What's Going on at the FBI?
77 comments
·February 4, 2025thih9
DyslexicAtheist
imagine being energy dependent on a regime that bullies you from Washington, and being asked to increase security spending to 5% of GDP by purchasing US weapons systems. while being told by the same regime they might take over Greenland or the Panama canal.
when putting US foreign policy into perspective over the past 30 (or more depending where you are) years, then aligning with China suddenly looks a lot less awful all of a sudden.
SlightlyLeftPad
I think when you look holistically at the promises that China has made, and broken, it still doesn’t make sense to align with China. That could change in the future but the time isn’t now.
An example; look at what they’ve been doing in the South China Sea, Hong Kong or Xinjiang.
Some instability in the U.S. is definitely uncomfortable but the alternative is not better.
Juliate
That.
The impact on commercial, technical, cultural influence of the USA is incredible.
How could we have any insurance that these (personal and professional) US-based infra/tools companies (even AWS, Microsoft, Apple) could be even operating as expected, and in good faith, now that some petulant, inconsequential mixed-business-political leader is able to trigger that level of damage on a whim?
hnbad
I think "unstable" is the right word.
You can argue that far more appalling things happen in places like Russia or China, sure. But this doesn't feel like a controlled assumption of power. It doesn't even feel like Trump is personally in control - let alone his "shadow president". It feels more like a chaotic romp through the federal government, disrupting operations and vital functions with little care or planning, then quickly dispatching a crowd of untrained, unqualified interns to put up scaffolding for something new and more aligned with whatever political goals may have inspired this.
Not just the FBI, not just the onslaught of EOs that seem to be more designed to test the limits of power by defying well-established constitutional and legal limits, not just the inconsistent threats of tariffs either. But also random acts like dumping water reserves ahead of summer for no clear benefit other than spite.
It's all very unpredictable - not Trump personally but the entire organism that surrounds him in this presidential term. I think this may be because of the many conflicting interests at play. You have Trump himself, the MAGA cult, the Evangelicals and hardline conservatives who supported him, the various interest groups within the GOP and so, so many billionaires trying to get a piece of the pie. I don't think he actually has much control over this. It's not just ideologically incoherent, it seemingly lacks direction.
I wonder what it will look like once the dust settles and the momentum has died down. As much as libertarians like to talk about running the government like a business, if the USG were a business right now I would expect it to be on its way to being shut down and sold for scrap like e.g. Toys'R'Us.
aaron695
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kragen
J. Edgar Hoover ran the US for decades and was more powerful than any president. His successor, far less powerful, is in a power struggle with the richest man in the world and a political party that controls all three official branches of government.
The situation looks unpredictable.
It may be worth rereading Mike Lofgren's essay from 11 years ago, before Trump's first campaign, in which he tries to apply the Turkish concept of the "derin devlet" to analyzing the workings of the US government, and why Obama's administration had accomplished so little of what it promised: https://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
trhway
the guy predicted today's coup by the broligarchy against the Deep State (more precisely what happens isn't coup even though it looks like it, in the short time i think we'll see that it is really a takeover of the Deep State by the broligarchy):
>That said, evidence is accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep State’s demand for patriotic cooperation.
arunabha
It's wild to think I'd ever say this, but the next four years will be the stress test of the strength of US institutions against an authoritarian president. If they survive the next four years, they will likely survive pretty much anything.
kragen
I don't think it's anywhere near that simple.
Organizations are ongoing processes, constantly in flux, not structures erected in the past. Like a river, you can never step in the same organization twice. Like ghosts and money, they only exist in people's minds; they consist of belief in them, hyperstitiously.
The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow? What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.
TeMPOraL
> You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.
Except the only thing that what makes them different from organized crime is also the shared belief in laws that form and direct them.
> will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
If they don't, i.e. if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not, the whole thing will unravel. Laws won't mean anything anymore, and then suddenly the president is just a random dude, the FBI is just a bunch of thugs with guns and suits, and USA is just words on a map.
You don't want to go there.
nyc_data_geek1
>>openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not
ah yes, the same way every major police department in the US has been functioning for most of living memory
msravi
> if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not
They already did that under Biden.
kennysoona
> but the next four years will be the stress test of the strength of US institutions against an authoritarian president.
As well as a stress test against half the voting population that thinks an authoritarian president is peachy and somehow patriotic.
whatever1
Half of the voting population were so fed up with the economy that they went with the nuclear option.
It’s just that most of them have not read history and none of them have lived through war or fascism to understand what they are signing up for.
They will all learn their lesson.
phinnaeus
I have strong doubts they will learn anything, if they were capable of that you could expect them to have learned it already.
macawfish
It was one third of the voting population.
macawfish
1/3rd of the voting population
greatgib
Also, you can't rule out the corruption-like part of the situation.
When you have billions to communicate, and people like Musk have a full global network to brain wash his ideas, obviously a lot of people might be wrongly convinced that they elected the president that defend freedom and efficiency of the institutions to improve their life.
Not realizing that Trump, Musk, are just selfish bastards defending these ideas but only for themselves.
okthrowman283
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moogly
It's already over. You'll have to rely on Canadians burning down the White House. I'm afraid there's no democratic solution to what you're enduring now.
gerash
US institutions aka. bureaucracy isn't without its own issues. I believe that's why people voted in a rather unusual person like Trump whose main feature is being outside the establishment.
It is the US institutions who have happily engaged in endless foreign wars over past several decades. They have also enacted low corporate taxation resulting in high stock prices but even larger wealth gap where few winners take all the profits.
bananapub
I think you're underestimating the damage he's done and will do. semi-permanent changes:
- complete radicalisation of an entire congressional party against functional democracy
- complete politicisation of the entire federal government
- normalisation of just straight up lying to the Senate in confirmation hearings (RFK on everything, Patel on q anon)
- normalisation of just straight up lying during campaigns (no idea what Project 2025 is!)
- making it clear to every single ally of the US that the US cannot be trusted to not be a complete cock
- normalisation of pardoning thousands of criminals who did crimes on TV in your favour
- normalisation of Congress and the top level courts being completely and utterly unwilling to life a finger to stop autocratic exercise of powers by the president
maybe the next president won't be a sociopath, but the above will still be true and maybe the one after will be.
mmastrac
Wild to see a bloodless coup in action.
vizzier
The worst part is, how do you even counter the injected rot? If they demand loyalty tests and infest your institutions how is it countered? do the other side also have to do the same (assuming they have the opportunity)?
All feels incredibly illiberal. I hope for the best that the oaths of office specific to these institutions hold.
jimkleiber
One way is for the people in the other branches of government—Congress (legislative) and Courts (judicial)—to stand up for their branches and fight against the executive.
The challenge is that people are more loyal to their political parties than their political branches, and the Constitution is built to check and balance branches, not parties.
rob74
Well, the supreme representatives of the judicial branch have just last year given the executive (=Trump) a blank check to largely do anything it pleases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024)). So yes, the US is in big trouble...
bboygravity
How is this different from any previous president?
Isn't the very reason that the puppets "need replacing" (according to the president) tell you that they are of the wrong (previous president's) political flavor?
Honest question, I'm not from US, but on the surface it just looks like more of the same thing that has always been happening? Except with way more media attention?
qqqwerty
These organizations consist of political appointees and civil servants. It is customary to replace all of the political appointees. Civil servants however have a lot of job protections and can only be fired for a limited set of reasons. Typically, a new administration would appoint new political appointees to the various departments (many of whom need to be confirmed by the Senate) and those appointees would then exert their influence on the department by shifting priorities around and they could even alter the hiring process to target more "aligned" individuals for the open civil servant roles. But they cannot just do a wholesale house cleaning. The high level purpose and the budget/size of the organization is determined by Congress and the political appointees are constrained by that.
So this is in fact very different from how things normally work.
jackjeff
I think it’s unprecedented for every FBI agent to fill up a questionnaire to admit whether they worked on a case where the president himself was an active participant.
jimkleiber
I think it's the emotional flavor of it. Things in the US government tend to move more slowly and filled with less apparent vitriol and vengeance. This seems like a slash and burn and to hell with people if they don't more outrightly pledge loyalty.
To me, at least.
rightbyte
They are supposed to be manouvered out with slowpaced schemes and retire for family reason not be fired in the open.
But ye it usually happens to some extent: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-trump-burrowin...
frodo8sam
Depends on your perspective. Many people would consider someone like Fauci non-partisan and more of a competent career expert, but Trumps people think he is very political and purge people like that. At the FBI they purge people who are probably quite competent and not particularly partisan but happened to work on Trumps case, which is mostly about sending a message I think not do much about finding the right employees to work at the FBI. This is very un American in my view.
bozhark
It won’t be.
maeil
You're right, it won't be. This is the only positive thing I can currently see. They could've easily pulled it off without resistance (i.e. bloodshed) in most of Europe, but in the US the indoctrination of US exceptionalism regarding "freedom" and "democracy" from an early age results in a non-negligible number of people who would actually put their lives on the line for this and willing to take part in active resistance.
Purely anecdotally from seeing a small part of military-adjacent tech, while most definitely voted for Trump and some of them will be MAGA-converts, most of them actually belived in that mission and won't be aligned with a proper dictatorship. They'll have to play it very carefully, keep elections but rig them just enough to make the outcome inevitable, to keep these people able to convince themselves it's still a democracy, boiling the frog very slowly. It might be preferable for them to actually accelerate things and go full Putin, there'll be a lot more active resistance that way.
stavros
> They could've easily pulled it off without resistance (i.e. bloodshed) in most of Europe, but in the US the indoctrination of US exceptionalism regarding "freedom" and "democracy" from an early age results in a non-negligible number of people who would actually put their lives on the line for this and willing to take part in active resistance.
All the Europeans who have died revolting against totalitarian governments are rolling in their graves.
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throwawaythekey
What makes it a coup? Trump was elected on a platform of government reform and that's what he is doing.
reshlo
A leader who is democratically elected, and then violates or exploits loopholes in the law to give themselves powers that they are not supposed to have, is engaging in a self-coup.
The US Constitution grants Congress, not the executive branch, the power to determine how the federal government’s money is spent.
Elon Musk’s team within the Executive Office of the President have reportedly gained full admin access to the payment system of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service at the Department of the Treasury, which is responsible for the majority of the federal government’s payments, and are using that access to prevent certain payments from being made. Among other things, they are also attempting to close down the US Agency for International Development, which was established and funded as an independent agency by an act of Congress.
babyshake
If you are elected on a platform of a coup (illegal reform), it doesn't make what you do any more legal. Some of what Trump is doing is not illegal, but some of it appears to be illegal.
throwawaythekey
It's pretty normal for a president to try illegal things and then get knocked back by the courts/senate. Is there an extra barrier you have for it to reach the meaning of coup?
guelo
The pardoning of the J6 rioters that broke into the capitol, and now trying to fire all law enforcement that were involved in their prosecution feels like the end of the rule of law. Law will now be whatever Trump says. It's a coup.
DiogenesKynikos
What makes it a coup is that Trump is acting completely illegally. He was elected president, not dictator. He does not have the legal authority to create a new government department, DOGE, to appoint Musk as its head without Senate advice and consent, and to give it full power over all other agencies.
lIl-IIIl
That doesn't make it a coup. "Coup" has a definition, which is to unseat a government through illegal means, or to stay in power through illegal means. For example, January 6th could be considered an attempted coup. But just acting illegally a coup does not make.
rapsey
That is for the courts to decide.
rapsey
Trump is overthrowing a cabal of un-elected bureaucrats openly ignoring the elected leadership. It is a coup for the other side. They are losing power they are not suppose to have.
Animats
Here's the actual letter from the FBI Agents' Association.[1] They're not a union, but they're close, and represent about 90% of FBI agents.
The acting head of the FBI is strongly against this and is resisting.[2]
So labor and management are both against this. It's the first real challenge to Trump's authoritarianism. Plus, most FBI agents have civil service appeals rights. They can fight back against arbitrary dismissal.
Misc. item: the tariff deal between the US and Mexico has something that the Trump administration hasn't mentioned - the US agreed to help clamp down on shipments of guns to Mexico. Mexico does not have easy access to guns in the way that the US does.[3]
[1] https://www.fbiaa.org/joint-letter-to-congress-on-the-fbi/
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/senior-fb...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Mexico
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derektank
Hypothetically, had FBI agents complied with completing the questionnaire and they had worked on the Jan 6th investigations, would it be legal for the administration to fire them based on that alone? Or would the agents be able to sue? My understanding is that they have limited collective bargaining rights compared to other federal employees, so presumably they'd only have whatever protections Congress provides all federal employees.
lwansbrough
I think the question "is it legal" is only relevant in a state which respects laws. Which is, increasingly, not the United States.
rob74
What's most wild about this is that what's happening at the FBI, while plenty scandalous enough on its own, are mostly eclipsed by everything else that's going on - e.g. this editorial https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/03/the-gu... doesn't even mention the FBI. It's like Trump is setting as many fires at once as he can, hoping that at least some of them will burn out of control...
kopirgan
Pendulum swings the other way. Karma forever the canine of female gender.
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AndyMcConachie
Live by the witch hunt, die by the witch hunt.
guelo
Do you believe the j6 rioters breaking into the capitol were not acting illegally so that there prosecution was a witch hunt? Help me understand.
notepad0x90
I think a lot of people just want to give the current administration a chance. Half the country wanted him, and if it wasn't this, it would be an actual civil war eventually.
However, isn't it a bit naive to presume the current administration would relinquish power and allow for a peaceful transfer of government in the end?
I hope I'm wrong but all the evidence and data is pointing to a decline of America and the American-led world order. What's more concerning is, as the economy and social climate continues to decline, people will be far less tolerant and accepting of each other. I'm concerned a lot of the horrible historical trends of the past will repeat.
A lot of things are happening that you just can't recover from, like at all. And some things, like relations with Canada and the EU may not recover for like a generation.
I suspect, history will look at the past few months as the time when the cold war was really won. I mean, even on HN, the majority were against the tiktok ban, if that isn't defeat, what is? Imagine not banning propaganda radio from Russia and china during the cold war. The most crucial victory America's enemies achieved is convincing American voters they're no longer their enemies. American voters mostly think it's a fight between governments or politicians, they don't get that the hostility includes the day to day people of the nations involved.
The question really (to me at least) is, is the war already lost and we just need time to process the loss? or can it still be fought? I don't know how, it will be decades of trying to avoid an actual civil war, can America really withstand being torn apart, when even something like banning tiktok is impossible?
I can understand how looking at the greatness of this nation and its might it can be difficult to imagine it's fall and decimation. can congress and the supreme court put aside their own short-term gains to save their country? Will states continue to want to be part of the union, despite disaster aids being withheld and American citizens being deported (yes, this is happening)?
And who would come after trump, now that trump has paved the way? it will take him his entire term fully gutting the government and lining up the military. I suspect his replacement won't need votes.
macawfish
Half the country did not. 1/3 of eligible voters. Which doesn't even count people under 18.
And to say that everyone who voted for him "wanted him" is a stretch.
I’m not from the US and news like this change my perception of that country - it seems unstable; just like I’m not considering a Wordpress blog, I’d think twice before any long term plans that involve the US.
The comparison to the Wordpress drama works surprisingly well for me, complete with vendettas and an overzealous leader, just on an even larger scale and affecting more people.