Here is what happened, in the order it happened, because the order matters.
The United States launched Operation Epic Fury and killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. We killed his daughter-in-law. The son and husband of those two particular dead people is now the new Supreme Leader. We bombed nuclear facilities. We went to war.
Days before the bombs fell, Kash Patel fired a dozen agents from CI-12 — the FBI’s elite counterintelligence unit specifically tasked with monitoring Iranian threats, tracking foreign spies operating on U.S. soil, and catching people like Monica Witt, the American Air Force intelligence officer who defected to Iran and began feeding our intelligence to our enemies. The agents were not fired for incompetence. They were not fired for misconduct. They were fired because they had touched the Mar-a-Lardo, stolen classified documents case. That is the whole reason. That is the full explanation.
The FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence gathered his remaining staff and told them he could not protect their jobs. He told them he expected more firings. He told them he understood if they wanted to leave, but he hoped they would stay — because he feared their replacements would not have their years of experience, and he wanted to keep the country safer. Read that sentence again. The man running the FBI’s counterintelligence operation was, in the same breath, begging his people not to flee while admitting he was powerless to stop the machine grinding them up.
This is not a personnel story. This is a national security story dressed up in loyalty tests and petty revenge.
Around 300 national security agents have left the bureau since Trump’s second term began — fired, forced out, or fled — including 45 direct terminations. Most of them hunted terrorists and spies. At least 50 were in leadership roles. Former FBI agent and national security contributor Christopher O’Leary called it “the equivalent of institutional decapitation.” That’s not hyperbole. That’s someone who spent his career inside the building describing what he sees from the outside now.
Many offices in the DOJ’s National Security Division have lost at least half their staff, including the office dedicated to counterterrorism. The head of the DOJ’s counterintelligence office — gone. The person who led the division’s office of law and policy — gone. The division’s executive officer — gone. In one case, Pedophile Protecting Pam Bondi demoted the acting head of the National Security Division because a portrait of Joe Biden was still hanging in the division’s front office. A photograph. That is what it takes to lose your job protecting the United States of America right now.
But it’s not just the people who were fired. It’s where the survivors were sent.
Between 25 and 45 percent of the agents who remained — the ones who survived the purge, the ones who still showed up — have been reassigned. Not to the Iran threat. Not to the cyberattack preparing to hit our water systems and hospitals. To immigration enforcement sweeps. And to relitigating the 2020 election.
Read that again too.
The FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia election offices. They issued subpoenas in Maricopa County, Arizona. The agents dispatched to execute these actions were drawn from the Atlanta Field Office’s public corruption squad — bureau resources, bureau time, bureau credibility — pointed at a five-year-old election that has been audited, recounted, litigated through sixty-plus courts, and certified by election officials in both parties in every contested state. The investigation is being driven not by career prosecutors who spent decades building election fraud cases, but by Kurt Olsen — a special government employee with no election law background before 2020, installed with White House access and a badge and a mission that has nothing to do with protecting the American public.
Other agents who worked national security were pulled to spend months redacting Epstein documents before their public release. Months. Of counterterrorism man-hours. For a document dump.
So let’s be precise about what is happening here, because precision matters: the FBI’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism capacity has been simultaneously gutted from above and hollowed out from within. The people who were fired are gone. The people who weren’t fired are chasing ghosts in Georgia and redacting names in a filing cabinet. And the people responsible for preventing the next attack are running on skeleton crews, stripped of leadership, waiting to see who gets the next termination notice.
The human cost is already arriving. Two young men were charged with terrorism after traveling from Pennsylvania to New York City and throwing an incendiary device at anti-Muslim protesters. They told police they had pledged allegiance to ISIS. They had gone undetected. In Austin, a man opened fire and injured more than a dozen people; investigators examined whether he was ideologically motivated by the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. These are early cases. The threat environment is not early. It is here.
Iran does not only retaliate with missiles. It retaliates with malware. The FBI and CISA have documented Iran-linked cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure — ransomware operations, destructive intrusions into water systems, hospitals, energy networks. More than a third of CISA has been fired or pushed out. U.S. Cyber Command has been without a permanent commander since April 2025. The people who know how to stop a cyberattack on a children’s hospital are gone or reassigned to count ballots in Maricopa County.
Four of the top officials ousted from the National Security Division had close to 100 years of combined experience between them. One former senior DOJ official put it plainly: “The FBI and Justice Department are completely unprepared to respond to a crisis, including the fallout from the current conflict in the Middle East.” Senator Mark Warner said it on the Senate floor: “Firing agents who investigate terrorists, foreign spies, cyber hackers and child predators does not make America safer.”
None of them are wrong. And none of them have the power to stop it.
What was Kash Patel doing while CI-12 was being dismantled on the eve of a war with Iran? He was on a $60 million government jet — the same class of jet he once publicly criticized Chris Wray for using — flying to Milan, where he attended the Olympic men’s hockey gold medal game, posed for propaganda photos in the locker room with a beer, and called the president so Trump could congratulate the players. The trip cost taxpayers a conservatively estimated $75,000. While his counterintelligence unit was being decapitated. While Iran was recalibrating. While the threat clock was running.
This is the man responsible for the nation’s domestic security posture.
The sued-him-in-federal-court part deserves its own paragraph. The lawsuit filed by three fired senior FBI officials alleges that Patel told one of them directly that he knew the firings were “likely illegal” but was powerless to stop them — and that “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.” Kash Patel allegedly admitted to one of his victims that he was doing something he knew was wrong, under orders, because Trump hadn’t forgotten. That is an allegation sitting in a federal courthouse in Washington right now.
Patel had testified at his confirmation hearing: “No one will be terminated for case assignments.” He said that. Under oath. Then he fired people for their case assignments and allegedly told at least one of them that’s exactly why it was happening. Perjury is a crime, but nothing’s a crime unless Hair Führer calls it one, so Krazy Eyez is safe - for now.
Here is the sum of it. Not the spin. The sum.
The country just started a war. The unit that tracked Iranian spies is gutted. The domestic terrorism office is gutted. The counterintelligence leadership is gone. The cyber defenses are depleted. The surviving agents are chasing 2020 ballots and processing deportation paperwork. The man running the FBI is at a hockey game. And the entire restructuring of the nation’s protective apparatus has been driven by a single organizing principle: loyalty to one man, and punishment for anyone who ever forgot it.
Whatever comes next — and something will come next — the people best equipped to stop it were let go for failing that test. The people still there passed it. And the people running it have made unmistakably clear what the job actually is.
It is not protecting you.
Just a little closing thought here: if we’re inundated with cyber attacks, lone wolf or “radicalized” groups attacking here, there and everywhere… do you think we’ll be holding free and fair elections in November? We don’t either.
**Unfugginbelievable is an independent, reader-supported investigation into the things that make us want to flip a table — then flip it back over and document everything on it. Every claim is fact-checked. Every source is real. No ads, no sponsors, no corporate overlords telling us what to leave out. If this work matters to you and you want to keep us caffeinated while we do it, buy us a cuppa at buymeacoffee.com/unfugginbelievable. We’ll drink it while reading the next filing.
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