Washington — The FBI’s investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the largest criminal investigation in the agency’s history, has given way to potentially its largest crisis.
Last week, Trump allies at the Justice Department ordered the FBI to send a questionnaire nationwide to identify personnel who investigated Jan. 6 and make a list for leadership to review. The move came after President Trump pardoned about 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants immediately after taking office.
The FBI subsequently turned over a list of about 5,000 individuals, which included information such as employee ID numbers and titles.
However, lawsuits filed by two groups of anonymous FBI agents resulted in a federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Thursday temporarily blocking the Justice Department from disclosing information about those agents to any other federal entity or outside group until further arguments are heard in the case.
“We just have a lot of unknowns, and it feels like no one has our backs,” said one of the agents on that list, who spoke to CBS News Thursday on condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation from the Justice Department’s new leadership.
“Personally, I’ve lost sleep over this,” said the agent, who investigated multiple Jan. 6 cases.
The agent said filling out the questionnaire was “demoralizing,” and that they were left feeling “defeated.”
“We all feel defeated, and for not, and really for nothing,” the agent added.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove issued the initial directive in a Jan. 31 memo. And in a follow-up letter to FBI employees Wednesday, Bove wrote that “no FBI employee who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner with respect to the January 6 investigations is at risk of termination or other penalties.”
But the scrutiny and storm cloud hovering over these FBI employees and their work on cases that yielded more than 1,000 guilty pleas and a 100% conviction rate in jury trials sends a chilling message, the agent warned.
The agent also wondered whether fellow agents, moving forward, would be “allowed to pick and choose” their investigations based on what they feel “comfortable” with.
When asked if the Trump administration’s demand for the list might scare off agents from taking certain cases in the future, they responded, “Absolutely.”
“I mean, we’re all humans,” the agent said.
Furthermore, agents who testified or signed their names to public court documents worry about retaliation from riot defendants or their sympathizers.
“It’s almost as if these defendants that were all pardoned have been put on a pedestal of being more patriotic and more loyal to this country than the men and women who go out every single day, away from their families, and put their lives on the line,” the agent said.
The FBI Agents Association, which represents thousands of active and retired agents, said that an agent who was investigating the deadly midair collision near Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C., was briefly pulled off that response in order to fill out the questionnaire, and then returned to the crash site.
