Emily Bazelon

The FBI, you know, 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.

And the Trump administration came in and they were really clear about this.

The mission of the agency was changing.

And, you know, the FBI, much of what it does is secret.

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.

Oh, wow.

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 beginning to worry about the safety and security of the country.

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.

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 going to lead it?

So one of the people we talked to was Tanya Ugoretz.

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.