Inside the FBI’s Morale Crisis

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, pushed out for not upholding President Trump’s agenda. That’s what several former FBI officials say got them forced out of the Bureau. Under Trump loyalist director Kash Patel, the FBI has seen dozens of employees purged to allegedly root out political bias. One of them is Jacqueline Maguire, who served for 25 years and she joins Michel Martin now to explain why she left and how changes within the FBI are making the U.S. less safe.

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Christian. Jacqueline Maguire, thank you so much for talking with us.

JACQUELINE MAGUIRE: Thank you.

MARTIN: You spent some 25 years at the FBI, you served in leadership roles that included Special Agent in Charge of the Philadelphia Field Office and Executive Assistant director of the Science and technology brands. Before we get into the reason that we invited you to speak with us today, your sort of your current role and relationship with the FBI. I did wanna ask is there something at the bureau in your service that you’re particularly proud of?

MAGUIRE: Oh, just being an agent and being able to, you know, serve the public. I don’t think any FBI agent forgets their graduation day from Quantico. It is a special day. I still get chills thinking about it. I had, you know, my family there, and to take the oath of office, you take the oath of office on your first day at the academy, you get sworn in, but then you do it again. Most often the director of the FBI at the time is at graduation and he swears in the new class of FBI agents. And you take your oath to swear allegiance to the Constitution. So I think that’s just as, as long as my career was and as many opportunities and experiences I was fortunate to have, I would go back to the very beginning and say I’m just most proud to have become an FBI agent.

MARTIN: And you swear an oath to the Constitution, right? Not to a particular administration, not to a particular figure.

MAGUIRE: Yes. I think you may have picked up on my emphasizing the oath to the Constitution to swear allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. In my career, I served under, i think it’s five different presidential administrations, both Republican and Democratic administrations. And it didn’t matter who was in the White House at the time, it didn’t matter, you know, what administration was in place. We serve the American public and we uphold the mission of the FBI.

MARTIN: And so now you have decided to become part of a newly launched FBI Support Network. What is this new organization?

MAGUIRE: this new FBI support network, which comes under the umbrella of the Justice Connection is to really provide resources based on what is going on in our world, in our country right now.

So the Justice Connection is an organization that was set up in January of 2025. When the new administration came in. The Trump administration came in and started firing and forcing people out in the Department of Justice. So this group, the Justice Connection was formed and it’s made up of former Department of Justice officials. And they were providing resources since that time, since January of 2025 to people who had been forced out. And that included FBI personnel. And the resources include legal resources, pro bono representation, mental health resources, career resources, and also just that general support to make sure with all that was going on, that they were not alone.

But because of everything that has happened over the past year and everything that’s happened at the FBI – the FBI has been, I think, the agency that has been impacted the most by the actions of the Trump administration. And we realized that the FBI really needed its own dedicated group under Justice Connection. So that’s where the FBI support network has come from.

MARTIN: You served through five presidential administrations. including President Trump’s first term. What is different about this moment than in previous administrations that you’ve served under?

MAGUIRE: There are always different priorities of new presidential administrations and different focuses, and that’s okay. I think the difference now is that really the guardrails have come down. I think this current administration is no holds bar on taking action without any sense of consequences. Not consequences for people, because those are, that’s happening. People are personally affected by this. But the consequences for the mission and the work of the FBI, the consequences honestly to the American people and to our national security and to our safety overall.

Because again, the mission of the FBI is to protect the American public and uphold the US Constitution. And the actions that this administration and the current FBI leadership are taking really distract. And the FBI is supposed to be and needs to be nonpartisan, apolitical. People need to be focused on investigations no matter where the facts lead. And there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t like where the facts lead, but that’s okay. That’s showing that we’re doing our job correctly because it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, we want it to be a fair outcome. And now I think that things have been turned upside down. And –

MARTIN: Give an example, give an example of why you say that.

MAGUIRE: An example I think is using the power of the FBI, its investigative power to go after those who are disliked or those who have partaken in activities that this administration dislikes. So you have folks in the FBI agent, analyst or professional staff who swore an oath to uphold the constitution. They have conducted investigations that have been approved at higher levels. They were assigned those investigations. They took action that was approved by the courts and now they’re being fired. They’re being, you know, acted against by people who are really betraying the same oath.

MARTIN: So people are fired because they were assigned to investigations. Presumably the President Trump is one of the people that they investigated. And because your, your contention and, and that of others part of this group is that, that because they were assigned a task and they fulfilled that task, they are now being retaliated against for doing a task to which they were assigned.

MAGUIRE: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. We could look at a number of personnel who’ve been fired over the past year, whether it’s prosecutors at the Department of Justice or agents, analysts and professional staff in the FBI. That’s a great example of the investigations of President Trump and those people because of their participation in those investigations. And at times, even because their rumored participation in those investigations they’ve been fired and they have been retaliated against merely for just doing their job.

MARTIN: In early 2025, you were among a group of other senior executives who were pushed out of the bureau. What did you ever get a rationale for – like, what was the stated rationale?

MAGUIRE: That is exactly the question I asked when we were told at the end of January, 2025 that we would be fired if we did not resign or retire from the Bureau within a few days. And the response was that we could not be trusted to uphold the president’s agenda.

MARTIN: Agenda, not constitutional requirements, but the president’s agenda. You were specifically told you could not be trusted to uphold the President’s agenda. How do you respond to that? And is there any legal recourse to that? I mean, does the FBI agents have civil service protections? I mean, is it, is there any process required or were, were you at a level where you’re essentially considered at will, once you’re a senior executive, are you considered a political appointee?

MAGUIRE: I was not a political appointee. I was a career public servant. I was a career FBI official that served for 25 years, as were all of my colleagues. So those are all great questions. You know, the response at that time was honestly shock. Because we had never seen anything like this. We had seen it being going on the previous few days at the Department of Justice where attorneys were being fired. But I think the shock of that being, the answer of the reason why, that we couldn’t carry out a President’s agenda. And my response right away was, I don’t carry out anyone’s agenda. I carry out the US Constitution. I carry out the mission of the FBI. And again, I wanna be very clear. Priorities change, right? Focuses change. Threats change over the years. We saw that, we saw that way back at the beginning of my career after 9/11 and the refocus of the FBI on National Security and counter-Terrorism. But those weren’t agendas. Those things were done for the safety of the American public.

MARTIN: You wrote an essay for for the New York Times back in March. You wrote that the Bureau remains strong because of the people who serve in it, even as many experienced employees have left. Do you know how many people have left? I know that it has, it’s been estimated that some like 10,000 lawyers in federal service have left, some people in the FBI service are also lawyers. Do you have a sense of how many FBI agents have left?

MAGUIRE: I do have a sense from the statistics that are put out by the Office of Personal Management, OPM, and roughly, I believe the numbers are about 1,100. I don’t have exact number in front of me, but I think about 1,100 agents have left over the past year. Now that includes, you know, retirements but it also includes people who were fired. It includes people who were forced out like myself. And it includes people who left because they could not tolerate and could not continue on in that situation and under the leadership of the current administration. I know that of that number, I believe it’s about 400 of those people were in supervisory positions. So people like myself as executives, people who were supervisors of squads or supervisors at headquarters divisions. So I think the impact has to be assessed not only by sheer numbers, but also the experience. I believe that the average number of years that those people who left last year had was 21 years. 21 years of service in the FBI, 21 years of experience working against the threats that the FBI addresses.

MARTIN: One of the things that occurs to me when I travel is that many people are sort of insulated from the consequences of a lot of the things that we talk about on this program and other news programs. Is there something you could point to that can demonstrate to the public what the consequence of losing these experienced people actually can be?

MAGUIRE: Sure. I think the consequence is distraction from our major threats.

And I think a perfect example, we went to war with Iran and right around that time, and I mentioned this in my piece in the New York Times, the current director fired people who were working the Iran threat in Washington, DC. And that is concerning that there is no consideration of the impact. There is no justification for these actions being taken. So my fear is that these distractions, these actions are really going to impact the FBI’s mission and then impact the safety of the country.

MARTIN: I do wanna mention that we did approach the FBI to ask their response to the creation of the FBI Support Network. We do know that they received our request, but as you and I are speaking now, they have not offered any response.

To this whole question of weaponization. The current director of the FBI Kash Patel repeats, has repeatedly argued that the bureau needs to rebuild public trust and address what he considers misconduct and bias within the agency. In fact, their argument is that people like him, and people like in the president’s order, his supporters, they have been the targets of the weaponization of law enforcement assets. I they are the victims, and that all they’re doing now is addressing what they consider misconduct directed toward them. And I just don’t know, how do you answer that?

MAGUIRE: I guess we could say that both beauty and weaponization are in the eye of the beholder these days, right? Because the weaponization argument, you know, again, 25 years in the FBI, I never experienced weaponization. The first time – and I’ve said it over the past year – the first time I believed I experienced politicization or weaponization in my job was at the end of January, 2025 when things became political. So I think there is a lot of subjectiveness in the view of what is so-called alleged weaponization.

You know, over time and over history, we could look back and yes, there have been instances, right, where people were wronged by the criminal justice system. And those people should be afforded the opportunity to clear their names, to, you know, right those wrongs. Luckily, I think we could say, while significant and impactful on our history those cases are not the majority. And we can’t just go around calling cases that we don’t like because they were, you know targeted, they were targeting friends of ours. You know, we can’t call those weaponized cases. I think the best way to avoid that is let the FBI be apolitical, let the FBI do their job to follow the law, follow the facts without fear or favor. And that is exactly what we’re seeing right now. The fear of employees, of not knowing if what they’re going to do is going to be the right thing or the wrong thing in Kash Patel or anyone else in the administration’s eyes. We have to do that without favor, without favoring one side or another.

MARTIN: Is there anything in the current moment that gives you any hope or confidence that the issues that you are raising will be addressed in any way?

MAGUIRE: I haven’t given up hope. And, and two examples of that I haven’t given up hope, because I know the career public servants and the FBI, I know the men and women of the FBI will continue their job and continue to carry out the mission to the best of their ability, despite the leadership or lack of leadership that they have now. And I think second is the FBI Support Network and groups like that, that are showing the employees who are having to face some tough choices or have been dismissed from the roles of the FBI due to no wrong of their own. But I think it gives me hope to see my former colleagues come together to provide the resources. to those personnel, to talk about the importance of the FBI’s work and the negative impact of the actions of this administration. Call those out. And since it was launched earlier this week, the response has been amazing both by people who want to provide support and also, honestly, by people who need the support, who say, you know what, whether they’re in or out of the bureau, I need some help. So we are happy to provide those resources.

MARTIN: So you mentioned that the FBI support network is receiving lots of it’s, you, you’ve gotten lots of positive feedback and support from the public. I was curious about current and former agents. What kinds of questions or queries are you getting from them? Are there some common themes that you’re hearing?

MAGUIRE: Sure. the calls from those who are in the FBI, from those who are recently, you know, dismissed from the FBI really are indicative of the need for this support network, of the need for the resources that the network is providing. Those resources span from legal resources, pro bono representation, legal advice, mental health resources, honestly, you know. I think those are very important and we can overlook the emotional toll that this could take on people. And then also career resources, you know, what is the next steps for me from someone who is looking to leave the FBI or, or has left, been forced out of the FBI? So I think, you know, across the board, those resources, we identified the need for those resources, seeing the great work of the Justice Connection over the past year, and those are the resources that are being asked for.

MARTIN: Jacqueline Maguire, thank you so much for talking with me.

MAGUIRE: Thank you very much.