Emily Bazelon

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.

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 investigation when the agents on the ground and local law enforcement are not sure who the correct suspects are to be putting out information into the world, which then, you know, swirls everywhere and can turn out to be wrong.

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.

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'd worked on investigating the president in the past.

And one of the people who got swept up in that search was Tanya.

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

Hmm.

And there are a lot of questions in the bureau, a debate 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 chairs 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 is like suspect bad things the FBI was doing when Biden was president.

Things they didn't properly investigate, perhaps.

Exactly.