Lawfare Daily: Michael Feinberg on Leaving the FBI

[Intro]

Michael Feinberg: I was never accused of any formal wrongdoing. Nobody has explained to me what was untoward about my relationship with Pete. I'm, I'm sort of at a loss as to why this prematurely ended my career.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare here with Michael Feinberg, former FBI China Hand.

Michael Feinberg: What has reached the public and the conception that the public has in terms of personnel being moved or ousted from previously earned and well executed positions is actually being understated.

Benjamin Wittes: Until the end of May, Mike Feinberg was a senior FBI Counterintelligence official in Norfolk, Virginia. That all came to an end because of a friendship he'd maintained with a non-person.

[Main Podcast]

Mike, start by telling us a little bit about who you were until the last Sunday in May of this year.

Michael Feinberg: Of course, I assume you mean by the question who I was within the FBI and we're not gonna go on a whole Proustian digression starting with childhood.

Benjamin Wittes: Correct. We were, I, I meant it in a professional sense, not in a deep exploration of your soul sort of way.

Michael Feinberg: Of course. So I was what would probably be colloquially referred to as a ‘China Hand.’ I had been in the FBI for just a month under 16 years, and for 14 and a half of those years I focused entirely on counterintelligence cases involving the People's Republic of China.

I held a number of positions. I was a case agent, which is sort of the internal bureau speak for what a lot of people refer to as a field agent. I was a case agent in the Los Angeles office for the first six or seven years of my career. Through a series of skills I was able to teach myself and learn from others and some fortuitous occurrences, I received a promotion to headquarters where I spent about 18 months in a role we were referred to as a program manager or headquarters supervisor, which basically means you are helping run traffic for field operations, getting them the approvals they need, managing resources de-conflicting with other field offices and so on and so forth. It's a very logistics heavy job.

And from there I got promoted to unit chief in a different section within the counterintelligence division, but one that's still focused on the PRC. I did that for a couple of years, had some pretty notable public successes. And on the basis of those successes, I was able to get a desk supervising a squad in the counterintelligence division of the Washington Field Office, where we focused a lot on insider threat cases, intelligence operations, and foreign malign influence.

I did that for about four years. It was easily the most fun and rewarding job I had in my entire bureau career. And from there I moved to the position of being the Assistant special agent in charge for all national security and intelligence programs in the Norfolk Field Office. And I held that position for just under a year and a half before my rather abrupt leave taking from the FBI and for much of that period towards the end, I was actually the acting special agent in charge of the office while we were between permanent personnel.

Benjamin Wittes: So, an assistant special agent in charge is a relatively high-ranking bureau management position. Is that fair to say?

Michael Feinberg: It is within a field office. In the greater scheme of things, it is mid to upper-level management. The FBI breaks management into three categories. There are supervisors, which are field supervisors, headquarters supervisors, and then there's senior leaders which are unit chiefs and assistant special agents in charge and assistant section chiefs at headquarters.

Above that is the senior executive service, which is a whole rigmarole you have to go through. And I believe the list of promotees has to actually be confirmed by Congress, I'm not positive about that anymore. But I was one step below senior executive service and was actually in the process of applying and interviewing for those positions.

Benjamin Wittes: So it's fair to say that as of May of this year, you were on a track to be bureau senior management. Is that right?

Michael Feinberg: Yes, it, it was actually, I would go so far as to call it a glide path. I'm not gonna get into the specifics of who they were 'cause I wanna protect them, but a number of people in different divisions at headquarters had actually sought me out and asked me to apply for vacancies immediately under them, which would've been my entry point into the senior executive service.

Benjamin Wittes: So I wanna clear this underbrush because, you know, there are some old conspiracy theories about me and the bureau. How do we know each other?

Michael Feinberg: I think we initially met because a family member of mine knew you when I moved to D.C.

Benjamin Wittes: Yes. I believe your cousin was a–

Michael Feinberg: He was a student contributor at one point.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. Yeah. I believe your cousin was a listener to Rational Security and you introduced yourself as, as his cousin at an event. We have no relationship of anything like leaks or inappropriate contacts, right?

Michael Feinberg: Correct. It's an entirely social relationship based upon shared acquaintances.

Benjamin Wittes: We've been workout buddies, we've hung out together. We have mutual friends. If you were polygraphed or I were polygraphed about our relationship, there's nothing that is untoward. Is that fair?

Michael Feinberg: That's completely correct.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so what happened to you at the end of May? Describe it for me.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, so the last Saturday in May, I was actually at my office. I usually went in weekend mornings to use the gym, get a workout in, and then clear out as much email traffic as I could that had piled up toward the end of the week, so I could start on Monday pretty fresh, and also just to sort of check the pulse and make sure nothing was happening.

While I was at the gym, probably around nine in the morning or so, I got a phone call from my newly arrived special agent in charge. And I was aware that over the past 24 hours or so, Dan Bongino had been trying to get ahold of her.

Benjamin Wittes: And who is Dan Bongino?

Michael Feinberg: He's the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Benjamin Wittes: Former podcaster and Fox News contributor?

Michael Feinberg: Yes. Yes. And she called me to inform me that the reason he had been trying to get in touch with her was actually to discuss me and in particular that he had become aware that I remained friends with Pete Strzok after his departure from the bureau,

Benjamin Wittes: And Pete Strzok just for those who have been living in a cave for the last eight years. Who is Pete?

Michael Feinberg: Pete Strzok is a former counterintelligence executive at the FBI. He held a number of positions in a number of different offices rising to very senior ranks. Who, while he was working for Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation sent a number and, and shortly before that sent a number of text messages to another bureau employee that were disparaging of the president and the subject of that investigation, and that occurrence once reported upon, sort of spawned a lot of conspiracy theories and slanders against the bureau in the multimedia universe that Dan Bongino previously operated

Benjamin Wittes: And they ended, Pete was fired as a result, and that matter remains in litigation to this day.

Michael Feinberg: That's my understanding. I'm not following the litigation with any great interest. I think part of it's been settled, but don't quote me on that.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Michael Feinberg: I think part still remains.

Benjamin Wittes: So, but it's fair to say that you were, Dan Bongino had become concerned that you were still friends with a former FBI official–full disclosure, I am friends with Pete too–who, has, is a matter of intense hatred for by the current administration from the president on down to Bongino.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, I think that's a very fair assessment.

Benjamin Wittes: Now help me out because I didn't know the FBI purports to regulate who's friends with whom. Even among its employees, what is the rule that it violates for you to be friends with a PNG-ed former FBI official?

Michael Feinberg: Nobody has made me aware of any rule, policy, procedure, or even an informal institutional norm that I supposedly violated. I was never accused of any formal wrongdoing. Nobody has explained to me what was untoward about my relationship with Pete. I'm, I'm sort of at a loss as to why this prematurely ended my career.

Benjamin Wittes: So one possibility is that they believed you were leaking stuff to Pete. Is there any truth to that?

Michael Feinberg: Zero. My relationship with Pete at this point is entirely social. We share the same taste in bands and an interest in new restaurants, and most of our interactions are talking about music groups, going to concerts, trying new restaurants.

You know, when he left the bureau, our discussion of investigations and operations completely halted. I would occasionally let him know if a friend of his with whom he was no longer in touch with got promoted or retired, but there was no discussion of even palace intrigue. I think the closest thing to any sort of FBI discussion that he and I had over the past six months was we both made slightly disparaging comments in a personal venue about the fact that Kash Patel had decided to wear a badge.

Beyond that, you know, we had a lot of discussions about the French dining scene in New York and bands that broke up in the eighties.

Benjamin Wittes: Do you have any idea of how Dan Bongino came to know of this relationship?

Michael Feinberg: I haven't the slightest idea. There's a couple possibilities that I've sort of mulled over as thought experiments. You know, my friendship with Pete was not a secret. It was not something I bragged about either. I'm aware that he's a controversial figure within the bureau and on the outside, but there are other people who knew that I continued to socialize with him.

There are other people at the bureau who do the same and continue to socialize with him. How I became a target in particular is something about which I have no insight.

Benjamin Wittes: So, alright, Dan Bongino becomes kind of inexplicably fixated on the social relations of an assistant special agent in charge in a Virginia field office. Honestly. Is that typical of him? Is that typical of the climate now that the seventh floor at the Hoover Building is kind of regulating social relationships?

Michael Feinberg: So, I've got issue I, I've gotta sort of qualify what I'm going to say with two caveats. The first is I want to be very clear that I never personally dealt with Dan Bongino one-on-one. I offered to. When I got that first call from my SAC, I explicitly asked if I could speak with him so I could provide some context and explain the relationship with Pete. I was told there is no world in which that will be allowed to happen.

The second caveat is I was at the point in my career when I left where a lot of my close friends have ascended to the higher ranks of the bureau and the J. Edgar Hoover Building. So I do hear quite a bit about first person interactions with Bongino. But I have to be very careful how I tread in terms of describing those things, because I don't wanna put people who are still there, who I know to have high amounts of integrity and judgment and wanna do the best thing for their country and for the FBI in any particular trouble.

So I'm gonna answer your question in generalizations. I'm just sort of warning in advance if there are natural follow-up questions, I may have to sort of, dance around them.

Benjamin Wittes: Fair enough.

Michael Feinberg: The climate on the seventh floor of the bureau and seventh floor is the menonym we use internally to describe the highest ranks of leadership. It's where the director, the deputy director, the individuals who used to be known as executive assistant directors, it's where they sit. It is where the morning and afternoon meetings are held to the extent they're still held. It's basically the nerve center for the bureau.

It's a pretty toxic atmosphere right now and one that is ruled by fear. My understanding is that the persona Bongino presented in his podcast and media appearances, the tendency to fly off the handle, the credulity at believing conspiracy theories, the sort of frothing at the mouth rants and lectures and yelling sessions. My understanding is that's not an act, that is actually who he is.

So I know for a fact there are a number of very senior executives who do their best to avoid having to meet with him one-on-one. They really endeavor to keep it only to official pre-scheduled meetings because there is no telling what particular Dan Bongino you are going to get at any given time. Is this going to be somebody who is laser focused on the practical logistics of a violent crime surge? Or are you getting somebody who's gonna be demanding information about the Epstein files or the assassination of JFK? You really have no idea.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright. So you don't know how he finds out about this relationship?

Michael Feinberg: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: You don't know of any regulation or rule that it violates–

Michael Feinberg: Correct

Benjamin Wittes: –to this day?

Michael Feinberg: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: So what happens your, your SAC says, Mike, we've got a problem. The deputy director has found out that you're still friends with Pete Strzok. What are the professional consequences she describes for that?

Michael Feinberg: Well, so, so there's a series of phone calls. Let me sort of, if you wanna, it might make more sense for me to just go through the whole day.

Benjamin Wittes: Yep, that's fine.

Michael Feinberg: So, that's the first phone call. She, she calls me, says he's concerned about my friendship with Pete and asks me to explain it. She says she's been ordered to get to the bottom of it, whatever that means. So I explained the friendship to her in pretty much the exact same terms that I did to you and your listeners a few minutes ago.

Social relationship. We worked together at headquarters, became friends. The friendship continued. We talk largely about innocuous topics you would talk about with any friend outside of your professional environment. She says she will relay that to the deputy director and will call me back. So I try to go back to my workout.

If I'm being totally honest, I'm pretty unsuccessful at that. My heart is racing. It is not because of any cardio work I'm doing. It is it's pretty clear to me there that I am in Bongino’s targets for nakedly political reasons and my career as I know it, if not over is about to become dramatically different.

Benjamin Wittes: And that your knowledge of that or your instinct about that is a function of the climate that you just described?

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, and look, it has been reported on in more outlets than I can count that a lot of FBI executives have been ousted from the bureau for very spurious and petty reasons, to the extent reasons are given at all.

Benjamin Wittes: And when you, you said that very carefully, that a lot have, it has been reported by a lot of outlets. I, I take it, you know this to be true.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. The reason I'm referring to outside media reports is 'cause I'm aware of many other people it has happened to or who have had their careers halted in other ways, in a way that has not reached the press yet and just knowing now firsthand what this process is like, I want to be as respectful of their privacy and what they and their families are currently facing as much as I can. So to the extent I'm gonna refer to personnel issues at the bureau, I'm gonna largely limit it to things that are already in the public eye.

Benjamin Wittes: But it's fair to say if you take all the Adam Goldman articles in the New York Times and all the similarly toned articles in other publications about the scope and scale of personnel actions in the bureau, the actual problem is significantly worse than has been reported. Is that fair?

Michael Feinberg: That's 100% fair. What has reached the public and the conception that the public has in terms of personnel being moved or ousted from previously earned and well executed positions is actually being understated.

Benjamin Wittes: And the limitations on the reporting is that a lot of people don't wanna do what you did, which is to go public for very sometimes good and respectable reasons, but it, it's fair to say that your story, which is a story of, you know, being targeted by the deputy director or somebody else for purely political reasons is not singular, right?

Michael Feinberg: Correct. I don't know if other individuals have been targeted in exactly the same manner that I have.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, surely not for purely social. I mean, yeah, the circumstances is somewhat extreme

Michael Feinberg: But I think if you are a senior executive who rose to your position under Chris Wray over the past few years and you are not willing to bend over backwards and make some pretty serious compromises with Bongino or Patel. The hourglass is running out on you.

Benjamin Wittes: So I'm not gonna ask you about the specific compromises, but is it fair to say that the essential demand is that you don't criticize the leadership privately, let alone publicly, that you don't have friends like Pete Strzok, that you don't go to French restaurants in New York. What, what are the parameters of the rules?

I mean, I, I mean, you're, you're an unusual FBI agent in being kind of interested in the restaurant scene and reading Proust and studying Ingmar Bergman. Those presumably aren't the things that get you in trouble. What is the list of things that's gonna wreck your career?

Michael Feinberg: No, Bongino hates foie gras. I really believe that is at the root of–

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah cause he's a hardened animal rights activist.

Michael Feinberg: Exactly.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, he’s, all about the geese.

Michael Feinberg: Exactly. It's curious that you use the word rule because that implies a level of predictability and regularity that I do not think is present in these decisions. I really think it comes down to if you became an assistant director or an a executive assistant director or a special agent in charge, or an assistant director in charge. And I realize a lot of your listeners are gonna have no idea what these titles mean. So let's just suffice to say they are very senior positions within FBI leadership both in the field or–

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. If you ascended to middle upper management in the Chris Wray or Jim Comey eras.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. You, you have a target on your back. A lot of those people retired because they knew this was coming. There was a flood of individuals who left shortly before or the weekend before, in some cases, January 20th. You know, they're slowly putting all those people out to pasture before they want to go, and they're being very careful about how they're doing it. They're not firing anybody.

But you know, when you become an FBI agent, you sign a mobility agreement. And they are taking people who have established their lives and their families' lives in Washington, D.C. and, or in a field office somewhere in the else in the country, and they're essentially telling them, they'll tell 'em on a Friday afternoon, you can retire by Monday, or you can get moved involuntarily to Huntsville, Alabama, which is where the bureau maintains a campus.

They're doing this largely to people who are pension eligible, so they have an incentive to go willingly and not put up a fight in a manner that may endanger their retirement plans.

Benjamin Wittes: So, what, that's not what happened to you. You're not retirement eligible.

Michael Feinberg: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: That whole not quite 16 years, you need the 20 years to be retirement eligible. I think you need to be a few years older than you are.

Michael Feinberg: You, you need to be over 50 and have had at least 20 years of service as a special agent.

Benjamin Wittes: Right? And so. Apparently being friends with Pete is worse than being merely somebody who ascended to their position under the ancien regime. What was the demand on Mike Feinberg?

Michael Feinberg: So there, there were a series of phone calls with my special agent in charge. I've already relayed the first one. I tell her what my relationship is with Pete. She relays it to the deputy director. She calls me back a couple of hours later and says he's not satisfied with that explanation. He's gonna have a meeting with Patel next week to decide what to do with you, whatever that means.

Benjamin Wittes: Patel being FBI director–

Michael Feinberg: The director.

Benjamin Wittes: – Kash Patel, famed children's book author.

Michael Feinberg: Yes. Three time children's book author. And you know, after that second phone call where she informs me that they're gonna have a meeting about me next week, I'm sufficiently alarmed that it's probably time to cut the workout short and go home and fill my wife and family in on what's happening, because in some form or fashion, it is very clear that our world is going to change drastically professionally, personally, financially, what have you.

Benjamin Wittes: So you go home. You fill in your wife–

Michael Feinberg: Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: –who happens to be seven and a half months pregnant?

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, I, maybe seven at that point. Yes. She's a very pregnant person at that point.

Benjamin Wittes: And clearly what should happen here is you get a phone call that says, nevermind we don't regulate social relationships. We'll call you if there's any leak questions, right? That's, that's what would normally happen.

Michael Feinberg: I guess, but we are so far from normal at this point in the FBI, even when I was still there on that May afternoon, that I have no expectation anything like you just described is going to happen to me.

Benjamin Wittes: So what did happen?

Michael Feinberg: So I fill my wife in on what's happening and I talk to some other senior executives who I know I could trust and try and get an idea of what's going on here. And what I'm told by all of them is that this is now just par for the course. This is the sort of thing that the seventh floor is focused on

Benjamin Wittes: Loyalty tests and we get to regulate your social relationships.

Michael Feinberg: I don't know if they're doing that for other people, but loyalty tests and ideological purity tests seem to be pretty par for the course these days. So, so I go home, I explain this to my wife, I, I explain it to other members of my family and not my immediate family, just, you know, parents, in-laws, stuff like that.

And I get another phone call a few hours later and it's from my special agent in charge who is calling apparently to tell me if I want to use it the employee assistance program is available to me, which I guess was kind of her, but I've been involved in the employee assistance program is one of the peers for other employees for the better part of a decade. I'm well familiar with it and don't need her to tell me. And she knows this, so I don't actually know why she's calling, but at this point I've sort of regained my self composure and am trying to view what's happening through me with as dispassionate lens as possible.

So, so before we get off the phone, I just say to her, I'm like, look, Dominique, I love this job. I care deeply about it. I also have a child coming into my life in two months. I need to have some idea at what I'm actually looking at here, what is on the table for me, because I'm pretty confused and befuddled by this whole situation and why somebody would possibly care that I have a friendship with somebody outside the bureau, regardless of their political leanings.

Benjamin Wittes: And what did she say?

Michael Feinberg: She said, all right, I'll be brutally honest with you, those promotions you're in for are not going to happen. You should prepare to actually be demoted, and you're probably going to be called up to D.C. for a polygraph or series of polygraphs about the nature of your relationship with Pete.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so this raises so many questions I don't even know where to start. First of all, can they just demote you without a reason?

Michael Feinberg: So they're actually being pretty clever about how they're doing this. And one of the things that led to my decision to ultimately resign, which I presume we'll get into shortly, is that I know how they've handled this with other people who are also senior leaders.

Benjamin Wittes: And how do they do it?

Michael Feinberg: What they're doing is they're not actually taking any personnel action that results in a decrease in pay or any sort of denigration of your GS level. They're just removing you from leadership positions.

Giving you a made up role at the same pay scale in another division or another part of headquarters and isolating you. I have friends who are in this situation who go days if not weeks, without ever getting an email or a phone call. They sit in a room and twiddle their thumbs and.

And, and to be clear, I should this as well, if you get removed as an ASAC, you know, in a small field office where one of those positions cannot be made up, there's a good chance they're taking advantage of that mobility agreement and moving you to another office.

Benjamin Wittes: So what were you realistically expecting if you stayed?

Michael Feinberg: Probably a transfer to Huntsville, to a GS-14 or -13 position, if, if they decided to demote me. If not, they would create some made up job somewhere else where I would just be bored to death until I voluntarily left.

Benjamin Wittes: And did you have a sense from your SAC that this bothered her? And, you know, she said brutally honest that can mean a number of different things. It can mean like, I'm really sorry to be the bearer of bad news this is outta my hands, you have my moral support and sympathy, or it can mean you're fucking on your own guy. What did you take her posture toward it to signify, or do you know?

Michael Feinberg: Do you mind if I answer that in a somewhat roundabout way?

Benjamin Wittes: By all means.

Michael Feinberg: So I was an assistant special agent in charge. I was a unit chief at one point. I was a field supervisor over a squad at one point. In every single one of those roles, I eventually had to notify somebody that they were under investigation for a violation of FBI policies, or a personnel action was being taken against them or they were being disciplined for some reason or another.

In other words, I pretty frequently had to give people news they didn't want to hear. Whatever the person had done though, they were a human being, usually with a family, usually with financial concerns, usually with childcare issues, a mortgage, what have you. I always made it a point to not softened the blow per se, I never sugarcoated anything that I had to tell anybody that was gonna materially affect them in a negative way.

But I tried to treat them as a human being and let them know I was here for them to talk to if they needed to vent about the situation. I understood this was gonna cause difficulties beyond just the office for them. I would usually offer to help out however I could. Whether it's putting them in touch with people who had been through similar situations before, helping them figure out childcare options, if their schedule was being thrown awry.

You know, you, you recognize that the person on the other side of the conversation is a human being with a life outside the office whose world is about to get severely rocked.

I got none of that from my special agent in charge. I got a, I won't say callous, but I will say a very matter of fact recitation about what was occurring and what I could expect to happen with me. There was not a lot of compassion or empathy in the delivery of the news.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so before we get to your resignation, I wanna, I wanna take the point of view of a skeptic for purposes of argument and narrative. So somebody's gonna write me and say, Mike Feinberg represents exactly the deep state operative that this administration promised to fight against.

He is hanging out with Pete Strzok, who's a, a, you know, the creator of the Russia hoax, he's eating at French restaurants and reading Proust and watching Ingmar Bergman movies. He speaks Chinese, which is, you know, suspect. And he's a lefty government bureaucrat of precisely the type that Donald Trump told you he didn't want in government. Good riddance, what's the problem?

So first of all, tell me a little bit about your politics and your political history.

Michael Feinberg: This is, so, I, I have a bit of discomfort about doing this because I've always strived to be an apolitical civil servant.

It's a particular point of pride for me that, for example, I went out to lunch with somebody I used to supervise just two weeks ago who was aware of what had happened to me, and he was a little amazed because he said it was sort of a sport in the office for us to try and guess your political beliefs, and none of us ever could.

Now that I am out of the office, I was a little more open with him. And when he said, we kind of assumed you leaned right on 70 to 80% of issues and probably leaned left on 20 to 30. And I told him that that's probably correct. I've never been a particularly political or ideological person, but to the extent that I have ever been a member of an organization that has political leanings those organizations have been invariably conservative.

Benjamin Wittes: So what, what organization were you associated with in law school?

Michael Feinberg: I was the vice president of Northwestern University's Federalist Society chapter.

Benjamin Wittes: And whom did you clerk for?

Michael Feinberg: I was a summer clerk with the Institute for Justice, which is a conservative, libertarian-leaning public interest law firm. Most of whose business is trying to reduce business regulations at the state and local level.

Benjamin Wittes: That was used to be run by Clint Bolick, who's now a Supreme Court Justice in Arizona. Right?

Michael Feinberg: Correct, correct.

Benjamin Wittes: And sort of famed, famed conservative.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, famed conservative–

Benjamin Wittes: Or libertarian.

Michael Feinberg: –who I think the only book published about him, I think it grouped him with Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. These are not milquetoast conservatives. These are not RINOs.

Benjamin Wittes: But you don't consider yourself a conservative particularly, right? You consider yourself an apolitical and kind of public service oriented. Is that fair?

Michael Feinberg: I'd push back gently on that a little bit. I, I would say professionally I was 100% apolitical. I don't think there is a single agent, analyst, or professional staff member that I ever supervised who would be able to tell you what my political beliefs are, whom I've ever voted for.

Benjamin Wittes: But you certainly weren't in there as a political operative of the left, right?

Michael Feinberg: No, I, I joined the FBI because I believe in public service. I deeply believe in public service, and look, but the intellectual ecosystem in which I was brought up, when I think of the writers who really shaped how I view the world, it's people like Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott. The magazines I read in my formative years as a college student and a young adult, I subscribed to the Claremont Review of Books. I read the New Criterion. You know, I also subscribed to other magazines just to get other points of view

Benjamin Wittes:  But, but you grew up in a conservative-ish milieu?

Michael Feinberg: I don't know that I'd say I grew up in a conservative-ish milieu. I mean, I was a liberal arts student and they're, you know, with the exception of maybe Hillsdale, I'm unaware of a university that leans right. I had a very common conservative reaction to a liberal milieu.

Benjamin Wittes: Fair.

Michael Feinberg: I saw what I thought then and still consider very sloppy thinking among a lot of my peers that led them to positions I didn't think were in intellectually defensible. And as a result, I, I became pretty conservative,

Benjamin Wittes: but it's fair to say, I'm just trying to track our, our skeptics.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Logic here. Speaking of sloppy thinking that to the extent it's okay, he's friends with Pete, he's a liberal bureaucrat in, in the deep state and he is, you know, probably part of this kind of fifth column of resistance. It's fair to say A, that you're, you're friends with Pete that was never a secret. And so what?

Number two, to the extent that you're drawing political conclusions from that, that you're some kind of, you know, liberal activist within the bureaucracy, that's wrong.

Michael Feinberg: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: And number three, to the extent that there's any suggestion that there's anything onward in your behavior as an agent or with respect to Pete in particular, that that's, you know, simply innuendo and nothing else? Is that?

Michael Feinberg: That's completely correct.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. So tell us about your resignation.

Michael Feinberg: So after the last call from my special agent in charge where she informed me that I would not be getting any promotions, that I would probably get demoted and that I was gonna be the form of some sort of polygraph or internal review, I talked to a number of employment lawyers. And the general consensus, and I talked to people across the board. I talked to individuals from white shoe, big law firms, I talked to solo practitioners, I spoke to individuals very familiar with these issues in civil litigation and individuals who were very familiar with them in the context of federal government employment.

And the consensus from everybody was, I could fight this. And I would probably win. What they were threatening to do is blatantly illegal, but I was also cautioned by everybody, and this is something I just know from having been in government for most of my adult life, that it would've turned me into a very bitter, aggrieved, frustrated, and angry person.

And anybody who knows the federal government knows that they can make your life miserable in a way that really walks the line where they don't create anything formally actionable. And the sort of person that all that would make me become, it's not who my wife needs during the third trimester of a high-risk pregnancy. It is certainly not who my son is going to need during the first few years of his life. And I decided, you know, the risk of sounding a little bit glib to quote the Rolling Stones, that it was time to walk before they made me run.

Benjamin Wittes: You left a brief, but very powerful letter of resignation that described both your own experience but also a larger climate. Tell us about that latter part of the letter.

Michael Feinberg: In the legal profession, I was an attorney before I became an FBI agent, In the context of torts, personal injuries, we talk about proximate cause and cause and fact. In other words, what are the individual circumstances and incidents that create a situation as being possible to occur?

That's the proximate cause and then what's the actual catalyst for the injury? That's the cause and fact. What they were threatening to do to me was the cause and fact, but there had been a head of steam building that made me uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on in the FBI in the previous five or six months anyway.

I had resolved with respect to the things that were making me uncomfortable to stay as long as humanly possible, do what I could to write them down, and protect the people whom I supervised, and hopefully at a later date be able to build the Bureau back into the organization that I knew and loved for the 15 years prior.

The issues that I'm referring to are really matters that have made the bureau less effective as a mechanism to protect American lives and interests, that are going to cause the public to question our integrity, and what I saw as the political weaponization of the bureau to a degree I would not have thought possible before it actually occurred.

Benjamin Wittes: Should the public question the integrity of the FBI at this point?

Michael Feinberg: I, that's a difficult question for me to answer. I think the public should question the statements and shadings of fact that come from the senior most executives of the FBI, namely the director and the deputy director. I think the public should know that there is still a workforce of line agents and analysts and professional staff who take their oath incredibly seriously and will do the right thing if pushed against a wall, but their numbers are gonna dwindle over the next few years.

And I worry that the people who are gonna be put through Quantico and go through their probationary period as new agents under this administration, and to be clear, when I'm talking about this administration, I'm talking specifically about Patel and Bongino, I'm not talking about the executive branch at large.

The agents who are gonna come of age under this administration are gonna have a very skewed view of how the FBI is supposed to function. And I really worry about what that is gonna do to the long-term integrity and effectiveness of the organization.

Benjamin Wittes: What comes next for you? You've quit without retirement and your disreputable friendships are, are, are not of the sort that readily create great job opportunities for former agents. You know, Pete Strzok, doesn't run a, a multinational corporation that needs a director of security of the sort that former FBI agents tend to wanna be. What, what, what do you do now if you're former, former China hand, Mike Feinberg, who's been PNG-ed by by the administration.

Michael Feinberg: So the smart move financially in terms of job security would be to go work for a clear defense contractor or a security consultancy or a tech company that faces counterintelligence issues on a daily basis, just in the course of their business.

We haven't really talked about my prior career that much. I don't wanna sound like I'm over-inflating what I did, but I've had some pretty phenomenal very public successes in the counterintelligence realm, particularly–

Benjamin Wittes: You're the guy behind the Huawei indictment.

Michael Feinberg: As well as a number of other relatively public and impactful prosecutions of Chinese entities and Chinese intelligence officers and their agents.

Benjamin Wittes: So that would be the smart move. You say that as though there's, there's a but coming.

Michael Feinberg: There is, there is.

Look, the smart move when I was 30 would've been to work in the big law white shoe firm world where I would've made in my first couple years what I made in my last year as an FBI agent, I was motivated to eschew any thoughts of the private sector because I really do have a firm belief in public service and a profound dedication to the national security of the United States and to the rule of law as it exists under our Constitution. The main venue I had for protecting those two things has been taken away from me.

So I would like to continue them in any way I can from the outside, which means I am hopefully going to devote the rest of my professional life to researching and writing and advocating for United States national security, particularly with respect to the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army. And to also write about rule of law issues and how constitutional limitations should and should not provide guardrails or limits on intelligence collection in law enforcement.

Benjamin Wittes: One of your cases involved the seizure of the largest cache of homemade explosives ever seized by the FBI.

Michael Feinberg: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: Over a weekend, you got to blow it up. And I just wanna know, was it super fun, super cool, and super badass to blow up a giant cache of homemade explosives? Or, or was it not as cool as it sounds?

Michael Feinberg: Okay. So, so, so it was pretty awesome. But I do want, again, I'm gonna qualify my answer. I was the ASAC over that case. I was not the lead investigator. There was–

Benjamin Wittes: So you didn't get to actually get to-

Michael Feinberg: No, I got to press the button at one point. But this was a lot of IEDs and a lot of precursor chemicals and it could not be blown up all at once because of the sheer volume. So suffice to say everybody who played an integral part in the in investigation or the case or its management, got to take a turn blowing up some portion of it.

Benjamin Wittes: Because it was like everybody wanted to be in on this party.

Michael Feinberg: It was like an, it was like an eight hour process of disposing of this stuff. Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Mike Feinberg as my little tiny cannon would say. Boom, you're a great American. Welcome to the other side. There's lots of public service to do on this side. For those who do not know this already, Mike will be joining Lawfare in September as our next public service fellow.

You will be hearing from him a lot. He's got a lot to say about the bureau, about the rule of law, about the Chinese Communist Party and its efforts against the United States, and again, about a whole lot of other stuff too. Mike, we'll be hearing a lot more from you. Welcome to the Lawfare Clubhouse.

Michael Feinberg: Thank you.

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