How Trump Plans To Make Enemy FBI Staffers ‘Lives a Living Hell’

As part of his second administration, Donald Trump is quickly ramping up to a potential firing spree at the FBI, as vengeance for the multiple federal criminal investigations into him, his associates, and violent supporters. But even before he and his incoming FBI chief get a chance to cull those in the rank-and-file, Trump and his lieutenants have a variety of plans for how to punish and undercut his real and perceived enemies working at different levels in the bureau — in the hopes that at least some of them just quit.

“There are ways to make their lives a living hell, even if you haven’t fired them yet,” says one Trump adviser, who like other sources requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “They can stick around for that, or just leave. They can also wait to be possibly fired later.”

This reporting is based on conversations with and written memos shared by three sources who have discussed these matters with Trump and his inner circle in recent months.

Trump, of course, has made no secret of his desire to gut the FBI in his second term and cram it full of MAGA lackeys — not so much to combat the “Deep State,” but to create his own cultishly Trumpy deep state. His second presidency, which has built heavily on the authoritarian vision of his first, isn’t even a month old yet, and already he’s started his purge of certain ranks of the bureau and the Justice Department. For instance, Trump’s administration fired eight senior FBI officials who had been involved in probing the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol that Trump had instigated. 

One of the top Justice Department officials handling this round of retribution and dismissal is Emil Bove — who just so happens to also be a former Trump attorney.

Meanwhile, Trump and his administration are plotting a broader cleansing of the FBI — including of the rank-and-file who were involved with the Trump probes that led to historic indictments — and gearing up for the inevitable court challenges for when they go for it. As the president awaits the expected Senate confirmation of the Kash Patel, the hyper-Trumpy conspiracy theorist he tapped to be his new FBI director, some administration officials tell Rolling Stone they hope to eventually release reports naming FBI agents who participated in the federal probe of Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election, and the agents and personnel involved in cases against Jan. 6 Capitol rioters. (For now, the Trump administration has agreed to a temporary deal, signed by a federal judge, to abstain from publicly airing these names of agents who took on Jan. 6-related cases.)

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Once Patel is officially running the bureau, additional dismissals of FBI agents and staffers are expected. But short of a mass firing, Trump administration lawyers and senior aides have game-planned the other scenarios and tools they have at their disposal for targeting people in federal law enforcement. 

One idea actively discussed among the upper ranks of Trumpland, including with the president himself, is to simply pull the security clearances of agents and other staff and career officials in the FBI who they’ve identified as anti-Trump subversives, according to the three sources. 

This essentially would take away the ability of these targets to do their jobs, and Trump advisers say they’d expect at least some of these people to just resign instead of suffering the indignity. The new Trump-era FBI and Justice Department are also weighing conducting invasive internal probes — “performance reviews,” as a Trump administration official sardonically calls them — of the numerous agents, federal investigators, and others involved, even if tangentially, with certain criminal probes including the ones into Trump’s 2020 election subversion and his hoarding of classified documents.

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Both investigations led to criminal charges against the then-former president. His 2024 electoral defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, and his return to the Oval Office, effectively shut down any chance those two federal trials would ever occur.

Additionally, in hiring people to replace certain purged staff, several Trump officials and senior aides to the president say that they want to add some key questions to the FBI interview process, including: Was the 2020 election rigged or stolen? 

These kinds of leading, conspiracy-theory-fueled questions, designed to root out job-seekers who won’t submit to Trump’s personality cult, are apparently starting to become a feature of so much of the federal bureaucracy.

In many ways, this has all been a long time coming. In May 2023, Rolling Stone reported Trump was already asking close advisers, including at least one of his personal lawyers, if “we know” all the names of senior FBI agents and Justice Department staffers who had worked on the federal investigations into him. Even then, Trump was privately ordering up the blueprints for an FBI purge, for when he reconquered executive power.

At a press conference earlier this month, President Trump told CNN that he’s going to fire at least “some” of the FBI agents who participated in Jan. 6 riot cases. And as Trump and his allies seek to remake the FBI, and so much else in the country, in his image, the president has surrounded himself with Yes Men and Yes Women eager to implement his wrath and his tantrums into public policy. Patel, his FBI director nominee, may fit this bill more than anyone.

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said in December 2023. “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Patel moderated his typically blustering, extreme-right positions — however, according to numerous sources close to Patel or who work in the Trump White House, there is barely anyone in the MAGA elite who didn’t see his Capitol Hill performance for what it was. That is: an effort to give the more squeamish Republican senators a fig leaf so that they vote Patel in. Then Patel, Attorney General and fellow Trump loyalist Pam Bondi, and the president can just do everything they want.

One source close to Trump gleefully compared Patel’s hearing performance to how the prior Trump White House had prepped Brett Kavanaugh to handle questions about Roe v. Wade and abortion rights during his Senate confirmation process for his Supreme Court seat — when Kavanaugh gave GOP senators like Susan Collins a patina of plausible deniability, even though everyone with major influence in the party knew that Kavanaugh would of course vote to torpedo Roe when the time was right.

“Kash is not going soft once he gets in,” this source says. “Why do you think the president is putting him there?”