Ben Wittes and Michael Feinberg: Breakdown at the FBI

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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

We've got a lawfare double header of sorts in segment two.

Our friend Ben Wittis is back.

But first, he was recently a top deputy in the FBI's Norfolk office.

He resigned after being told he'd be demoted for being friends with someone on the Cash Patel enemies list.

His title had been Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Norfolk National Security and Intelligence Programs.

He had previously worked in other roles, such as a unit chief at the J.

Edgar Hoover building in D.C.

It's Michael Feinberg.

How are you doing, man?

I'm doing well.

Yourself?

Well, I'm still employed.

So I'm doing better than you, I guess.

It seems like.

Yeah, yeah.

And I saw from one of your earlier podcasts that you actually got to go see Oasis kick off their reunion tour.

I saw Oasis's first homecoming show in Manchester and Heaton Park.

It was fucking brilliant.

It was brilliant.

Yeah, I feel bad.

I've been making fun of Oasis on Blue Sky lately, but

that has more to do with the personalities of Liam and Noel.

I've actually, I saw them a few times in their original interview.

They sound as good as ever, man.

I don't know.

Liam's been, I think, I don't know if Liam stopped smoking or what's going on, but they sound great.

Highly recommend.

And you've got free time.

So they're playing all over the world.

Well,

we're having a kid in about two and a half months.

Unfortunately, free time is not really on the agenda for me.

Congrats.

Well, my advice to new parents, nobody tells you this, like three months to nine months is actually a great time to world travel with a child.

No one tells you this because after that, because you know, they, you know, unless you have a, unless you have a cranky child, but most of them at that age just shut up if you just give them a bottle or change the diaper.

Once you get to about a year, you know, they've got minds of their own.

Yeah.

So anyway, so maybe, maybe contemplate that.

We have at least something in common.

Robert Burns, you wrote an article for lawfares that said goodbye to all that about leaving the bureau.

And like one of these insane only in Trump 2.0 stories, you're forced to leave, I guess, because you went to a concert with Pete Strzok, who people might remember from the lovers' texts that Trump liked to mention on the campaign trail from the first Russia investigation.

So I guess that, I guess you were spotted with Pete, and that led to a series of events, which brings you here.

Why don't you just kind of walk us through what happened?

Yeah, so I don't actually quite know how this was brought to the estimable Dan Bongino's attention, but he did handle it with his usual temperance and maturity.

So,

you know, I was at the office on a Saturday and I get a call from my special agent in charge who tells me that it has come to the attention of the deputy director, as she called him.

Deputy Dan, we call him around here.

Yeah, yeah.

It's come to his attention that I have remained friends and remained in contact with Pete Strzok since he left the Bureau.

And

there's nothing false in that.

It's absolutely true.

You know, he and his wife were a guest at my wedding.

We hang out quite a bit.

We talk all the time.

As I said in the piece, largely about the food scene in various cities and mostly about different bands.

Our friendship kicked off when we discovered we were both huge Smiths fans.

It's not exactly the stuff of a deep state conspiracy, more just us showing our.

I don't know.

Morrissey has been getting pretty kooky these days.

So yeah,

he's problematic.

Let's put it that way.

But yeah, so I admitted to being friends with Pete, and

there were a series of more phone calls about it.

And basically, by the end of the day,

Once I had sort of regained my self-composure,

because it was very clear to me that my career was,

my life really was about to change drastically as a result of having a target on my back for Bongino and Patel

I was explicitly told by my special agent in charge that my career was functionally over I was not going to get a promotion for which I was in I needed to prepare for the fact that I would in all likelihood be demoted

and I

also needed to reconcile myself to the fact that I would be called up to DC

in order to submit to a polygraph about the nature of my friendship with Pete, whatever that means.

They explicitly said that to you.

You're going to have to go take a polygraph test like you're going to meet the parents to talk about whether you and Pete were what.

I don't, like, what would even make that happen.

As near as I can tell,

Patel and Bongino really do believe that there is some sort of deep state conspiracy, like something out of a Chesterton novel that is.

I don't think either of them have read any Chesterton.

I'm actually making a point to drop in as many cultural references they would not understand in every interview I do as possible.

But yeah, I think they really do believe that there is some sort of organized deep state resistance to the Trump agenda, which is just quite frankly not true.

And the mere fact that Pete and I get along and are friends was enough that they needed to,

I don't want to be melodramatic and say, ruin my life, but you know, they needed to take away my primary source of income when my wife was seven months into a high-risk pregnancy, make us go through Cobra for insurance, remove the mission and dedication to our country for which I've always been proud of.

You know, it's,

it's weird.

I wish I had a better word for it than that, but.

Lunacy would be maybe one way to start.

Lay the predicate for people a little bit.

Like, what kind of work were you doing?

Yeah, so I was most recently at the Norfolk field office where I was the assistant special agent in charge over the entire national security portfolio.

And for a good part of that time, including the first three or four months of the transition, I was actually

the acting special agent in charge because the former had been promoted.

So it was natural for me to step into the role.

But prior to those 18 months, I've dedicated my entire career to combating the Chinese Communist Party and its efforts to undermine the national security of the United States.

I oversaw a number of very public indictments, which had a material effect, I think, making us safer.

And I worked on a lot of stuff that's still classified that I can't get into,

but

that all ended in a similar place.

I mean, you would think that China Hawks, like yesterday there was the testimony from Mike Waltz, who got downgraded to UN ambassador after the Signal Gate situation.

I mean, like, he's been his whole career being a China hawk.

There are a number of China hawks in the administration.

Like, you would think that there would be a counterbalance of people who are not, who are less concerned about your friendships and more concerned about institutional knowledge against the Chinese.

No, nobody actually cares about that.

No,

there is a complete willingness to jettison any sort of subject matter expertise

from the FBI if the individuals who possess it are political undesirables, friends with political undesirables, or just had the timing misfortune of having been promoted by Chris Ray.

Oh, so you mean like there are people that

just got kind of got caught up in bad timing, bad luck.

Yeah, I mean, if you, if you, you know, within the Bureau, we use the phrase seventh floor as a sort of metonym for all FBI leadership.

Yeah.

And within the first week of the administration, like everybody on the seventh floor was given their walking papers.

I mean, you know, this is reported in the Times and the Post and the Journal.

It's no secret.

Like they just eviscerated

the top line of leadership.

that had all the real institutional knowledge, not just about the threats, but about how best to use the levers of power that the Bureau has.

So like what, I mean, I guess you were in there as recently as what, six weeks ago or something.

Like what,

what is happening now?

Like, what are they?

What are the remaining people working on?

How's the morale?

Like, what's immigration and violent crime largely.

There's a willingness by Patel and Bongino to have the Bureau function essentially as just an augmentation effort for HSI.

For people who don't know what's HSI.

Sorry, Homeland Security Investigations, which is a subset of ICE, which is immigration and customs customs enforcement.

And the FBI is also going on enforcement removal operations.

It's weird.

You know, traditionally,

a cabinet secretary or somebody like the FBI director who is immediately below a cabinet secretary

would try and hold joint loyalty to his or her president, but also the department that he or she ran.

And that second concern is just nowhere in the minds of Bongino and Patel.

So they're doing nothing to protect the jurisdiction and mission of the FBI.

They're just using us to advance the president's

primary political cause, which is the constriction of immigration into the United States.

So,

you know, when I was in Norfolk, national security squads, white-collar squads, squads that handled public corruption, they were eviscerated to

move agents and analytic support from their previous threats to immigration operations and to a lesser extent, South American gang operations.

What does that work actually look like?

If I'm not mistaken, the FBI doesn't really have a history of doing immigration enforcement works.

What are the agents being told?

What does that actually mean they're turning their focus to immigration work?

Yeah, so you're very right about the history and subject matter expertise.

The FBI has actually had Title VIII authorities which would allow them to do immigration enforcement since 2001 when

their powers were sort of put on steroids as a result of the 9-11 attacks.

They never did it because

it made no sense.

Like the FBI is very good.

at complex investigations

of highly coordinated organizations using very complicated statutes like RICO or FISA.

Instead of doing that, you now have massive amounts of agents standing around doing perimeter security, rounding up children and grandmas.

Well, that's something Dan Bagino can understand.

I mean, that's, you know, the RICO cases are complicated.

You know, just being

a mall security officer is something that's like in his, in his wheelhouse.

Yeah, perimeter security is something an agent with like six weeks in the office would normally do on an arrest.

And now you have agents with decades of experience and real subject matter expertise spending a good portion of their day doing it.

So like, what are the practical like effects of that?

I know are people,

I don't want you to get any trouble or anything.

Like, are folks like still doing the other work and just like trying to do it themselves?

Are there major things that are lost?

And if you were to be worried about something, like what would you, you know, what did you think?

There are a couple of areas about which I'm very worried.

You know, on the criminal realm, Maine Justice, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, has been very upfront that

white-collar crime is no longer a priority.

He has said, I think, in public statements, that it harms American businesses to enforce laws on the books.

So that's out the window.

As has been widely reported, DOJ's public integrity section, PIN,

has also been eviscerated by firings and resignations.

And I'm focusing on DOJ rather than FBI resources because

a lot of people don't realize, like, the FBI can't bring criminal cases on its own.

As much as we hate to admit it, we need the help of federal prosecutors.

And if the federal prosecutors are no longer working those violations, the investigators are just running on a hamster wheel.

Like, they're not getting anywhere.

So that area of criminal enforcement is gone.

They're not going to do a lot of right-wing domestic terrorism work.

In fact, they pardoned thousands of people for their role in January 6th.

So that's not getting worked.

And I saw no real concern on the part of FBI senior management, particularly when I was working as acting SAC, to really do anything on the counterintelligence and international terrorism fronts either.

You know, it's heading over the ocean.

You start to think to yourself, you want to make sure you have your affairs in order.

I don't want to get too macabre.

I'm not a scared flyer.

I love,

you know, now that Sean Duffy's in charge, maybe, but

still, there's something about flying over the ocean that makes you want to make sure you have your affairs in order.

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So, the folks that are still there, what is morale like?

I mean, I maybe morale's good because the people that are there are folks that are excited to meet Cash Patel.

I don't know.

I don't know, right?

I did not have fans.

I don't know.

Or maybe there are a bunch of people there who are just trying to keep their head down.

Like, what's the FBI, you know, what's like inside the building, do you think now?

So, I'm happy to answer that, but I got to give two caveats to sort of qualify my answer.

Sure.

First, I still talk to a real lot of people in the FBI.

I mean, it's where I spent the better part of two decades.

But the people with whom I speak and the complete strangers who've reached out to me on various platforms.

Self-selecting.

Yeah, exactly.

Like these are people who, the people who hated what I had to say in law fair are not going to be reaching out to me to express their ire at the seventh floor.

That's caveat number one.

Caveat number two is I think we really need to differentiate between the workforce and the newly appointed senior executives.

The workforce, from everything I am hearing, both directly and secondhand, is miserable.

They joined the FBI out of a real desire to serve their country and protect it from serious threats.

And a lot of them don't feel like they're doing that anymore.

The senior executives are more problematic

because there are some who

think by staying on and accepting promotions, they're acting in the best interests of the FBI.

I disagree with that analysis, which we could get into or gloss over, but there's also a lot of senior executives who see opportunity and they are purposefully promoting people who are not eligible for pensions yet.

So they're over a financial barrel and they can't push back against the administration.

And

I think people who are willing to put put themselves in that situation

are of a different

type than the workforce who really just wants to do their work.

Let us get into it because I was going to ask you: I mean, was there a part of you, right?

Like, you weren't fired, right?

Like, you were threatened with demotion.

Yeah, right.

You were threatened with demotion or, and obviously, your humiliation of having to, whatever, take a polygraph test and talk about what concerts you went to with Pete Strzok.

So, was there a part of you that was like, F these guys, I'm going to stay, make steroid Dan Bungino fly down to Norfolk and fire me, you know, to my face.

And, you know, maybe I should stay in here and do the work.

Yeah, so I did think of that.

There were two reasons I did not pursue that path.

The first is it wouldn't have been an option.

I know a number of people who were targeted the same way I was.

Maybe not for the exact same reason, but there was something in their life outside of the bureau that rubbed the current rulers in the wrong way.

And

when they say demoted, they're being really clever about it.

They're not actually giving them a diminution in pay or a change in GS levels.

They're removing them from leadership positions and putting them in empty offices where they have nothing to do.

So even if I stayed and accepted what was coming my way, I wasn't going to be working on investigations or operations to protect our country.

I was going to be sitting in an empty office, not getting any phone calls or emails.

Number two is

I could have fought this.

I talked to a lot of immigration lawyers in a very condensed time period to figure out whether I had a case.

And everybody agreed that I did.

And I would probably-

why immigration lawyers?

Sorry, employment lawyers.

Yeah.

I was like, all right, were you thinking about fleeing?

Was that just a.

All options are on on the table.

Sorry, employment lawyers.

And

fighting that would have taken years.

It would have made me miserable.

It would have made me a very frustrated, bitter, angry person.

That's not who my wife needs during the third trimester of pregnancy.

And it is absolutely not who my son is going to need during the first few years of his life.

I made,

you know, not to sound maudlin or over-wrenching, but like a really really heartbreaking decision that I had to leave.

And you mentioned, just kind of to put a finer point on it, like, obviously there's been reporting in the Times and about other senior leadership and stuff that I left, but you're, you're, you're just kind of the one that's talking about this the most publicly, right?

I mean, the number of people that have been run out, I think, exceed what is.

in the public domain and what people realize.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah.

I mean, because you have a lot of things happening.

You have the departure of senior executives who are being forced out.

You have people like me who are choosing to resign as a means of escaping untenable situations.

But you also have a really large number of people who

are eligible for retirement, but are still leaving much sooner than they planned.

You know, most agents, because of the

weirdness of the federal employee retirement system,

you're usually eligible to retire around age 50 and you're mandatory at age 57.

You have a real lot of people who are planning to stay till 57 who are now punching out the day they turn 50.

Yeah, I do wonder about that.

Like, I was like, if you're a 50-year-old G-man who's been, you know, who has just decades of experience behind you, serious, not political, right, in any meaningful way.

And you go into a meeting one day and it's podcaster Dan Bongino telling you that you have to, whatever, start doing perimeter security around

a park ice raid.

And you've got to have talked to some people who've been in maybe not that dramatic of a situation, but like that type of situation.

Like,

how do people even process this?

Like, what is the leadership?

Is there any competent person that they have

given power to in order to guard against that?

Are these guys literally reporting to Dan Bongino?

So

it is rarely the case under normal times that a line agent would ever come into contact with the deputy director.

That's changed a little bit under this administration.

But yeah, there's a lot of links in the chain of command between those two who relay these orders to them.

The problem is, if you get high enough in that chain, you're going to be dealing with somebody who is appointed by these people and by definition is willing to work with them and probably

not in a position to push back.

So

you have that as one part of the dynamic.

The other part is like

they are executive branch officers.

Like if the White House, if DOJ wants to prioritize immigration, that's entirely within the bounds of legality and propriety.

That doesn't mean it's smart.

That doesn't mean that they're having the hard discussions about the second and third order consequences of ignoring other violations or the opportunity costs of having agents spend eight hours a day on perimeter security.

So most of the line agents I know

are just keeping their heads down and

doing what they can within the bounds of law and their oath to the Constitution, but hating their lives on a daily basis and feeling like they're not contributing to an important mission.

So you don't have any funny stories for me of Dan Bongino, you know, giving orders in crayon or anything to senior bureau officials?

I mean, none that you don't know.

I mean, Dan Bongino has spent the past week wrapped up in a conspiracy theory involving a child molesting financier who was actually arrested and killed himself during the first Trump administration.

But somehow this has become a deep state conspiracy now involving Comey Obama and Biden.

Like,

we're through the looking glass.

This is Alice in Wonderland.

So when we got back to New Orleans this week, I was informed by my child that the neighborhood cat,

the neighborhood cat, our cat or part-time cat, whatever we're calling Aretha these days, was a little bit grumpy.

And I was like, well, yeah, of course Aretha was a little bit grumpy.

We were gone for 10 days and they.

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They weren't getting their smalls.

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All right, that brings me to two other burning questions I had for you as an expert G-Man, but

I want to lean on your expertise.

We'll do the silly one first with Epstein.

Okay.

So, like, I'm reassessing all of this.

Maybe I'm going a little info wars.

I don't know.

But, you know, the three minutes of missing video, I'm starting to wonder about, but I'm just, I'm just teasing.

But I do wonder when people talk about the files or whatever, you've, you've been in these investigations, maybe not child sex trafficking investigations, but similar investigations.

Like, talk about like, what are people even talking about?

Like, if there was actually a serious, serious effort to review the FBI files about Epstein and kind of release unredacted things that had been redacted before?

Like, what would that even be?

Yeah, so look, anything is possible in the world.

So I could turn out to be totally wrong.

And I just want to admit that up front.

But

investigations don't have like secret vaults and cabinets where we put certain evidence and other evidence goes different places.

And only some people

know about the findings, where other findings are so highly sensitive that only senior executives.

Like,

first of all, if there was something really damaging on a case this size,

it probably would have leaked at this point, just being realistic, not from the FBI, but probably from Maine Justice.

Secondly, like, this is

this is a prime example of why you don't want conspiracy theorists running a really important law enforcement and intelligence gathering operation.

Like

the only thing

that should be guiding what they are putting out or what they are saying is like, what did the witness and victim interviews say?

What do the financial documents we've looked at say?

What do the travel logs say?

I mean, there's some private financial documents.

Like that's the kind of stuff that might be in there that I think is a more realistic quote-unquote conspiracy theories.

Like Trump's friends, donors, Les Wexner or whatever, if it is in there, you know, from paying a lot of money.

And FBI looked into it and they're like, well, I don't know.

Can we invest?

Can we actually indict this guy over this?

It looks bad.

But, you know, maybe that's the kind of thing that would be.

Yeah, but like the number seven FOIA exception, which would normally restrict the release of that sort of information, you know, it's limited to things

that

would A, tip off the subject.

that he or she is being looked at.

Subject's dead.

Epstein's dead.

Yeah.

You know, and the other requirement is it's going to affect an ongoing enforcement action.

And once again, Epstein's dead.

It's possible they're looking at other co-conspirators.

I mean, we know they are at least one, or they're thinking of opening other cases on individuals, but like they can say that without identifying the individuals.

There's just a lot of smoke right now, and I've been in the government long enough to know that when people of

what I will politely call call the intellectual makeup of Dan Bongino see a conspiracy, there's probably not a lot of fire behind that smoke.

Okay.

So that three minute, the three minute video from the prison doesn't have you.

Doesn't have your G-Man, the spice sense to speak.

Yeah.

Three minutes of missing tape.

It's enough time to get in there and gout somebody.

I mean, look, the advice I was given when I joined the bureau very early on and that I passed on to probably every single person I ever supervised, Never assume malevolence where incompetence will suffice.

This is where I go to my normal why I'm against most Trump conspiracy theories.

It's like Trump can't keep a fucking secret.

We know everything about this asshole.

Anyway, all right, here's my last FBI expertise question for you.

When the administration was first starting and all these hires were being made, right?

The cash one was particularly of concern to me for a specific reason, right?

Which is the FBI does have a lot of powers.

Like the FBI can create a lot of problems for people that they're investigating before you get to a grand jury, right?

Like there's investigation, you know, hassling.

And I don't, like, maybe these guys are just too incompetent to do that.

I mean, obviously, you know, Comey's been hassled a little bit.

There have been examples, but like, what, what do you think about that?

Like, as far as concerns about potential, you know, retribution, maybe, I don't know, maybe targeting you or others, you know, with the kind of powers that the FBI has.

What might somebody be concerned about or not concerned about in that realm?

This is actually one of the few things I take some comfort in.

First of all, I don't think Patel or Bongino understand enough about how the FBI works to fully leverage its abilities.

Secondly, a senior appointed political official within the FBI, of which unfortunately there are now more than there ever has been, they can't run an investigation.

You know, like they need a GS10 through 13-level level case agent to actually go out and do stuff.

And I have immense faith in the overwhelming majority of that workforce that they take their oath to the Constitution very seriously.

My worry is that over the three and a half to seven and a half years that

Cash, I'm not going to math, however long Cash Patel is director, because it's a 10-year term,

you know, he's going to have the ability to really influence influence the internal culture of the Bureau in terms of how we train new agents and play a role in terms of what sort of people we hire.

So while right now there is a very strong rule of law culture within the FBI, I do have concerns that that culture may be weakened as we promote people who are willing to work for these clowns and also as we hire people who are not alarmed by what they see going on.

So you're telling me you don't think there's a master plan?

You don't think Cash is like looking at my texts about the Oasis set list and trying to wait for an opportunity?

I don't know.

Am I allowed to ask one silly question?

Of course.

Yeah.

Did they play any of the B-sides?

Like, did you get Aquiesce or the Master Plan?

Of course we got the Master Plan and Aquiesce.

Yeah.

It was almost all the first two records.

They played almost nothing from, so we got a ton of B-sides from the first two records.

Okay.

Almost nothing from the last few records.

Little by little, they played, I forget, maybe like two or three songs.

So we're not on the first two records.

That was perfect.

Those are the two tours I saw them for when I was much younger.

You got to get back out there.

You got two weeks.

I think you can get to Heathrow and then get back in time for that child.

I am never going to stop resenting my son for having a due date the same week that Pulp is reuniting in D.C.

Oh, you can do it.

You can make it to the hospital in time.

I had a friend that was at an LSU game while his child was being born, and he made it to the hospital in time.

It's all good.

You can do it.

Mike Feinbergman, I'm sorry these fuckers are doing this to you.

Thanks.

But, you know, don't let them get you down.

I appreciate your service to the country and let's stay in touch.

All right.

Sounds good.

Have a good one.

Thanks, brother.

Everybody up next, Ben Witta.

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All right, we are back with editor-in-chief.

What is that right?

Yeah, editor-in-chief of Lawfair.

He also writes Dog Shirt Daily on Substack.

It's our old buddy Ben Wittis.

What's happening, man?

You know, just living the dream.

I'm no worse than anybody else.

I'm chilling in Washington while you're hanging out in Spain and Britain.

Yeah, with the American flag.

I love that you still have a little patriotism in your soul, Ben Wittis, in these moments.

Your guy, Mike Feinberg, who wrote that Good Ride All That piece for Law Fair, just finished with.

You cut the end of that.

And I don't don't mean that guy, it's just one of these examples.

It's like anytime you meet one of these supposed shadowy deep state people, it's like, this is crazy.

It's like, this guy's got fucking conservative philosophy books sitting behind him.

You can sort of scroll in there and see his Bill Crystal style library and taking his job seriously, doing China counterintelligence.

And he's out of there because

somebody spotted him at a concert with Pete Strzok or something.

The whole thing is lunacy.

Well, yeah.

So he's, so I've known Mike for a long time.

We're, we're old workout buddies.

And you're working out?

What do you, what are you doing?

Max benching or what?

No, no, it's more of a, you know,

solid core Pilates kind of situation.

Um, but uh, you know, Mike's kind of out of my league, um, but um, we've known each other for it's got to be more than 10 years now.

And,

you know, whenever I've been on the show and, you know, you guys, you or Charlie before you would ask about like you know what's going on in the fbi and i would say something like oh you know fbi agents are are crafted this isn't like you know you know a year at the police academy right this isn't like you know these are people with exquisite expertise and i always mention you know language skills and you know some of them are you know money laundering experts and i'm always thinking of mike when i when i say this.

This is a guy who's, you know, he speaks Chinese, he's a lawyer, he's a he's spent 15 years in China counterintelligence.

You know, this is the kind of person you get rid of.

at the peril of the institutional capacity of the agency.

And he knows just a remarkable amount about a lot of different things.

This is not, you know, what when people think of an FBI agent, they sometimes think of a kind of knuckle-dragging cop.

You know, yeah, he's got some tattoos and he can, you know, bench press a lot and he knows how to handle firearms, but he also, you know,

has good Mandarin, knows the history of French film, you know,

has read Proust and yeah, has a...

has a wall of books that he's actually read that are reflective of uh you know conservative legal tradition and other stuff.

So, you know, this is the type of person they're driving out of the bureau.

So let's just broaden that out a little bit because he was talking about the, you know, the actual bureau itself and, you know, how there's been, you know, reporting about obviously the politicals getting run out of the seventh floor, but it's actually broader than that as far as people leaving.

The same thing's happening elsewhere, and it's happening at DOJ.

It's happening at state.

Like, just talk about both from an institutional capacity perspective, but also sort of the legal perspective.

Last time we were talking, we were talking about like, can they do this?

You know, are these people going to be able to hire employment lawyers and stay on?

Like, what is your sense for the breadth of the drain from DOJ and others?

The breadth is enormous.

And, you know, I think the best way to understand it is as

there's a purge going on, which is, you know, an active getting rid of a certain cadre that are politically suspect.

There is also,

you know, you see this with the Department of Education, with the State Department the other day.

There's also a concurrent downsizing that is just like, let's just reduce.

the size and capacity of the agency, which is not targeted at individuals.

It's just let's rip this agency apart and make it less capable than it used to be.

And then there's a third thing that

is going on that

actually doesn't involve my particular areas, but it is

worth thinking about in this context, which is a large-scale destruction of the government's grant-making capacity.

And this is particularly acute in the scientific areas, the biomedical space,

the world's largest funder of cancer research, which is the National Cancer Institute, is

getting out of the business of funding cancer research, right?

And so you have, I think, these three strains, which are somewhat independent of one another, but all part of this larger package of uh war on what Trump thinks of as the deep state and

those of us who live in a reality-based environment would call the institutional capacities of the federal government.

The magnitude of it is immense and hard to get your hands around because, frankly, very few of us, I mean, I have expertise in the Justice Department and the FBI.

I don't have expertise in

the...

the grant-making capacities in the medical research space of the U.S.

federal government.

And so very few people have have a kind of holistic sense of what this looks like.

But I do think thinking of it in 360 degree terms is important.

There is another way to do it, another way to think about it, which is what are we spending money on?

And, you know, if you immigration detention centers smoking.

That's right.

So if you say, if you look at it in the macro picture and you say, what is the Trump administration spending money on?

The answer is it is reducing funding for all of these traditional things that we think of in the sort of post-war era as major government priorities.

And it is spending that money and much more, by the way, on building detention facilities, though not adjudication capacity to deport as many people as humanly possible.

Yeah, just a quick aside, because I want to get more into the staffing side of it, but on the grant making, since you mentioned it, I did a video last night.

People should go check out for more details on this.

But, like, they're doing this rescissions package today on Run the Hill, which basically defunds things they already funded as a shorthand for what they're doing.

The procedural vote passed last night, 50-50 with Fancy.

It's a tie-breaking vote.

One of the things in it, they cut the, it's like $100 million for the UNICEF General Fund, which essentially just is like the organization that whenever there's a major crisis in the world, they go and ensure that kids like under five are able to get food, like an access to nutrition.

100 million is like nothing.

Like this bill, they just passed the OBBB that raises the deficit by 3 trillion, 4 trillion, 5 trillion, depending on who, what, which analysis you look at.

You know, this is just a total drop in the bucket.

And to your point, it's hard to kind of for everybody to wrap their heads around everything, you know, that's being, that's being cut in these situations.

And it's like these small line items for people that don't have big lobbying efforts, you know, that do real good work.

And the great concession that the Republican moderates, such as they are, gouged from the administration on the rescissions package was not cutting, I think it was $400 million for PEPFAR.

So that's the win, right?

I think, you know, the best way to understand the administration is and its priorities is in terms of the gross financial financial picture.

And that is, you know, cutting.

And look, you can agree with these values, you can disagree with these values.

I happen to find them morally appalling.

But

let's just describe them neutrally, which is: we want to lock up and deport as many people as humanly possible, and we want to cut the federal government down to size in nearly all other areas, and we want to give enormous tax breaks.

That's the gestalt picture.

Yeah, you could just kind of evenly describe

the recent funding decisions to spend, you know, whatever, 450x on prison camps that you're going to spend on food aid for the world's youth.

I mean, that's just what they've decided to do.

Back to the staffing stuff.

You wrote about Arez Rouveni, I think I'm getting that right, a DOJ prosecutor who has been pushed out, and just a huge kind of firestorm around that.

Talk about that story as a kind of representative of what's happening right now.

So, first of all, Erez Rouveney is not a prosecutor.

He was a civil litigator in the immigration space whose job for the last 15 years has been to defend administration initiatives in the immigration space, including under the Trump administration.

He's one of the people who defended the travel ban.

The woke travel ban.

He was the defender of the woke travel ban.

He's on the briefs.

I think he argued some of the stuff in the lower courts.

He's a very talented lawyer.

It's like it isn't really a Muslim ban because we also threw North Korea on top.

Exactly.

That's, you know, I mean, there are a lot of positions that Eras Rouveni has litigated on behalf of a number of administrations for that I don't share.

I always believe in

never criticizing the career lawyers for defending the administration policy, because that is their job.

That is why we hire them.

And they don't formulate the policy.

Their job is to defend the policy.

In the Biden administration, you defend the Biden administration policy.

In the Trump administration, you defend the Trump administration policy.

As long as you are observing the ethical rules and norms of being a government lawyer, I exempt these people from criticism.

Eres Rouveni did exactly that, and he got fired for it.

And not just fired, but Pambandi denounced him personally on national television.

And

the government doesn't even really deny the allegations,

not in a meaningful way that he puts forward, which is that,

first of all, the

Dracula-like Emile Bovie, you know, said to a room full of lawyers that they might have to say fuck you to court orders, that the government has lied to courts, has willfully defied court orders.

And Rouveney, unlike,

you know, these themes are the same themes as we saw in the sort of Eric Adams dropping that case.

But he did something that none of these other lawyers who've left have done, which is that he wrote a 27-page account of it all

and

included 150 pages of underlying documents that are

really shocking.

And, you know, we can talk about the details of that.

Yeah, sure, shocking in what way?

Yeah.

Well, so, you know, first of all, he, you know, when he says that Emile Bovie

said,

we might have to say fuck you to the courts.

He then has,

you know, a bunch of texts between him and other lawyers when they seem to be defying the court orders.

Where one of the other lawyers says, I've guessed we've reached the fuck you point.

This is like defying the, and this is in the context for people, this is defying the court orders around immigration stuff, such as like the plains del Salvador and Abrego Garcia.

Exactly.

And Reveini was on there.

The Brego Garcia case was so he works on three cases kind of concurrently that are all still, one is Abrego Garcia, one is the JGG case, which is the Alien Enemies Act case to El Salvador, and then the third is this DVD case where, you know, that ends up with the flights to South Sudan, right?

And in each of these cases, he's trying to restrain the government from essentially first defying court orders, but then failing utterly in its duty of candor to the court.

And in each case, he is either pushed back at quite senior levels or ignored.

And then, look, he files this document.

Emil Bovie then has his confirmation hearing.

He is asked repeatedly about

Mr.

Ravaney's allegations.

And he

I think it is very hard to escape the conclusion that he lies under oath about it.

He says he doesn't recall saying that they were going to have to say fuck you to Judge Boesberg.

And I think it is very hard to escape the conclusion that both he and

at least one other

Justice Department lawyer were engaged in a willful, not to mention the

DHS hierarchy, were engaged in

an effort to deport people illegally, irrespective of what the courts had to say about it.

And so, look, you know, this material is now public.

And the real question is, does anybody care?

Well, is that the question?

Do we have to answer that question?

I mean, look, yeah, I think actually that's the real question.

Because the answer for, you know, if you could get two or three Senate Republicans to care, that would be, well, you'd need four, but that would be an important thing.

No chance of that, in my view.

This is the shocking thing to me about, and this goes back to the Feinberg situation, and maybe shocking isn't the right word, but this is the dispiriting thing, is that,

you know,

I understand, I don't support, but I understand kind of the own the libs, drink the liberal tears reaction that you see online when the State Department bureaucrats are like boxing up their stuff and getting out of there and the Department of Education is showing up.

This is old

right-wing anti-government ideology, right?

And they don't think that a lot of people in the federal government do good work and it's fine for a lot of them to be fired, right?

So I'm not endorsing that.

I'm just saying like that is something that is understandable.

The dispiriting thing is that like in the DOJ and an FBI, like we are talking about people that are being kicked out that are totally apolitical, that are doing objectively real work to keep the to keep the country safe, to defend the rule of law in the country.

And the fact that like across the board, people are being run out on the rail, kicked out,

expertise is being lost.

They're stopping doing certain types of investigations.

In service of nothing, in service of the paranoia of the podcast host, who's the deputy FBI director, right?

Like that is the thing that is you would, you would imagine that there'd be one fucking Republican on the Hill that would be like, wait a minute,

we need to have more respect for the people that are putting their lives on the line for the country that are trying to protect us that work at the that you know work at these law enforcement agencies.

I'm like, there's nothing zero.

Let's talk about Senator Tom Tillis in particular, the now venerated Tom Tillis.

Who is venerating Tom Tillis?

I missed that.

Yeah, yeah, that happened while you were away.

I would have disabused the venerators if I had

been in debt.

You know, he

the big beautiful bill, and he, uh, when Trump attacked him and said he was going to organize a primary campaign against him, he announced that he wasn't running for re-election anyway.

And, you know, this augered a great new era of independence on the part of Tom Tillis.

Tom Tillis spent much of the month of January fiercely defending Cash Patel and criticizing aggressively those who were suggesting that he might be a conspiracy theorist who had no business running the FBI.

I have not, you know, while Tillis has said that he regrets his vote for RFK.

Now, he has not said anything of the kind about Mr.

Patel, to my knowledge anyway.

And moreover, I have not heard him say that, you know, it is simply unacceptable for Emil Bovie to do the things that he is credibly said to have done.

In fact, has provided no evidence that he didn't do.

And that coming up to the Senate Judiciary Committee and saying in response to Erez Raveny's allegations that he just doesn't recall whether he said, fuck you, about the courts, you cannot confirm somebody to be a judge on the Third Circuit United States Court of Appeals, which, you know, is he going to vote for Emil Bovey?

I wouldn't bet against it.

Let's put it that way.

This is a completely unacceptable set of behaviors by a lot of different people.

And we haven't heard boo from the Inspector General of the Justice Department.

Senate Republicans don't care.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals put a stay on Judge Boesberg's contempt inquiry, an administrative stay, and then have been radio silent for three months.

And so my question is, when you have people behaving this way, what is the mechanism of accountability or is there none?

I don't know.

I mean, I think that there is none, right?

If the Senate Republicans

aren't going to do anything about it.

It is crazy in the context of the Epstein thing.

I've been doing a lot of interviews with the Epstein thing.

I understand why Republican-based voters and podcasters are upset about the Epstein file situation.

But for ostensibly responsible senators, it's insane that there are Republican members of the U.S.

Senate that are trying to get accountability for Trump on not releasing the redacted Epstein files.

But there's not a single one who feels like, hey,

maybe it was a bad thing that we ran out the China expert from the FBI because Cash Patel's Fifies were hurt, that like some other random, you know, he is friends with some random person.

Again, similarly to the funding, it's a telling breakdown of what the priorities are.

Yes.

So let's talk about the real housewives of the Justice Department.

Go for it.

Normally, you would say it is a bad thing

that the deputy FBI director just goes walkabout on a, you know, Friday, refuses to come into the office and won't say whether he's quit.

I'm sorry, Ben.

We all need mental health days sometimes.

You know, have you ever stormed out of the office just because you're mad at a colleague, decides you need to eat ice cream and watch Bravo all day?

I just want to say I totally respect Dan Bongino's right to do it.

Normally, the president of the United States, when you ask him on a Monday morning, do you have a deputy FBI director?

This literally happened Monday.

And Trump said, I think so.

Like,

you know, he literally.

Like Costanza shows back up at the seventh floor and he's like, what, you guys took me seriously?

You thought

about that little joke on Friday about me quitting?

I understand

that, you know, people think everybody needs a mental health thing.

The deputy FBI director is one of the true workhorse jobs of the federal government.

And you don't just walk out in a snit

and say about the attorney general, either she goes or I go.

And by, and by the way, the fact that like these people are like

acting like this is,

you know, normally you would think it's a bad thing that they've turned the upper echelons of the Justice Department and the FBI into a weird, like, the girlies are fighting reality show.

Right now, I'm relieved that they're, you know, fighting over whether a dead guy, for he's been dead for what, six years now, seven, five years,

whether he had files and they were on the attorney general's desk or whether he never had files and that was never on the attorney general's desk.

And by the way, Dan Bungino's quit.

No, he's not.

Yeah, he's playing golf.

I mean, I love this.

And the reason is the more consumed they are with destroying each other, the less focused they are going to be on destroying the cultures of the agencies that they're running.

And so, you know, bring it on.

It's the Iran-Iraq war.

Arm both sides, amplify all the messaging.

We should have like a Banjin, oh, Bandi, you know, kind of like a food fight, like in a cage, like a WWE-style thing, where like they both get cakes, they get to throw each other pay-per-view.

I would pay for that.

I would totally, I wouldn't pay for it.

I'd pirate it.

But yeah, I mean, look, it is profoundly embarrassing that

this is what the upper echelons of the law enforcement operatus of the United States is doing.

And the fact that we all kind of treated it like a QAnon themed soap opera going on at...

the attorney general and FBI director level was just kind of a normal weekend and that the stories should be broken by Laura Loomer and Axios, right?

Like these aren't like that.

Congrats to Axios.

Yeah.

I think it is a

telling marker of where we are.

Let's just put it that way.

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I've got another telling marker.

Just one more thing on the staffing.

So we've been, you heard from Mike Feinberg the type of expertise we're losing from the FBI.

I want to highlight somebody who's coming back to work.

A former FBI agent who was charged with encouraging the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th to kill police officers has been named as an advisor to the Justice Department task force that President Trump recently established to look into retribution against his political foes.

That's Jared Wise, and he's going to work for Eagle-Eyed Martin.

Yeah, former FBI agent.

Yeah.

I thought the FBI agents were all part of a deep state plot to go after Trump, and it was the woke liberal agents bureau.

That seems to be wrong if Jared Wise was working there.

Well, yeah, I mean, one thing that I've never met,

and

I've hung out in FBI circles quite a bit.

Left-wing FBI agents, they don't exist.

You've never met like a purple-haired nose-ring, non-binary FBI agents?

No, they all work for NSA.

No, I'm serious.

Those people are like you walk around the halls in Fort Meade, and they'll be like some

girl with purple hair

walking next to a military officer.

And, you know, those people are linguists and computer science geeks and math geeks.

And that's all of, but the FBI is like, it's a bunch of conservative white guys.

We do honor their service to the NSA, too.

We really, we appreciate it.

And absolutely.

And always, if they get run out on the rail as well, they're also welcome on the blog podcast.

All right.

I want to do a little Ukraine.

Is it good news?

Like, obviously,

unimaginable suffering has happened in Ukraine over the last six months while Donald Trump, you know, played out his melodrama with Vladimir Putin.

And so it's horrible.

So this is not like not a rah-rah Trump thing.

But does it feel like maybe something has changed here?

Or do you think that this is a can kick?

Trump does, you know.

like seems to be upset with Putin, more open to allowing Zelensky to use offensive weapons.

Zelensky is getting some attackums and patriots that are needed and long overdue.

Like, what's your assessment of the state of play and what are you hearing from your Ukraine pals?

All right.

I have three things to say about this.

First of all, let's distinguish between two policies that were announced on Monday.

The first is the availability of weapons to Ukraine.

The second is...

Vladimir, you have 50 days to sign an agreement, otherwise punishing sanctions.

I think the second one,

you know, an inexplicable 50-day grace period.

I don't think that is a big change of policy.

It is a change of tone.

To put the onus essentially entirely on Putin is a significant change of tone.

And I do think there's promise in that.

But 50 days is a long time.

A lot of Ukrainians are going to get killed in those 50 days.

And I don't think Trump deserves a lot of credit for,

you know,

announcing that something bad will happen to Russia 50 days from now.

The weapons issue is a different matter.

And I think it's assuming it's real.

And I want to see the actual weapons transfers happen before I assume that.

You want to make sure Darren Beatty doesn't put a stop, you know, stop delivery on those.

For example, I also want to make sure Trump doesn't change his mind.

and I want to make sure that the Europeans are as aggressive when it comes to actually spending money as they are when it comes to talking about it, which is a chronic issue.

That policy change is very important.

And my willingness to criticize the Trump administration is almost infinite, but I do want to give him credit for that.

If it happens, it's a very big deal.

And Ukraine desperately needs those new, more air defenses.

It has been asking for long-range missile capability for a long time.

If it gets both, that is a big deal.

Now, there are two things that I don't like about this deal.

One is that I don't know for sure that it's really happening.

And so my willingness to say, well, you know,

this this is a great thing.

It should have happened eight months ago, but it's a great thing, blah, blah, blah, is tempered by the fact that I'm not 100% sure it's really happening.

So

hold that thought.

But the other thing is that I don't love the fallback to the position that, you know, we're not going to spend a dime.

Europe's going to pay for it.

And our involvement here is sort of transactional.

We're going to supply weapons to Europe so that they can give them to the Ukrainians and they will pay for them.

Now, this is the best we can hope for from Trump, I think.

And

I don't want to be churlish about it.

But we should be supporting Ukraine with money.

And what will be to me the Rubicon where Trump, I will say, yes, Donald Trump has

changed on Ukraine in a profound way and has adopted a policy that is consistent with what I think U.S.

policy should be is when he goes to Congress and asks for a supplemental of whatever size is appropriate for U.S.

spending.

That goes back to the earlier part of our conversation where we say, look at how they're spending money.

And they're still not spending money supplying weapons to Ukraine.

And so I think it is, look, it's an important step.

It's a big change.

And it does, it will save lives in Ukraine if it really happens.

So, I don't want to sound churlish about it.

Is it this is the day he became the president?

No.

No.

I will add one amendment that's slightly churlish, but more cheeky than churlish, I guess.

It should be worth mentioning that that obscene scene in the Oval Office where J.D.

Vance was demanding that Volodymyr Zelensky thank him for doing nothing.

The origin of that fight, like the crux of that fight, rather, was

that Zelensky was just trying to say to them that they're trusting Putin.

They shouldn't trust him.

That was basically the crux of the fight.

Was that like you, like, Zelensky's basically like, I hear what you guys are saying, but like, he's been saying this for a decade and a half.

You cannot trust that he says he's going to come to the negotiation table.

They're going to keep attacking us.

And then Trump and J.D.

Vance got their butt hurt and pissed that Zelensky was saying that.

And now here's Trump this week saying, essentially, Zelensky was right.

And he didn't say Zelensky was right, but he's saying, yeah, yeah, like Putin, Putin didn't do what he said he was going to do, it turns out.

And it's like, that's all Zelensky was trying to tell him.

And he was doing it in a very modest way.

And it created this Oval Office scene, this kind of petulant, you know, reaction from Trump and

Vance.

And anyway, it merits mentioning.

Oh, it merits mentioning.

Look, nothing can redeem Trump's treatment of Ukraine in the first six months of his administration.

And in no sense, when I say that this is a big deal and it will save a lot of lives, is that meant to undermine the point that the first six months of the Trump administration have been a very, very deep betrayal of our European allies and

Ukrainians who are under fire.

I am approaching the question from a slightly different point, which is Ukraine really, really needs more interceptors and more Patriot batteries, and it may just get them now.

And I am very grateful for that.

I am not praising Donald Trump.

Ben Wittis, thanks for checking in as always.

It's good to see you, my friend.

Everybody go head over to Lawfare Media, sign up for the newsletters, Dog Shirt Daily.

I do like the situation.

Ben's been writing the situation, which is occasionally very serious and at times, you know, has a more comedic tone to it.

I try to make one out of four of them,

you know, three out of four are super earnest and angry, and one out of four is written with the idea that if you're not making fun of the situation, you are part of the situation.

We'll leave it there.

Everybody go sign up for Lawfare.

Ben, I'll be talking to you soon.

And listeners, we'll be seeing you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

Peace.

Of what you wanna say

and cast your words away upon the waves

and sail them home with acquiescence on a ship of hope today.

And as they land upon the shore,

tell them not to fear no more.

Say loud and sing a proud today.

And then dance if you wanna dance.

Please, brother, take a chance.

You know they're gonna go.

Which way they wanna go.

We

know is that we don't know how it's gonna be.

Please, brother, let it be.

Life on the other hand, won't make us understand.

We're all part of the best of land.

Say it loud, we're singing by

today.

I'm not saying saying right is wrong.

It's up to us to make

the best of all the things that come our way.

Cause everything that's been has passed, the answers in the looking glass

is more than twenty million dollars.

On life's endless corridor,

say it loud and sing it proud.

And then

we'll dance if they wanna dance.

Please, brother, take a chance.

You know they're gonna go.

Which way they wanna go

breathe.

Know is that we don't know how it's gonna be.

Please, brother, let it be.

Life on the other hand won't make you understand.

We're up on our back.

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one.

August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.

It's time to head back to school and forward to your future with Carrington College.

For over 55 years, we've helped train the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Apply now to get hands-on training from teachers with real-world experience.

In as few as nine months, you could start making a difference in healthcare.

Classes start soon in Pleasant Hill, San Leandro, and San Jose.

Visit Carrington.edu to see what's next for you.

Visit Carrington.edu slash SCI for information on program outcomes.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the floor store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.