FBI agents who were driven out under the Trump administration have formed a support network, with former intelligence officers sounding the alarm over the 'devastating' impact of the president's bid to overhaul the US security agency.
A New Face for the FBI
For generations, FBI agents have borne the mantle of strength and authority inherited from J Edgar Hoover's Depression-era G-men. Now, hardened veterans of the bureau are projecting a different face as they seek to fight back against what many say is the systematic undermining of the bureau's values under a drive by Donald Trump to turn it into an instrument of retribution.
Complaining that many agents – including top leaders – and intelligence analysts have been fired, driven out, or forced to resign, bureau alumni have formed an FBI Support Network. This network seeks to meet the legal, job-searching, and mental health needs of former investigators while bolstering those who remain but chafe under the leadership of current director Kash Patel.
Mental Health Challenges
'Many FBI agents and professional staff analysts are quietly dealing with the mental health challenges that have been caused,' said Kayla Staph, a member of the network's advisory committee and a former FBI cyber-crime investigator. Agents had suffered 'moral injuries' from being pressured to violate their own values, she added.
'As someone who worked as a special agent and carried myself as someone who is very strong, I'm still a human,' Staph told the Guardian. 'We have challenges, just like everybody else, that we're balancing life with work [to be] on top of a job that is that we need to be mentally focused for.'
She said the bureau had undergone an 'unprecedented assault' on its 'institutional integrity and workforce' since Trump returned to office in January last year and installed Patel – a loyalist who had been a harsh FBI critic and vowed to uproot a 'deep state' culture he claimed was biased against Trump – as its director.
Supporting Agents Under Attack
The network is also championing the bureau's traditional values and highlighting what it says has been a calculated effort at dismantlement aimed at undermining the rule of law. Staph said up to 2,800 agents had left since January 2025, according to the bureau's own figures – many of them leadership figures seemingly targeted on purpose. The office of personnel management has cited a lower figure of 1,100 agents departed in the first year of the administration.
'About one-third of the agents who have left were leaders in the organization,' said Staph. 'They are the ones who understand the nature of the FBI core values and the people that we look to to guide us in raising up that next generation.' She added that driving out so many leaders seemed by design to alleviate obstacles for someone trying to use the FBI for their own purposes.
The network's members include Brian Driscoll, who briefly served as the bureau's acting director in the weeks before Patel's confirmation by the Senate but was later fired after trying to protect agents targeted because of involvement in previous investigations that targeted Trump, including the January 6 insurrection. Driscoll appears in a video announcing the network's launch, saying its goal was 'to offer our assistance to the special agents, intelligence analysts and the professional staff who are under attack'.
Legacy and Resistance
The video's most poignant contribution comes from Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, whose death at 81 in March was greeted with gloating by Trump. 'We have a unique mission, we have a unique legacy that has been passed down to us and I think people in the FBI know and understand and are tremendously proud to be part of that legacy,' Mueller says in footage at the beginning of the three-and-a-half-minute video.
Staph – who resigned from her position at the bureau's Norfolk, Virginia field office last September, citing the diversion of resources to mass deportation efforts – said the network spoke for remaining agents who are prohibited from publicly defending that legacy. 'We're doing something that FBI personnel can't do from the inside,' she said. 'They're apolitical, so from the outside, we can speak out against the attacks on the bureau's dedicated work and raise awareness about the importance of its mission-critical work.'
Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State – an organization of retired national security professionals dedicated to safeguarding the rule of law – said the network's formation was a reaction to an official drive to reshape US security services in an image resembling historically notorious agencies like the KGB, the Gestapo, or the Stasi. 'The fact that former FBI people need a support group tells you the devastating impact of the president's policies and Kash Patel's policies,' said Cash, a former intelligence officer. 'It's an alarm bell ringing. These are people that stay on the line to the last. The fact that they need a support group tells us that American democracy itself and law enforcement needs a support group.'
But he added: 'The fact that they're organizing tells me that there's something still powerful about the FBI, and I have confidence that the history of that organization is going to permit them to resist destruction.'
