Quinta Jurecic
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Quinta Jurecic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So that may be, you know, within that 6%. And people who were disabled and were not able to comply with the executive order that federal workers return to in-person work full-time because they physically couldn't. And so these are people who didn't want to leave but felt forced out.
And the other thing that Nick said is that, you know, people are very aware that this is not an offer that they can rely on. I think that, you know...
If the government had done this in a more organized way, if it had come from the specific agencies rather than from OPM under the, you know, particular, the vast array of federal agencies here, if it had come through the normal channels, if the terms of the offer had been clear rather than continually changing, if it didn't have material in the contract that said, by signing this, you're giving up any rights to sue us if anything goes wrong,
If it wasn't obviously clear to anyone who has spent any time in government that the government was making a promise that it actually couldn't carry out, because part of what this says is that you agree to resign, you'll leave on September 30th, and we're going to pay out your salary until then. The problem with that is that the government's going to run out of funding in mid-March.
The federal government actually can't promise these civil servants that it will continue to pay them that amount because they don't know where the funding is coming from. And so that runs into legal problems for exactly that same kind of power of the purse issue. And so the sense...
that has, I think, been brewing among people who have received these emails is not only that there's kind of a bullying and hectoring and dismissive and rude quality to the emails, but that they are being sent by someone who doesn't understand how the government actually works, and that therefore there is absolutely no reason to think that the federal government will hold up their end of the bargain.
And under those circumstances, why would you take that offer?
Happy to.
So before I start, I want to say we're recording this on the morning of February 7th. And if things change between now and when listeners hear this show, what I say may be out of date because the story is moving very quickly.
As you say, the Trump administration came in clearly with a posture of revenge toward the FBI and the Justice Department as a whole, really, right out of the gate when he pardoned over 1,500 rioters who had been prosecuted for their role in January 6th. Since then, what we've seen is a spree of firings at the Justice Department that
including of line prosecutors, so by which I mean, you know, not supervisors, not people with any power, just people who were tasked to, you know, carry out these prosecutions. This had been carried out largely by Acting Deputy Attorney General Emile Bovey, who was actually one of Trump's lawyers in the many prosecutions against him.
Now that Pam Bondi has been confirmed as Attorney General, we'll see what happens next. An effort to target the many, many FBI employees who were involved in carrying out this massive investigation into the insurrection. There was reporting that the Justice Department wanted to essentially carry out a purge of everyone who was involved in some way in these investigations.
And like I said, that is an extraordinary number of people.
Exactly. And so I believe off the top of my head, I think the FBI has 38,000 employees. That's agents, analysts, everyone. It has about, I think, 13,000 agents. So 6,000 people is a lot of people in a way that would potentially really damage the FBI's ability to move forward as an organization just because, you know, if you fire everyone individually, This was really an all-hand situation.
People were pulled in who had all kinds of expertise. And so if you let all these people go, what happens if you lose a bunch of your China counterintelligence experts? What happens if you lose a lot of your counterterror people?
That's fair. I think the point that I'm trying to make is more that I think we should be very worried about what the long-term effects are on the security of the country and on the FBI's ability to work as a national security and law enforcement organization. if this happens. But the thing is, it hasn't happened so far.
This seems to be kind of a effort from the acting FBI director, Brian Driscoll, who as a sidebar is in that role by accident. I'm sorry, can you explain?
It's somewhat deranged and I'm not totally sure I completely understand. My, my best understanding is that, uh, so actually we have to back up and note the most noteworthy thing here, which is that the FBI director resigned before Trump took office. Uh, Christopher Wray, who Trump had appointed after he fired Jim Comey, the FBI director has a 10 year term. Wray had not served out those 10 years.
Wray resigned voluntarily ahead of time. Uh, Uh, because essentially I think he, he realized that Trump was going to fire him and wanted to get out ahead of that. So it is not normal for the president to come in and not have a Senate confirmed FBI director. Uh, Patel obviously has not yet been confirmed. So then we have this question of, okay, what are we going to do?
Who are we going to put in charge? The Bureau had selected two agents to serve as the acting director and the acting deputy director. It seems like what happened is that somebody put in the names reversed on the FBI website, and they decided that it would be more trouble than it was worth to switch the names. So the agents...
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