Goodbye to All That

On May 31 of this year, in a series of phone calls beginning at nine in the morning and ending that afternoon, the newly installed Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Norfolk Field Office, Dominique Evans, made clear to me that, at the direction of Dan Bongino, my career with the organization had—for all intents and purposes—come to an end. 

It would be an understatement to say that I had not expected this.  In fact, I was in the midst of preparing for a potential move to Washington, D.C. to take on a new position at FBI headquarters. 

But, it turned out, I had made a terrible mistake: I had remained friends with someone who had appeared on Kash Patel’s enemies list. How did Bongino find out about this private friendship? I honestly don’t know. What business was it of his? None at all. Was I accused of any sort of misconduct? No. It didn’t matter. 

I faced a choice: get demoted or resign. I became the latest of a great many senior FBI special agents to walk out the door. 

The specifics of my experience may be unique—details often are—but the broad strokes of the story have become unfortunately common in recent months, as more and more special agents are driven out of the Bureau on mere suspicion of political unreliability. These developments should be concerning to all Americans. In the past six months, the FBI—and, for that matter, the Department of Justice and intelligence community as a whole—has been forcing out a wide range of experienced personnel needed to protect our nation. Under Patel and Bongino, subject matter expertise and operational competence are readily sacrificed for ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce.   At a time of simultaneous wars across the globe and a return to great power competition, this makes us all less safe.  

On the Saturday morning that I received the first phone call from my SAC, I had been working at the Norfolk Field Office as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for its national security and intelligence programs. For roughly three months at the beginning of the current administration, I had actually been serving as the acting SAC, overseeing every aspect of the field office’s operations. Before my tenure there, I had also been an agent in the Los Angeles Field Office, and a program manager and, subsequently, a unit chief within the Counterintelligence Division at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Immediately before my sojourn in southern Virginia, I had served as a field supervisor over a counterintelligence squad in the Washington Field Office.

Ironically, some of the greatest successes of the first Trump Administration’s efforts against the People’s Republic of China’s intelligence services and their proxies occurred under my leadership: I was the principal investigative architect of the indictment of Huawei Technologies, and the unit I oversaw at FBI headquarters contributed to the FCC’s decision to bar China Mobile a license to operate in the United States. I supervised the case against a Zoom executive who assisted China’s Ministry of Public Security in its campaign against Chinese political dissidents in the United States. All in all, I played a role in many cases pursued under the administration’s China Initiative (I am aware that the China Initiative became controversial for political reasons and that the Biden administration formally ended it. None of the cases I was involved in were among those that gave rise to the controversies.) In short, I was an apolitical civil servant protecting the United States against its most salient near-peer threat.

Indeed, a cursory look at my pre-FBI background would reveal that, far from being some sort of leftist deep state operative, my personal beliefs generally lean right; I was vice-president of my law school’s most conservative organization, and my first clerkship was with a libertarian public interest firm.

By the time of this year’s inauguration, I had been comfortably ensconced in the Norfolk Field Office for approximately fourteen months. There I managed the Bureau’s local counterintelligence and counterterrorism programs, confidential human source recruitment, and all of the office’s intelligence analysis and production.  Those operational responsibilities all fell under me on the organizational chart. But as one of only two ASACs in a relatively small office, I also regularly served as the on-scene commander for SWAT and Special Agent Bomb Technician deployments and dealt with office-wide personnel and disciplinary issues on a near-daily basis.

When the new administration’s first executive orders and attorney general memorandums began flooding our in-boxes in late January and early February, I was serving as the acting SAC, the previous incumbent having been promoted to be an Assistant Director.

The tenor in the organization changed as the government took on new priorities and initiatives in a fashion that did not comfort most on-board personnel. Probationary employees, many of whom only recently earned their badges, called me frequently or came by my office in near-panic about how they would provide for their families if fired from the FBI; the early days of assisting immigration enforcement efforts made some veteran agents nervous, as it was not a government priority to which our agency traditionally contributed bodies or resources, and it involved scaling a steep learning curve.

But as I reminded everyone at the first all-office meeting I held, we were executive branch employees, and as long as an order or initiative was not illegal, we were duty bound to act upon it. Constant reassurances from headquarters that our probationary agents would not lose their jobs gradually applied a salve to some worries, and we found our battle rhythm for contributing to the missions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Enforcement Removal Operations. The establishment of new government-wide task forces is never an easy lift, and helping with efforts designed to discourage immigration required getting up to speed on somewhat unfamiliar legal standards, tactics, techniques, and procedures.   But I enjoyed a solid and friendly relationship with the local Homeland Security Investigations executive, and in spite of the fact that our area of responsibility was not home to a significant population of undocumented immigrants, we felt that we were able to help advance the President’s priorities.  

This is not to say that we did not have misgivings about the new efforts. Many of us worried that other investigative priorities were being impeded or ignored as an opportunity cost of our shift in focus. And the larger climate in the Bureau was undeniably toxic: senior executives were being forced out, our leadership was taking on investigations that were clearly political in character, and they were turning over the names of agents who had worked on Jan. 6 cases to the Justice Department for who knows what reason. That said, the initial panic had certainly settled down. 

By the time spring came to southern Virginia, the majority of the Norfolk Field Office felt that we were in a relatively good space.

All that changed when I received a call from my boss. She wanted to know if I was friends with Pete Strzok.

*          *          *

Prior to that day, I had never faced any sort of disciplinary review or investigation. And to be clear, I was not accused of violating any rules or regulations this time either, nor had any of my cases fallen short of institutional standards. My only supposed sin was a long-standing friendship with an individual who appeared on Kash Patel’s enemies list, and against whom Dan Bongino had railed publicly.

Yet rules turned out not to matter much. And so, that weekend, Bongino informed my SAC, who in turn informed me, that he was halting—and actually reversing—my professional advancement.

I’m not going to rehash or relitigate Pete’s story here; it’s been told ably and comprehensively by others, not the least by himself. I’ll simply note that we worked together in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division roughly a decade ago, and we shared a number of mutual acquaintances before we ever even met (the counterintelligence world being not that large). Our own friendship began with a discovery that we liked the same bands and shared an interest in trying new restaurants; the notion that I was his “protégé,” as one X account stated, was news to us both. Most of our conversations since he left the Bureau have involved debating the relative merits of New Order versus Joy Division. If the fact that I sang along to “Every Day is Like Sunday” while he stood next to me at a Morrissey concert actually represents an imminent danger to the Bureau’s integrity, then, for the first time in nearly a half-century on this earth, I’m truly at a loss for words.

Yet under Bongino’s reign, it was apparently enough. My SAC informed me in a moment she described as “brutally honest,” that I would not be receiving any promotions; in fact, I needed to prepare myself for the likelihood of being demoted. She gave me no details about what position or office I would be sent to once my time as a leader prematurely concluded.  

Furthermore, she told me, I would be asked to submit to a polygraph exam probing the nature of my friendship with Pete, and (as I was quietly informed by another, friendlier senior employee) what could only be described as a latter-day struggle session. I would be expected to grovel, beg forgiveness, and pledge loyalty as part of the FBI’s cultural revolution brought about by Patel and Bongino’s accession to the highest echelons of American law enforcement and intelligence.  

When my SAC revealed the concern about my friendship with Pete, and its imminent consequences, I knew that I could no longer stay at the Bureau.  Within twenty four hours of my final phone call with her, I resigned, five years short of eligibility for retirement and a pension. I sent the following letter: 

Dear SAC Evans,

I am writing to tender my resignation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, effective immediately.

In a series of phone calls yesterday, I was informed by you that, because I maintain a friendship with a former FBI executive who is a critic and perceived enemy of the current administration, I will not be receiving any of the promotions for which I am currently being considered, and that I should actually steel myself to be demoted from my present role; additionally, I was informed that I should expect to be polygraphed about the nature of my friendship.  Even with these warnings and admonishments, though, it was never explained what policy, procedure, or institutional norm I had supposedly violated other than communicating with someone whom our current management finds politically undesirable.  Within five minutes of our last phone call, an email went out to the office removing me as acting SAC in your absence.

It should go without saying—to anyone who cares about the Constitution and rule of law—that this is not right. Our organization’s motto is “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,” but over the past six months there have been too many signs that our current leadership does not understand the last of those words. Earlier this year the ranks of our senior executives were decimated by forced retirements, and many others were willing to take their places without voicing concern or dissent. The Department of Justice has been ordered to open cases on individuals solely for having the temerity to say that the 2020 election was not stolen, or for having carried out their lawful duties as state level prosecutors; few people have pushed back. We sacrificed the names of every Special Agent who investigated the events of January 6, 2021, and an entire public corruption squad in our nation’s capital was disbanded for having worked on a related matter. Within our own field office, we shirked our national security obligations in order to move personnel to immigration task forces; our area of responsibility does not actually have a significant population of illegal immigrants, but our leaders wanted press release-ready roundups, so we pulled people from congressionally mandated counterterrorism and counterintelligence duties. I could go on.

I recount those events more in sorrow than in anger. I love my country and our Constitution with a fervor that mere language will not allow me to articulate, and it pains me that my profession will no longer entail being their servant. As you know, my wife and I are expecting our first child this summer, and this decision will entail no small degree of hardship for us. But as our organization began to decay, I made a vow that I would comport myself in a manner that would allow me to look my son in the eye as I raised him. It is now apparent that I can no longer both fulfill that vow and continue working for our current leadership.

It has been the honor of a lifetime to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Mike

*          *          *

The English poet Robert Graves, from whom I pilfered the title of this piece, once remarked that during his time in the trenches of the Western Front, he rarely saw displays of patriotism. My experience at the FBI could not have been more different. Special Agents—as well as the Bureau’s intelligence cadre and professional staff—tend to be effusive in their reverence of the United States. In my own career, every single office I occupied throughout my time as a leader in the organization held a dark cherrywood case, nestled on a bookshelf, which cradled an American flag, folded thirteen times into a compact triangle.  

That flag blanketed my grandfather’s coffin the day that we laid him to rest; a child of the Great Depression, he enlisted in the United States Army not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The congestive heart failure which ultimately felled him decades later appeared shortly after I joined the FBI, and during his last days in hospice—when a steady stream of painkillers loosened his hold on reality and his memory began to slip—he never once forgot, and even remarked upon, the fact that I had recently begun training for the role of Special Agent. This recognition meant more to me than perhaps he realized; most of my ideas about civic duty and public service were drawn from the example he set throughout his entire life. Perhaps for that reason, when the honor guard folded his funerary flag and went to present it to my father, he motioned for them to place it in my hands.  

Shortly before I sent my resignation letter, my wife and I, with the help and supervision of some other FBI Norfolk personnel, packed up my office. I was in an emotional maelstrom about giving up my badge, and it’s a good thing that she was there: the very act of removing his flag from the shelf drove home, in a previously unfelt visceral way, that my formal term of public service was over. I crumpled into my wife’s arms in tears. 

But there is a reason I refer to my formal term of public service; the oath of office I took upon joining the FBI did not contain a caveat releasing me from supporting and defending the Constitution simply because I no longer draw a government paycheck. I raised a number of issues in my resignation letter: the compromises so many new assistant directors and special agents in charge are willing to make, many out of financial necessity or personal ambition; the willingness of the institution to use law enforcement tools against political undesirables or electoral enemies; and the lack of trepidation about sacrificing impartial and hard-working investigators for political favor. 

It’s particularly concerning to me, as someone who dedicated his professional career to combating the Chinese Communist Party and all of its tentacles, to see resources and efforts diverted away from hostile foreign intelligence services and other serious threats to the homeland to focus on minor immigration status offenses. These changes should discomfit any citizen who cares about his or her nation; even now that I no longer walk into a field office every morning, these trends still vex me.  

I’m looking forward to exploring all of these issues over the next few months in writing, in engagements with the public, and by other means. In that way, I hope, I can continue my service to the United States and—of equal importance to me, at this point in my life—to those who still carry FBI credentials.  

To those readers still at the working level of the Bureau, who intuitively understand the damage your supposed leaders inflict every minute on a once great institution—so, so much more than they ever could comprehend—you represent the best of our nation and our communities; I take comfort in knowing that you’re manning the battlements.

Fidelity, bravery, and integrity, forever.

Editor's Note: The opinions presented here are entirely his own and not that of the U.S. government.