Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency, his administration has removed a number of career officials from the Justice Department and some law enforcement agencies. One of those forced out is David Sundberg, a 20-year FBI veteran who once led the Washington field office and oversaw the Jan. 6 investigation. Sundberg says the Bureau under Director Kash Patel has been weakened by those personnel decisions.
Sundberg told reporters that capabilities have been diminished, citing fewer personnel and a shrinking reservoir of institutional knowledge. He said agents and analysts who spent years developing subject-matter expertise have been dismissed without due process after being tied to cases the director views as politically inconvenient. That, he warned, erodes the FBI’s connections with the broader intelligence community.
Line agents do not pick their assignments, Sundberg emphasized. Over long careers they accumulate expertise on national security threats and are expected to follow lawful orders. Removing those employees, he said, takes away practitioners who knew how to detect and interdict threats before they reached U.S. soil.
Sundberg expressed particular concern about counterintelligence and Middle East threats at a time of heightened tensions with Iran. He said the Bureau has lost analysts and agents who had both the technical knowledge and the external partnerships needed to track espionage, cyber activity, and other attempts to harm U.S. interests.
On whether the purge makes the country less safe, Sundberg replied that the FBI now has fewer people capable of finding threats as far from U.S. borders as possible. He described Iran as a persistent counterintelligence threat with significant cyber capabilities and noted the importance of preserving the FBI’s ability to respond across the intelligence community.
Sundberg said many of those removed had worked on matters that scrutinized actions by the president. He argued that public corruption inquiries have long been a core part of FBI work, applied without regard to party, and that agents expect to conduct that work without political interference.
Leadership changes at the top, he added, ripple through field offices and affect morale. Sundberg said political considerations must be kept out of the Bureau to maintain continuity in criminal and national security investigations. When investigators and analysts feel vulnerable to reprisal for doing their jobs, it creates two harmful effects: some may fear being assigned to legitimate cases, and others may avoid opening necessary investigations that could be politically awkward.
Sundberg compared current morale unfavorably to the period after President Trump fired Director James Comey, saying morale is worse now because career employees see colleagues dismissed for case assignments. He warned that removals have included analysts whose community-wide ties were crucial, leaving operational gaps at a time of international strain.
A former assistant director in charge of the Washington field office, Sundberg said he is running for Congress but stressed he spoke to highlight the risks of politicizing personnel decisions. He called for insulating investigative work from politics so agents can focus on threats without fear or favor.