Bulwark Takes - Lawsuit Exposes an FBI in Crisis

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Tim Miller takes on a new lawsuit from former FBI officials citing Kash Patel and Dan Bongino politicizing the bureau and pushing out career agents in favor of loyalty and social media clout. Read more in the NYT, "White House Exerts Enormous Influence Over F.B.I., Lawsuit Says": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/us/politics/trump-fbi-lawsuit.html

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. Tim Miller from the Bullwark here. Yesterday, I taped the upcoming video about a lawsuit being filed by three former FBI officials targeting the Bureau and particularly naming Cash Patel and Dan Bongino as incompetent, as wrongly firing them, as caring more about their social media and their political revenge tour than about protecting the country. And given what we've seen from Cash and from the FBI since this assassination of Charlie Kirk, I feel like the testimony in that lawsuit is more important than ever. So I want to put the video out, but just kind of note that I taped it before this sort of ongoing news story about the FBI's response to the shooting in Utah.

Because at minimum, Cash Patel has absolutely bungled that publicly posting about, having a suspect and then having to post again about how they had released the suspect humiliating and it also news that the agent in the Utah region who's supposed to be in charge of of that area had been fired for reasons unknown some suspicions that it was an anti-DEI firing because he was Muslim. So more to be found out on that. But I think the internal story of what is happening at the FBI is going to continue to be a major, major news item for us to follow and a major risk for the country. And I think that we are seeing a little bit of that incompetence in real time and the response from the Bureau to the Kirk assassination. So stick around for more.

details from this lawsuit because it is a fucking doozy. And we'll be back for more on this as news develops out of Utah. Hey, everybody, Timot from the Bullwark here. We've got a breaking news story from the New York Times about a lawsuit from three former top FBI officials targeting Cash Patel and targeting this administration on the grounds of unlawful removal from their jobs. I want to shout out Alan Fior and Glenn Thrush at the Times. who have the scoop on this. We'll put the link to their story at the bottom. We've had Glenn on the channel a few times. I'm sure we'll have them back soon. It is a story that we've been following for a while. And we'd Mike Feinberg on, former FBI official who resigned, but was essentially pushed out over the fact that he hung out with Peter Strzok, basically. Peter Strach, who was involved in the investigation against Trump and the first Russian investigations. It's come to his attention that I have remained friends and remained in contact with Pete Strach since he left

the bureau. And there's nothing false in that. It's absolutely true. He and his wife were a guest at my wedding. We hang out quite a bit. We talk all the time. As I said in the piece, largely about the food scene in various cities and mostly about different bands. Our friendship kicked off when we discovered we were both huge Smiths fans. It's not exactly the stuff of a deep state conspiracy. And that same, you know, campaign of targeting an intimidation and retribution inside the Bureau is what underlines this legal filing. So the former officials who brought the suit, Brian Driscoll, Stephen Jensen, and Spencer Evans. Driscoll, we've been talking about here quite a bit who's known as the Driz, very well respected inside the Bureau. He ended up becoming the de facto director of the Bureau after Christopher Ray resigned.

like a coward, rather than forcing Donald Trump to fire him. So the DRIZ ends up kind of being the de facto head of the Bureau for a little while and receives very positive reviews from everybody. Somebody who just, like, got thrust into this job, focused on doing the work, focused on protecting agents who are just doing their jobs, you know, not being political. And that unwillingness, essentially, to act on Donald Trump's campaign of retribution inside the FBI is what ends up getting him removed.

according to the suit. In the suit, they accused Mr. Patel of dismissing them. It's the first time I've ever called Cash Mr. Patel. Appreciate the formality of the New York Times. They accused cash money sign of dismissing them as part of a campaign of retribution because they didn't demonstrate sufficient political loyalty. Narit Patel not only acted unlawfully, but deliberately chose to prioritize politicizing the FBI over protecting the American people. And I want to get to the details of the ways in which he politicized the FBI and ways you targeted this guys, but that is the key point here. The FBI is not a place where you put in your partisan friends.

It's not a spoil system part of the federal government, okay? We want agents who have expertise and experience going after bad guys. That's the job of the FBI, okay? That we need that for us. For the party that is, oh, we're back in the blue. Oh, oh, we're law and order. the left is, is putting us at risk. What's putting us more at risk, okay?

Because I think it is putting in political stooges in front of the head of the FBI and getting rid of people who have actual expertise in going after child sex predators, looking into Chinese espionage, and all the other things that the FBI does on our behalf. You know, we talked about this with that shooting in Minnesota. I'm not blaming Cash Patel on that, but all I'm saying is that the person, there's like some confusion over their gender pronouns at one point were trans, they regret it up, whatever. The person that shut up that church, okay, told people they shoot up that church. They posted it onto social media.

There were known threats. And this administration is deemphasizing that, firing people whose job it is to look after domestic terror threats, refusing to call it. out white supremacist domestic terror when it happens. That wasn't the case of Minnesota, but we want to de-emphasize any efforts to look at potential radicalization within the country to instead focus only on immigration and to put fucking C-list podcast hosts in charge of massive portfolios of the Bureau of Investigation as repayment for being nice to Mr. Trump.

That's what they're doing. And it is putting people at risk. And they're right about this. Going through the lawsuit even more. At the time rights, the suit describes previously unreported accounts about key Trump appointees, including Cash, Stephen Miller, and now seem to be judge, Amil Beauvais. And with regards to Miller and Bovet, Miller's at the center of the suit. He is not Senate confirmed, as they point out, but he's making demands of those officials at the FBI. Emil Bovae, Emil Bov, stated that he was receiving pressure from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to see symmetrical action at the FBI has been happening.

the DOJ made clear that he and Miller wanted to see personnel action like reassignment, removals and terminations at the FBI. So, you know, that's something we've known that's been happening, but there it is right there in the lawsuit. They're pushing out people just based on their politics, based on the fact that they were involved in investigations into Trump. I want to pull out a couple of the other examples mentioned in the in the suit and in the Times article. The Driz described his initial vetting interview with Cash Patel. He was informed that he could have a top position. If he was, quote, not prolific on social media. did not donate to Democratic Party and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024.

So that's it. A job qualification to be a leader at the FBI now in this administration, there's a political loyalty test in order to have a job protecting Americans, something that's good to know. Driscoll had then at a second interview with Paul Ingracia, who was the White House DOJ transition liaison. And Grosia is a totally unqualified lunatic. He makes Cash Patel look, you know,

downright accomplished. Grascia has paled around with white nationalists. He advances the most insane arguments on behalf of Trump on social media. So he has been prolific. Driscoll, the fucking career professional FBI official had to go interview with this Twitter troll, with this total zero Twitter troll embarrassing, somebody that you wouldn't hire to coach your kid's soccer team. I had a top person at the bureau to interview with him.

During that interview, Ingrossia asked Driscoll whether he supported Mr. Trump, what he thought about DEI. The Driz ends up, as I mentioned at the top, getting kind of put into this job by accident. Yeah, I've been applying for the number two job, and it was going to be a different FBI agent that was named his acting director. But there was a mistake. The White House disclaimed it as a clerical error where they issued a public statement giving Driscoll the top job. Trump and his team didn't want to be embarrassed and admit that to fixing the screw up. So they told Mr. Driscoll they could keep their top job job. Driscoll said, okay, as long as he wouldn't be called upon to fire anyone without due process,

that almost immediately they began demanding him to do that. Beauvais brought up the pressure he was receiving from Miller to conduct summary firings of agents who had been involved in investigations against Trump. One of his most insistent demands was that they create a list of all the agents that worked on the vast investigation into the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. So they wanted a list of anybody, not who, not even political opponents, just people who were doing their job that day and were part of the investigation against the people that stormed the Capitol. These guys are also babies that's important to know. And his lawsuit, Bovet tells Driscoll that he was pissed at him in part because there were some parody videos that were being passed around FBI employees where Bova was portrayed as the Batman, while Driscoll was like, dude, I have a real fucking job to do.

All right. I didn't make the video. I don't know who did it. Like, why are you being such a little bitch? He didn't use that word. I'm just summarizing essentially where Driscoll was. And yet this is another reason that gets him on the wrong side of these guys. And then Driscoll points out to what happens with Dan Benjino comes in.

Benjino comes in. Obviously, he's being deputy FBI director. The critique of him is that he has a, quote, intense focus on increasing online engagement of his social media profiles. He's worried his followers have a negative perception of the FBI because he's been advancing deep stake conspiracies his whole career. People that worked under him were worried that Bongino was spending more time creating content for his social media pages than on actual FBI investigations. These are the, I mean, this is all we all, they are who we thought they were.

But this is what's happening at the, at the top level of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the organization that's job it is to protect us from domestic terrorists to go after people that are trafficking kids, dealing drugs across state lines, like terrorism. The people that are in charge of this care more about firing those who hurt Donald Trump's fee-fis and making sure that their social media pages are getting good engagement than they care about doing their jobs on behalf of the American people. It is, the whole thing is pathetic. A couple other people who got pushed out that were not a party of the lawsuit.

One was Walter Giardina. I've mentioned him before on here in his story. He's one whose wife was dying when all this stuff. was going on. And then there's Chris Meyer, an agent who was Cash Patel's pilot. Both of them were targeted online by far-right critics, by MAGA critics. And like these tweets about these random agents had been sent to top White House aides. And so the White House aides had told FBI officials then to have these guys fired. Again, it's crazy. I'm in the filing. These guys discussed their colleagues. Jaredina and Meyer saying that they were decorated combat veterans. They had decades

of investigative experience. They had a respect for the institution, a disdain for self-promotion. Nobody who knew who they were. They weren't, you know, frequent guests on Bannon's war room. These are people that actually serve the country. I want to protect the country. Anonymous people, folks out there, exactly the type of people you want in government. They're getting pushed out because some fucking trolls on the internet thought that they might not be fully supportive of Mr. Trump's authoritarian takeover. In early July, Jensen, again, one of the three folks filing this lawsuit, Jensen goes to Cash's office to urge him to protect Jardina's job. He says he's been unfairly targeted.

He said it would be, quote, inexcusably cruel to add to the burden of him because he's caring for his dying wife and he's done his job well. Cash's response to Jensen when that happened was to hand him a challenge coin that had his name on it with the S replaced by a money sign and then give him three cigars, told him you're crushing it, and you can get out of here, I'll take, I'll take it under advisement. He fired a Gerdina right after. So there you go. That's who we're dealing with.

We're dealing with small men who don't care all about the country, who care about putting their fucking name and image on random coins to hand out to people who care about their social media engagement. And what they're doing is targeting and snuffing out people who do care about the country, who do care about their jobs, care about their families, care about our families who want protect us and they're getting pushed out because they're being slandered because they're perceived foes of the MAGA agenda because they were doing their job investigating criminals on January 6th. It is sick what these people are doing at the FBI is absolutely sick and it is going to lead to a more

dangerous country. And I think that both on the merits and on the politics of this, people should be outraged by the way that our federal police force. is being run right now. So we'll be back for much more. We'll see you soon.