Let’s say you’re about to go to war. Not metaphorically. Actual bombs, actual strikes, actual regional conflagration. Let’s say the country you’re going to war with has a documented, decades-long history of sending operatives to American soil to murder your officials in retaliation for exactly the kind of military action you’re about to take. Let’s say those operatives have used biker gang members, drug traffickers, burner phones, and cryptocurrency — and that the FBI has thwarted plot after plot to assassinate everyone from a sitting president to his Secretary of State to his National Security Advisor.
Now let’s say that, a few days before you launch that war, your FBI Director fires the unit that tracks those operatives.
Because one of them investigated a box of stolen documents in Florida.
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s Tuesday.
KKKash Patel, the moron Donald Trump installed to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation — a man who spent years publicly fantasizing about revenge against the agents who dared to investigate his boss — just gutted CI-12, the FBI’s elite Washington Field Office counterintelligence squad whose entire reason for existing is to track foreign spies, monitor global espionage threats, and — critically, urgently, right this second — watch for Iranian retaliation on American soil.
He fired at least a dozen of them. Agents. Analysts. Support staff. Gone.
The firing happened last Wednesday. Operation Epic Fury — Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and set the Middle East on fire — launched on Saturday.
Three days. Three days separated Patel’s purge from the moment the United States went to war with the country those purged agents specialized in.
CI-12 is not some dusty backroom squad. They are the lead domestic team for investigating insider threats and foreign intelligence activity on American soil. They track illegal media leaks and classified document mishandling, yes — but they are also the people who watch for foreign spies running operations in the United States. Their specialty, honed over years of case work, is the Iranian threat matrix: the regime’s networks, its methods, its proxies, its willingness to recruit American criminals as cutouts to do their killing for them.
This is not abstract. After Trump ordered the 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, CI-12 was the unit that monitored potential retaliatory strikes by Iranian-backed actors on U.S. soil. In the years that followed, Iranian operatives were charged with plots to assassinate Trump himself, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton. An FBI and Department of Homeland Security report from last August described Iran’s security services as “adaptable and opportunistic” — a regime that recruits people whose identities obscure Iranian involvement, uses codewords and burner phones and cryptocurrency, and does not give up.
Iran has been trying to kill Americans on American soil since 1980. They are patient. They are persistent. And they just watched us bomb their country and kill their Supreme Leader.
CI-12 was the unit standing watch.
Was standing watch.
Why were they fired? Because Kash Patel learned last week that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation had obtained his phone records — and the phone records of now-White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — as part of the Mar-a-Lardo classified documents probe. Patel called it “outrageous.” He called it a “weaponized” Biden DOJ. He called it “deeply alarming.” And then, within hours of going public with his grievance, he fired the people he blamed for it.
These were career counterintelligence professionals. They didn’t choose to be assigned to the Mar-a-Lago case. They were assigned. By the FBI director hired by Hair Führer in his first regime. That’s how federal law enforcement works — you go where you’re sent, you work the case in front of you, you follow the evidence. They did their jobs. They are now unemployed. And the FBI’s Iran desk is running on fumes.
We have been here before. Not with Iran specifically, but with the logic. Remember DOGE? Remember the gleeful mass firings of federal workers in early 2025 — the nuclear safety inspectors and the food safety scientists and the infectious disease specialists and the air traffic control workers, all tossed out in a blitz of ideological performance? Remember how the administration then had to quietly, urgently, embarrassingly call them back? The FDA fired nearly 50 workers in its Office of Regulatory Policy and had to order them back with one day’s notice. The HHS fired the entire team running the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and then had to rehire a single longtime employee for two and a half weeks just to run the formula that distributed $400 million to states. A former GSA official summed up that entire chapter with three words: “left broken and understaffed.”
The pattern is not incompetence in isolation. The pattern is: fire first, break things, discover things were actually load-bearing, scramble. Except you can’t always scramble. Some expertise doesn’t come back. Some institutional knowledge walks out the door and doesn’t answer the recall email. And some purges happen three days before a war.
This isn’t DOGE chaos. This is DOGE chaos with thermonuclear stakes.
The damage extends well beyond CI-12. The DOJ’s National Security Division — the office that for decades has worked to identify and disrupt Iranian assassination plots on American soil — has already lost at least half of its workforce. The counterterrorism office has been decimated. Senior FBI officials who oversaw counterintelligence and international terrorism have been pushed out. Nearly half of all working FBI agents have been reassigned from their actual jobs to immigration enforcement. The Epstein file review pulled national security attorneys away from national security work to redact documents. What was left of the Iran-watching apparatus when Patel picked up the pink slips had already been gutted to the studs.
And on Sunday — the day after Operation Epic Fury began, the day the Middle East started burning — there was a mass shooting at a bar in Austin, Texas. The shooter wore clothing featuring imagery associated with the Iranian flag. The FBI is investigating it as a possible act of terrorism.
Kash Patel put CI-12 on high alert Sunday. The unit he had fired the week before.
Let’s be very clear about what this is. This is not a policy disagreement. This is not aggressive management style. This is a man who was handed the keys to the nation’s premier domestic intelligence agency — an agency that exists to protect American lives from foreign threats — and who used those keys to settle a personal score. He fired the people who had done their legally authorized jobs investigating conduct that Donald Trump found politically inconvenient. He fired them at the worst possible moment. He fired them into the teeth of a war.
Michael E. Anderson, President of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, did not mince words. The summary dismissal of experienced agents and analysts, especially those with experience in Iranian counterintelligence, he said, “seriously undermines the FBI workforce in addressing the significant and ever-increasing threats our nation faces today.”
That is the president of the FBI agents’ own professional association saying the FBI Director has made America less safe. In public. On the record.
Inside the FBI on Monday, agents were bracing for more. Sources told reporters that additional CI-12 firings might be coming. People who have dedicated their careers to keeping Iranian assassins from operating freely on American soil were waiting to find out if they still had jobs.
This is the government we have right now. One that goes to war and fires the people who watch for the blowback. One that treats national security as a prop when it’s convenient and a liability when it implicates the boss. One that has gutted the institutions protecting us and then stands at a podium and tells us we’ve never been safer.
The receipts say otherwise. They always do.
We are a country that just started a war. We have a diminished counterterrorism division, a gutted Iran-watching unit, and a half-staffed national security apparatus — all courtesy of a man who decided that loyalty to Donald Trump was more important than protecting the people of the United States.
The agents of CI-12 did not fail us. They were failed — fired, discarded, punished for doing exactly what the law required them to do. The question now is what happens when Iran’s “adaptable and opportunistic” security services decide it’s time to collect.
The people who would have seen it coming are no longer at their desks.
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