Iran War Poses Test for Justice Dept. After Fires Reduce Positions in National Security
Firings, resignations and diversions to the president’s priorities have left elite counterterrorism and counterintelligence units stretched thin, current and former officials say.
President Trump was asked on Thursday if Americans needed to worry about the possibility of terrorist reprisals by Iran inside the United States. “I guess,” he said, not entirely reassuringly. His follow-up response was even colder comfort. “Some people will die,” he said.
His remarks were not unnoticed within the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly by agents and prosecutors who handle cases involving terrorism and national security. After a year of constant firings, resignations and other disruptive distractions, elite counterterrorism and counterintelligence units have been stretched thin and left short-handed, current and former officials say.
There is widespread concern about the capacity of these units to deal with threats unleashed by Iran in particular, an adversary known for its willingness to combine espionage, cyberwarfare and attacks in the real world in bringing the fight overseas.
According to current and former officials, an exodus of experienced investigators and prosecutors has occurred as a result of a succession of hard-line personnel and policy directives, frequently at the command of the Trump White House. The importance given to Mr. Trump’s directives has also diverted agents from national security matters to immigration enforcement or other ancillary tasks, including scouring the investigative files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Troy Edwards, a former deputy chief of the national security section of the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, stated, “The more D.O.J. and F.B.I. leaders fire public servants and force principled resignations by doing the president’s bidding, the more they remove institutional muscle memory and relationships from the national security apparatus.” “When seconds can make all the difference in countering terrorism threats, the loss matters.” The most vivid illustration of this remarkable brain drain came days before bombs from the United States and Israel began raining down on Tehran.
Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, fired about a dozen members of an elite Washington-based counterintelligence unit whose agents and analysts specialized in reducing terrorism threats from the Middle East. The reason for their termination: They had also been involved in the investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida residence and private club, Mar-a-Lago, after he leaves office in 2021.
According to people who are familiar with the situation, some of those who were fired included agents who worked on efforts to stop Iran’s ability to operate covertly in the United States. At least one was part of an interagency task force based in McLean, Va., known as the Iran Threat Mission Center. Some of the agents were thrown out so quickly, according to one person familiar with their work, that they were unable to hand off their most sensitive and knowledgeable sources to their successors.
A request for clarification was made, but the F.B.I. did not immediately respond. But in a social media post, Ben Williamson, Mr. Patel’s spokesman, said that the agents “acted unethically and violated the mission,” although he did not specify any wrongdoing.
The firings and forced resignations at the bureau and the Justice Department began almost the moment that Mr. January 2025 saw Trump’s return to the White House. From the beginning, leaders in both organizations began firing agents who were involved in Mr. Trump, or those deemed insufficiently loyal to him, without any justification other than the president’s unlimited power to hire and fire under Article II of the Constitution.
Doing so essentially drained a reservoir of veteran supervisory agents and prosecutors with expertise in counterterrorism and national security, sapping morale and leaving many units in bureau headquarters and the Washington field office with a dearth of experienced leadership, according to former agents, who described the situation as dire.
The Justice Department’s elite national security division, which is responsible for many of the most complex and sensitive cases, was decimated by firings, forced transfers and retirements.
Former division officials claim that the division lost between a quarter and a third of its leadership. That includes its interim director, who was fired after being scolded by Attorney General Pam Bondi for not removing a framed picture of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during her first visit to the unit early last year.
In the past year, the division’s counterterrorism section has lost about half of its line prosecutors, from about 40 to less than 20. Another unit in the section, the counterintelligence and export control section, which oversees cases involving sanctions against Iran and the seizures of Iranian oil tankers, has had similar losses, former officials said.
In addition, firings and resignations have particularly ravaged the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, which has a long history of prosecuting high-profile terrorism and national security cases. Many of the people who were pushed out or left, including Mr. Edwards, James B.’s spouse’s son-in-law Comey, the former F.B.I. director — lost their jobs after the White House sought to force prosecutors in the office to build criminal cases against Mr. Comey and another one of Mr. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, one of Trump’s adversaries.
Ms. Chad Gilmartin’s spokesperson Bondi stated that the national security division of the Justice Department was still operating at full capacity and that any suggestion to the contrary was “an outright lie” meant to fuel a media narrative. Beyond the serious attrition of counterterrorism experts inside the Justice Department and the F.B.I., the Trump administration, beginning in January, also pulled out of several international organizations with vital counterterrorism missions.
Among them was the Global Counterterrorism Forum, which was founded in 2011 and brought together law enforcement officials and policymakers from more than 30 countries to share best practices on fighting violent radical extremists.
The Department of State under Mr. The forum and other organizations from which Trump withdrew in his second term were praised in a report released during his first term.
