Trump administration moving to fire FBI agents involved in investigations of Trump, AP sources say

WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials are moving to fire at least some of the FBI agents engaged in investigations involving President Donald Trump, two people familiar with the plans said Friday.

It was not clear how many agents might be affected, though scores of investigators were involved in various inquiries touching Trump. Officials acting at the direction of the administration have been working to identify individual employees who participated in politically sensitive investigations for possible termination, said the people who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. attorneys were instructed on a call this week to provide the names of prosecutors and agents who had any involvement in the hundreds of cases against the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was not made clear on the call why the names were needed, said the person, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Any mass firings would be a major blow to the historic independence from the White House of the nation's premier federal law enforcement agency and would reflect Trump's persistent resolve to bend the law enforcement and intelligence community to his will. It would be part of a startling pattern of retribution waged on federal government employees, following the forced ousters of a group of senior FBI executives earlier this week as well as a mass firing by the Justice Department of prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith's team who investigated Trump.

The FBI Agents Association called the planned firings ''outrageous actions by acting officials are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents.''

''Dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau's ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure,'' the association said in a statement.

It was not immediately clear what recourse any fired agent might take, but the bureau has a well-defined process for terminations and any abrupt action that bypasses the protocol could presumably open the door to a legal challenge.

When pressed during his confirmation hearing Thursday, Trump's pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, said he was not aware of any plans to terminate or otherwise punish FBI employees who were involved in the Trump investigations. Patel said if he was confirmed he would follow the FBI's internal review processes for taking action against employees.

Asked by Democratic Sen. Cory Booker whether he would reverse any decisions before his confirmation that don't follow that standard process, Patel said, ''I don't know what's going on right now over there, but I'm committed to you, senator, and your colleagues, that I will honor the due process of the FBI.''

Before he was nominated for the director's position, Patel had remarked on at least one podcast appearance about the existence of what he called anti-Trump ''conspirators'' in the government and news media.

Trump has for years expressed fury at the FBI and Justice Department over investigations that shadowed his presidency, including an inquiry into ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign, and continued over the last four years. He fired one FBI director, James Comey, amid the Russia investigation and then replaced his second, Christopher Wray, just weeks after winning election this past November.

Asked at the White House on Friday if he had anything to do with the scrutiny of the agents, he said: ''No, but we have some very bad people over there. It was weaponized at a level that nobody's never seen before. They came after a lot of people — like me – but they came after a lot of people.''

He added, "If they fired some people over there, that's a good thing, because they were very bad.''

The FBI and Smith's team investigated Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Both of those cases resulted in indictments that were withdrawn after Trump's November presidential win because of longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the federal prosecution of a sitting president.

The Justice Department also brought charges against more than 1,500 Trump supporters in connection with the Capitol riot, though Trump on his first day in office granted clemency to all of them — including the ones convicted of violent crimes — through pardons, sentence commutations and dismissals of indictments.

This week, the Justice Department fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Smith investigations, and a group of senior FBI executives — including several executive assistant directors and leaders of big-city field offices — were told to either resign or retire or be fired Monday.

Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.

The firings would be done over the will of the acting FBI director Brian Driscoll, who has indicated that he objects to the idea, the people said.

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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Jim Mustian contributed to this report.