Justice Connection today released a video featuring its new advisory committee member Michael Feinberg, a special agent from the FBI who after nearly 16 years at the bureau was pushed out for being friends with someone on FBI Director Kash Patel’s enemies list.
“The fact that an FBI Director would even have an enemies list, the fact that friendships could be used against career employees, it’s difficult to state how abnormal this is,” Feinberg says in the video. “Kash Patel was explicitly hired to enact a political purge at the FBI.”
Feinberg recently published a story on Lawfare detailing the circumstances that led to his abrupt resignation on June 1, 2025.
Throughout his career at the FBI, Feinberg – who speaks Mandarin Chinese – focused on counterintelligence and counterterrorism, leading some of the greatest successes of the first Trump Administration’s efforts against the People’s Republic of China’s intelligence services and their proxies. Before his resignation, he was the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Norfolk Field Office’s national security and intelligence programs.
Feinberg is just one of the many senior FBI managers who have been driven out of the bureau for purely political reasons.
“I have literally dedicated my entire adult life to combatting the intelligence services of our greatest geostrategic rival,” Feinberg says in the video. “We have lost individuals who are legends in the tactical and hostage rescue world. We have lost experts in foreign terrorist organizations.”
The effect of this purge at the FBI is profound, and it has caused the loss of expertise in a wide range of strategic national security priorities, such as counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber security. In addition, FBI leadership has pushed many agents doing this work to instead support immigration enforcement operations, pulling agents with special language capabilities and expertise handling sensitive and complex security matters to stand on the perimeter while ICE agents execute immigration arrests.
“The American people, no matter in what part of the country you live or how you cast your ballot, need to understand that what is happening at the FBI is not normal and it is not making us safer,” Feinberg concludes. “And get angry, because ultimately it’s your communities that are going to be victimized.”
This video is part of an ongoing video project to raise awareness about the vital work carried out by the nonpartisan workforce at the Justice Department and the consequences of this administration’s attacks against the department.
