The FBI launched a wide-ranging round of staff cuts on Friday as Donald Trump’s administration moved to swiftly shake up the US’s leading law enforcement agency, three sources familiar with the matter told the Reuters new agency.
At least five top FBI officials in major US cities – Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, New Orleans and Las Vegas – were ordered to resign or be fired, one of the sources told Reuters.
The move came at the same time that CNN reported that a purge of career law enforcement officials would hit the agency, with dozens of FBI agents facing the axe who worked on investigations into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and any Trump-related cases, such as the inquiry into missing sensitive documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
CNN reported that agents and other employees would be asked to resign or face termination in a process starting on Friday.
Trump has vowed to dramatically revamp the US justice department, which includes the FBI, after it brought two criminal cases against him during his four years out of power. He has repeatedly claimed – without evidence – that Joe Biden “weaponised” law enforcement to pursue a political vendetta against him.
The FBI terminations would be a major blow to the historic independence from the White House of the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency and would reflect the Trump’s determination to bend the law enforcement and intelligence community to his will.
It’s part of a startling pattern of retribution waged on federal government employees, following the forced ousters of a group of senior FBI executives earlier this week as well as a mass firing by the justice department of prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team who investigated Trump.
The FBI Agents Association called the planned firings “outrageous actions”.
“Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for failure,” the association said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post also reported that interim US attorney Ed Martin has dismissed roughly 30 federal prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases in the Washington office over the past four years.
In his first day back in the White House, Trump granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged with storming the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, in an attempt to block Congress from certifying the 2020 election results which Biden won.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
