three times as many people working the command post than we would normally have. And I just had logistical concerns. And when asked, it was, well,

“we've got to do this for optics. We've got to make a show for the president. So Jill is already”

frustrated. And then she gets asked to do something that she feels crosses a red line for her. A group of protesters had been filming agents. They had a megaphone. They were telling people to stay indoors because ICE was in the area. And later that day, we were asked to run preassessment checks. She's asked to have members of her team run a preassessment on

protesters, which is essentially the first step toward a criminal investigation. And members of her

team had been asked to take a look at a cell phone video that their supervisors claimed showed anti-ice protesters impeding an arrest. There was a little bit of vicaring, but the protesters remained where they were. They didn't cross the line that the agent had put out there. Their determination is that the protesters have done nothing wrong. The investigative team had determined that the protesters were exercising their first amendment rights. And so they say we're not going

“to go forward with this investigation. And they're told you have to open one anyway.”

It was so ludicrous. It's almost like this would have been in normal times. This would have been your scenario in your legal training that you would take a test on. And it would be, you know, so you've been told to open this investigation. What do you do? And the answer would be,

you do not because this is first amendment protected activity. And where did Jill understand

that order to be coming from? She was getting the request from her supervisor, but it was clear to her that there was pressure coming from the top. I want to make sure that we're not sounding naive here and acknowledge that the FBI has a long history of doing things that violate citizen's constitutional rights. For instance, conducting surveillance on people. This is not a new concept. So how did what Jill was asked to do fit into that or differ from that? That's a great question.

Several people described the FBI to me to be in a kind of post-hover mindset, meaning that they were very aware of the ways that particularly in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the Bureau had violated American civil rights by investigating huge numbers of people who had committed no crime. And that's not to say that since then their track record has been perfect by any means. The treatment of Muslim Americans after 9/11 is just one example, but it's drilled into them at Quantico, the FBI training

academy, to try to balance the mission with American civil rights. And Jill felt like that effort was being now completely ignored. And so she says no, she pushes back. I was told I couldn't say no. And I was told, well, you can get fired today or you can get fired in four years when another administration comes in and starts looking and seeing who had violated the law and who had followed an acquiesced. She's told in response, you know, Jill, you can get fired now or you can

get fired when someone a new administration comes in and starts looking into constitutional violations. It was in a sense, an admission that we know this is wrong. We're asking you to do it anyway. And if you don't do it, there will be consequences. So what happens to her? Well,

first her squad gets taken away from her. She gets reassigned. I was also told that I was a problem

and she's told that the seventh floor is aware of her. The seventh floor means the where the director sits in the Hoover Building in Washington. The stress that came with that. So she knows that she's being monitored. I knew at that point. I was done. I was worried. And she decides to leave.

walking with my friends to my car to put my boxes up. It's so painful because I love to my job.

I loved what we were doing and it just, it hurt to know that things had changed so much that I was not going to be able to continue doing the job that I loved. So we're seeing in some very tangible ways their agents that are not only being taken away from their typical work, but they're also being driven to leave. Yeah, we heard a lot of examples of this, but the other big dynamic we observed in terms of the political reorientation of the bureau

was that people were being pushed out because their work from the past was now being viewed

“with disfavor. So maybe you remember this, Patel in the beginning when he got chosen for his job,”

talked about purging the agency of any employees who's worked on investigating the president in the past. And one of the people who got swept up in that search was Tanya. I was on vacation with my husband in Virginia Beach and one of my deputies was covering for me while I was away. I had a routine check-in with her just to see if there was anything significant that needed my attention. And one of the items highlighted for me was that the division in my

absence had received questions about a piece of intelligence that the FBI published in September 2020. So now we have to go back to 2020 and all the fears about foreign influence in the election.

And at that time the FBI issued an intelligence report that contained a second-hand tip

“that the Chinese government was creating fake IDs to cast votes for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.”

And there are a lot of questions in the bureau to beat about the credibility of this intelligence, the FBI ultimately withdrew this report. But then now fast forward to 2025, Senator Chuck Grassley, who's the Republican Senator who cherished the Senate Judiciary Committee, he's conducting oversight and he's asking for lots of internal FBI documents. He's on a hunt for what he sees as like suspect bad things that FBI was doing when Biden was president.

Things that improperly investigate perhaps. Exactly. And so the FBI gives Grassley emails about this report about the Chinese and the 2020 election. And in one of the emails, an FBI employee wrongly identified Tanya as the official who had ordered this report to be withdrawn.

“I'm both trying to get to the bottom of it in terms of why it's my name associated with this”

and also thinking who do I need to talk to about it. And so then she meets with Dan Bungino. He acknowledged that he had heard about this and he was aware of it, but he commented that the matter was out of his hands. And I didn't really understand what that meant because he was the number two official in the FBI. And the next afternoon, she was placed on an administrative leave. I'm a pretty stoic person. I can handle a lot in its part of what's made me successful in my job

over the past 24 years. But at that moment, I had tears in my eyes. And then there was going to be an internal investigation of this whole field report and why it was withdrew. The FBI's

inspection division contacted me. And she's interviewed twice. So a polygraphs never pleasant.

They polygraph her. And then she gets called in to discuss her options. And she asked, well, what did this review find? And she's told that the review found no misconduct, not by her or anything related to the report. And so I asked, well, if that's the case, why can't I return to my previous position? So then she says, well, okay, if the review found that I did nothing wrong, can I have my job back? And then they say, well, you're a senior executive. And so your position

is at the discretion of the director, meaning of Patel. And then she's told, no, she could not have her job back. She's going to be transferred somewhere else to another field office. She's going to be demoted. And so she left the agency taking with her a whole career's worth of experience. This is someone at a very high level who had spent her entire warm life at the FBI to so casually discard such people as if they were, like, a used up tissue, you know, with

no consideration for what the organization would be losing. It is careless in a way that is

So effectively, what Patel and Bungino are telegraphing is we need headstrile and it doesn't necessarily

matter whose heads. Yes, she is the scapegoat for this whole convoluted story, right? It's not that anyone is saying that this report about the Chinese trying to steal votes for Biden was true. What she has told is that the FBI that Patel does not want to go to Senator Grassley and explain that the person who is named in this email who from just that email looks like they withdrew the report is currently the head of intelligence for the FBI. Did you hear about any other

“FBI employees that got pushed out because of similar political pressure? Yes, we did. And I think”

one of the striking things we saw was that for some employees, it wasn't one discrete action

they took that got them pushed out, like not one single email. It was the major cases they were assigned

to. Their whole line of work, the things that had made them valuable to the FBI before were now being held against them and making them vulnerable. There are thousands of agents who had worked on the January six investigations and plenty who had also worked on the four investigations of President Trump. So now they're worrying is this work that I did before because I was assigned to it going to put me in jeopardy. And one of the people we talked to who was in that position was

Blair at Holman. There was a period of time where I was watching the news every day just to see you know what could lead up to my potential termination. That's not a way that I want to live

my life. It's not how anybody. So before Trump took office for a second term, Blair had been the

supervisor, a special agent of this elite public corruption unit called CR-15. And so we were investigating government employees who were misusing their position. And then on top of that we also worked congressional cases, Senate cases, judicial cases. And that was the unit that conducted the investigation against President Trump about whether he interfered in the 2020 election. I think I knew that there was going to be a lot of eyes on the investigation, but it wasn't any

“different than anything else we worked. In the sense that you need to follow the rules,”

you need to follow policies. You have to get approval for certain things. Like the case is a case. Then now fast forward to 2025. And that investigation, which is called Arctic Frost, becomes a huge target for Trump and also for critics like Senator Grassley. So Blair is watching some of the agents who she picked for this assignment because of their great skill because she saw them as very independent and utterly nonpartisan. They're trying to get fired.

It was hard to see two outstanding people terminated. And she's just kind of waiting for them to come for her. And then of course they do. My letter said, you know, due to my lack of judgment, a lack of impartiality that led to the political weaponization of the government. And to me, what that meant was you were on the investigation and we're firing you for it. I just

“kept thinking, you know, this life that I had that I enjoyed that I loved the people that I was able”

to help the justice that I was able to get for individuals this over. Obviously, all of this is extremely distressing to the people that it is directly affected these agents who are being forced to leave in some way. But I do wonder also about the people that are being left behind and what kind of impact this environment has on them and of the actual work of the FBI. We heard from a lot of people that there's now a culture of fear in the Bureau of

paranoia. Dozens of people have been fired by Patel since he became director and the fireings continue. So people are really concerned about taking on assignments that might be viewed as political because you're just not sure whether the next administration who comes into office, if they don't like something that you worked on, whether that's now going to be caused for you to be pushed out. So if you got a tip that there was corruption or even a terrorist threat

from someone who was perceived as an ally of this administration, it could be really costly to your career to come forward. And so you might stay quiet. And that means that there's more corruption and Americans are less safe. It also just means that the whole mission of the Bureau has been corrupted. You know, we talked earlier about the fact that the two of you did interview people who worked at the FBI who did say that the FBI needs better PR that it's good that some

of these agents move out to field offices and just to take that a step further, it makes me wonder whether taking all of the changes that you've reported on together, were there people that you spoke with who worked at the FBI that were actually in favor of the direction it was going?

open to reforms. A lot of people felt that it was too top-heavy, too slow, there was a lot of bureaucracy,

“but the way that these changes were being carried out made them concerned about losing the Bureau's”

fundamental independence and that they were making the country less safe.

So ultimately what you were describing is an agency that's really been turned upside down

under cash, but tells leadership. And since your reporting came out, there's been additional reporting about how the agency has been in turmoil. Just last week the Atlantic published an article that among other things accused, but tell of excessive drinking and we should note, but tell us since filed a lawsuit against the Atlantic, accusing it of defamation. So given all of these controversies put together, I just wonder whether you have any sense

that patels on the way out. It's impossible to know for sure. Patel is definitely doing everything he can to please his boss and keep his job. Just this week, he promised that arrests related to the 2020 election would be happening soon, and the White House has been issuing public statements of support. But that said, there's been some reporting that Trump called Patel to express his displeasure after he was

seen celebrating with alcohol with the US men's hockey team at the Olympics. So there've been mixed signals. Dan Bungino, we should note, has left the bureau this year for unrelated reasons, but as for Patel, we'll just have to wait and see. And another interesting thing that's happened since our piece came out is that Blair Tolman is one of the leading plaintiffs in a new lawsuit against the FBI.

It's about holding the government accountable for doing the right thing, the way we hold ourselves accountable for doing the right thing. And this is a lawsuit that is challenging the dismissals that have been part of what the plaintiff say is a political purge. Yes, we are seeking reinstatement. We are seeking the due process that we were not afforded during this process. That is one of the goals of the lawsuit,

absolutely. I just never think about that part because to me, the lawsuit is also about making

“sure that others are protected now and in the future. I think many agents feel that the courts”

and the media are really the last open avenues for them to convey their sense of what is going wrong within the FBI. So many people said to us, I've worked in government for 20, 30 years. I've never spoken to the media before, but they feel that the internal checks, the watch dogs, speaking to their supervisors, either those channels have been shut down or they're not functioning properly. And so, employees of this typically buttoned up secretive agency were really willing to speak to us

for this story because the mission that they had dedicated their lives to, keeping American safe, they worry as being severely compromised. I think with the American people, they don't, they wanted was, they wanted change. They wanted the system to be challenged and in a lot of ways reformed. But the ways in which you change an organization like the FBI are not by cutting off chunks of it and hoping that it grows back better. Certain threats just aren't getting

addressed because there's no one there to work them. And it just makes me question, what are we missing? What threats are we not seeing? I don't know how we rebuild after this. I think we're going to be very fortunate if we stay safe. But I worry about what is being missed. Emily Baslan, Rachel Pozer, thank you both so much for your work and for being here. Thank you for having us. Thanks so much Rachel.

We'll be right back.

“Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday afternoon, President Trump said that he was”

extending a ceasefire with Iran just hours before it was set to expire.

The announcement came after Vice President JD Bans put his trip to Pakistan for a second

round of ceasefire talks on hold. The extension was the departure from the President's posture earlier in the day. When he told CNBC that if Iran did not agree to U.S. demands "I expect to be bombing" and Virginia voters approved a plan to jerrymander the state's congressional map to favor Democrats, giving the party a significant boost before the midterms. The plan could eliminate four of the state's five Republican-held seats from the November election.

The win by Democrats effectively brings the nationwide jerrymandering war to a draw.

Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and Jack DeCidoro with help from Mooch Zady.

“It was edited by Robsipco and Deventeiler and contains music by Dan Powell, Diane Wong,”

Marion Zano and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.